SPAN: May/June 1998

in'dustry MEET in ONCE

AGAIN

IN FEBRUARY

e

'99

The 13th Indian Engineering Trade Fair - Asia's NO.1 Industrial Event, will be held in New Delhi from 12-17 February 1999.

Korea will be the Partner Country at the 13th IETF '99 where it will showcase the best of its technologies, products and services in the Partner Country pavilion.

HIGHLIGHTS • Over 35 participating countries.

65,000 sqm. of space .2,50,000 visitors • 150 Product Sectors on display

• Concurrent

wi IElF '99

13th .'

THE INDIAN

,~ ~'"

ENGINEERING

TRADE FAIR

12-17 FEB. 1999 NEW DELHI, INDIA AN ALL INDUSTRY FAIR

Shows:

Automechanika India The India international trade fair for car workshop & service station equipment, auto spare parts and accessories (with Messe Frankfurt GmbH and ACMA).

1 st Indian Ocean Rim Trade Fair International fair representing the best technology products of the Indian Ocean Rim Countries.

Asia's largest Industrial Fair Certified

by:

and

1st Weld India International '99 International fair on welding technology.

2nd Microtecnic India '99 International exposition of production measurement & quality control equipment (with Reed Exhibition Companies).

5th Cleantech Environment '99 International fair on cleaner technologies process industry.

9th Enterprise '99 A show for small & medium subcontracting services.

enterprises

in the

and

Confederation

of Indian Industry

Trade Fair Department Gate No. 31, North Block, Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium New Delhi 110 003, India Tel: 91-11-4626225, 4626273/6, 4626281/2 Fax: 91-11-4626271,4647844 Internet: http://ietf.com Email: rekha@sai.cii.ernet.in

SPAN

The Making of the Modern Corporation

By Morton Keller

Publisher Francis B. Ward

The Neighborhood Entrepreneur: Home Selling Takes Off

Editor-in-Chief Donna J. Roginski

By N. Habibulla

Editor Lea Terhune Associate Editor Arun Bhanot

The Confluence of Civilizations A Chat with B.P. Singh

Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana

:

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

The Many Faces of the Future

By Samuel P. Huntington

Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar

Our Oldest Computer, Upgraded

By John Tierney

Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library

Revving Up REVA America: A Religious Society

Front cover: Jyoti Nargas, one of several distributors of Tupperware products, displays food grade plastic containers made by the American direct-sales company, which has recently entered the Indian market. See story on page II.

By Mirza Asmer Beg

: Photographs: Front cover-Hemant Bhatnagar. 3-Hedrich-Blessing.

11-12Hemant Bhatnagar. 15-17-Brij Mohan Mahajan.

19-illustration by Suhas Nimbalkar.

23-illustration

by Hemant Bhatnagar. 27-33-Maria Politarhos. 3435-Brij Mohan Mahajan. 38--courtesy the White House. 40-courtesy Shabda Kahn.

41-Hemant Bhatnagar. 48-49-illustration

by Suhas Nimbalkar. 5I-Brij Mohan Mahajan.

55-courtesy Ford Motor Company. 56-from the collection of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan. 58--courtesy Lama Surya Das. Published

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On the Lighter Side Bob Dylan: Still Walkin' Down the Line

By ArunBhanot

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A Long Way From Alice's Restaurant

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Higher Education: Practical Matters

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Life at High-Tech U

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Give Me that Old-Time Religion

By Lea Terhune

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cies of the U.S. Government.

Editor.

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3316841),

The New Islam

By Carla Power

(6 issues)

Rs. 125;

~

The Spinning Wheel

By John McTague

A LETTER

FROM THE PUBLISHER

n the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Earth Day, at a function in the American Center Library in New Delhi, Magsaysay award-winning environmentalist M.C. Mehta said, "Let's not talk about environment alone but be seriously concerned and involved in its preservation." He urged people to think of the environment every day, not just once a year. The electric car recently unveiled at the U.S. Embassy in Delhi-the REVA, designed in a joint collaboration between the Maini group andAmerigon Inc. -is a symbol and, we hope, will be a small "vehicle" for change, not only in India but around the world, as more zero-emission cars are developed to replace those that cause air pollution. The U.S. Mission strives to maintain green awareness in its operations.

At the American Embassy Ambassador Richard Celeste has initiated the use of unleaded gas. We are cutting backon use of electric power and installing solar water heaters in living quarters. The Ambassador encourages American companies doing business in India to be models of "green" corporate citizenship.

There are many approaches to saving our increasingly precarious environment. These may be personal or political. Home Secretary to the Government of India, B.P. Singh-author of

O

.

Leadership Program

India's Culture: The State, the Arts and Beyond-sees the ecology

movement as one of the most important global unifying factors of the next century. His views in "The Confluence of Civilizations" are a foil to those expressed by Samuel P. Huntington in "The Many Faces of the Future," adapted from his book, The Clash ojCivilizations.

Both authors touch on the importance of culture and religion in relationships between nations. This issue of SPAN devotes several articles to religion in America. A general outline of American religious attitudes is offered by MirzaAsmer Beg in "America: A Religious Society." Carla Power provides a glimpse of young American Muslims and how they are squaring modern life in a fast-paced, multicultural society with the traditions of their religion in "The New Islam." Lea Terhune interviews three American gurus about the influence of Eastern belief systems on religious America today in "Give Me that Old-Time Religion."

Our cover story highlights a new development on the Indian business scene: direct sales. For decades American women have become financially autonomous by organizing

parties or using one-to-one contacts to sell specialized, high-quality products at home. Three of the biggest American direct sales companies have come to India in the past few years: Tupperware, Avon and Amway. N. Habibulla talks to some of the members of this new sales force and surveys the scene in "The Neighborhood Entrepreneur: Home Selling Takes Off." In "The Making of the Modern Corporation" Morton Keller traces the growth of the corpor~tion from its humble colonial beginnings to the international giant of today. One of these giants, now joint venture partner with India's Mahindra & Mahindra, is Ford M9tor Company. In "The Spinning Wheel," Ford Motor vice president John McTague tells us about the relationship between Henry Ford and Mahatma Gandhi and how a modern company can also be a good global citizen.

Those contemplating a stint at university in the United States may be interested in "Life at High-Tech U," by Deborah Branscum, who describes the digital attributes of American higher education as it enters the next century.

Practical assistance in finding the suitable institution is offered in a companion piece that lists resources for information about American colleges and universities available in India and on. the Internet. Continuing the theme of higher learning, "Our Oldest Computer, Upgraded," by John Tierney, focuses on the interaction of high technology and the human brain. Is it all too much? Not likely, he says.

New York's Times Square, as seen through the fanciful and versatile lens of Maria Politarhos who photographed its moods, is the subject of our photo essay.And for music lovers, this issue features two American notables. "Bob Dylan: Still Walkin' Down the Line" hasArun Bhanot recounting the personally-felt impact of this phenomenal singer/composer. And another well-known folk singer, Arlo Guthrie, son of the legendary Woody Guthrie, talks to SPAN about his life, music, and what he is doing now ''A Long Way FromAlice's Restaurant."

The MayIJ une issue of SPAN looks at people in two diverse nations as they make use of their personal freedom in facing challenges to the environment and challenges making a living. We see this manifested in the ability of housewives to create small businesses, or by people exercising their freedom to choose their religion, sing their songs or develop new and exciting relationships in their multifaceted world.

The

Malcing of the

Modern Corporation

I'

The idea of the corporation dates back to medieval Europe. It traveled to the New World with adventurous 17th and 18th century colonial entrepreneurs.

As the author points out, incorporation turned out to be as American as apple pie.

he large business corporation has a firm place in the American imagination as the dark repository of private power. There are no more reliable villains on TV or in movieland than these shadowy, soulless, omnipresent institutions and the faceless, greedy men and women who serve them. And yet today as much as ever before, corporations are accepted as the driving engines of our economy, as the places where most of us work. It sometimes seems that corporations in America are what lying was to the English schoolgirl: an abomination unto the Lord, but an everreliable friend in time of trouble.

The corporate charter was invented in medieval Europe. For centuries, incorporation legitimated a variety of public institutions and semiprivate enterprises, rather than private businesses.

It found receptive soil in the American.colonies, and during the early years of the Republic became a widely accessible instrument of economic growth. Yet from early on there was a tension between the public character and private purposes of corporations.

As the term corporation became a synonym for big business after the late 19th century, corporations increasingly became the subject of political debate and the target of legislation and regulation. But to an extent that is not generally appreciated, many of the challenges posed by the corporate form have been handled in America's courtrooms rather than in the political arena. In part, this is simply because corporations are creatures of the law. But turning the corporation to public purposes without impinging on its proven ability to create wealth (which is, in fact, another public purpose) has proved also to be a very delicate task-one of many such tasks that Americans have relied heavily upon the courts to carry out.

To understand what corporations are, it is necessary first to have some idea of where they came from. The idea that certain kinds of institutions-towns, guilds, schools, hospitals-should have a charter from some higher authority that grants them defined privileges dates from at least the Middle Ages. Early charters were variants of the basic feudal contract that linked lords and vassals in medieval society; if for individuals, then why not for institutions?

Out of this experience came the idea of chartering commercial ventures as well. During the 16th and 17th centuries, English entrepreneurs sought royal charters for all sorts of ventures, including trading outposts in the Baltic, Russia and Ireland, and then "plantations" in the New World.

Most of these early chartered ventures were joint-stock companies, composed of investors who pooled their assets for a single enterprise. The Dutch East India Company of 1602 is often accounted the first true stock corporation, with a permanent fund of capital. The great advantage here was that in the (not unlikely) event of failure, the participants' liability was limited to the amount they had invested. This made it easier to amass the large capital pools these early overseas ventures required.

So the early modern corporation emerged to meet the financial and organizational needs of the Age of Discovery. But charters also served the power-aggrandizing monarchs of 17th century England, such as James I. By establishing the principle that corporations were legal entities created by the Crown, the king not only asserted his authority over them but was in a position to grant monopolies and other perquisites to his favorites.

But the royal stamp of approval, too freely given, encouraged rampant speculation, much as U.S. Government deposit insurance in the 1980s encouraged American savings and loan soci- . eties to overextend themselves. The inevitable end came in 1720 with the ruinous collapse of the South Sea and Mississippi "bubbles," rampages of speculation in the shares of two companies established to launch commercial ventures in the New World. Parliament's Bubble Act of that year put an end to almost all corporate chartering for commercial purposes in England for the rest of the 18th century.

T

hat long hiatus, coming as it did during the seedtime of the Industrial Revolution, strengthened what was already a strong inclination in England to rely on partnerships rather than corporations as the preferred form of business enterprise. Partnerships made sense in a tightly knit, hierarchical society, where extensive and complicated bonds of personal relationship defined the social structure and controlled the major sources of investment capital.

The Bubble Act applied also to the American colonies, which faced the added difficulty of trying to launch commercial ventures in the face of a British imperial policy that reserved the profits of more sophisticated forms of enterprise to the mother country. The Philadelphia Contributionship for Insuring Houses from Loss by Fire (1768) was the only chartered business corporation in the colonial America, acceptable because of the socially useful nature of its business.

Nevertheless, incorporation turned out to be as American as apple pie. Every colony had a royal charter by the eve of the Revolution. Colleges, charities, New England towns and villages, churches and quasi-public enterprises such as wharves and mills eagerly sought charters of incorporation from colonial assemblies.

Independence opened the floodgates to innovation in many realms of American society, not least the launching of commer-

cial ventures. No longer did a hostile king or parliament threaten their legitimacy. And a new structure of state and national government now existed that could create, define and limit incorporation.

An important early statement on the place of the charter in the American system of government was John Marshall's decision in

In the mid-19th century the emergence of brand names brought a new dimension to corporate enterprise. It was the beginning of advertising, which later became an industry in itself

the Dartmouth College case (1819). Could New Hampshire unilaterally alter the terms of Dartmouth's pre-Revolution royal charter? Marshall (and a dutifully unanimous Supreme Court) said no: Dartmouth's charter was a contract, and hence came under the protective wing of the Constitution's clause barring the impairment of contract. his

ruling seemed to suggest that incorporated bodies would enjoy a high level of immunity from state interference. New York judge James Kent said soon after the Dartmouh College decision that it "did more than any other single act...to throw an impregnable barrier around all rights and franchises derived from the grant of government; and " to give solidity and inviolability to the literary, charitable, religious and commercial institutions of our country."

But to say that a charter was the same as a contract challenged the assumption in English common law that a corporation was free to do everything that it was not explicitly forbidden to do.

Instead, American courts took the view that a corporation could do only what its charter-granted by the state legislature, that republican tribune of the people-explicitly said it could do. In other words, a charter was not an open-ended grant of authority but a specific and limited authorization to take on a particular task: an approach well suited to a republic dedicated to the principles of limited and representative government.

There was more. By saying that corporate charters were contracts, not grants, the Supreme Court stripped away any implication that corporations enjoyed the special favor of the chartering authority. It thus enabled the charter of incorporation to become a widely accessible instrument in the contract-dominated market economy of the 19th century.

The benefits of the corporate device quickly became evident.

Incorporation's limited liability reduced investor risk, thus making it easier to attract the relatively large and unaffiliated American investing public. And a corporate structure made it easier to bring in a professional management. These were important advantages in a scattered, diverse society, so unlike the tightly interconnected world of business and capital in England.

The spread of corporations also democratized-or, more accurately, republicanized-commercial enterprise by bringing it within the framework of American Government. Charters came not from an unaccountable sovereign but from popularly elected state legislatures. At the same time, .the semiofficial status of corporate charters eased the access of companies-and their competitors-to the new nation's legislatures and courts.

In the heady days of the early and mid-19th century, American corporate chartering expanded as never before. Schools and colleges, medical and agricultural and charitable societies, churches, towns and cities barraged state legislatures with charter requests. The number of business corporations soared. By 1817 some 2,000 had been chartered, and this was just the beginning. Turnpikes, canals, bridges, banks, ferries, steamboat and insurance companies and railroads were the most conspicuous recipients. New York alone granted about 500 turnpike charters between 1797 and 1847.

The prevailing,view was that there was no important difference between purely commercial and quasi-public enterprises.

Each in its own way benefited the young republic. It was not difficult to believe that banks, bridges, canals, turnpikes, railroads and insurance companies played a public role, and to accept the fact that they often got special privileges, such as monopoly rights for a period of years, when they were chartered.

But as the economy grew, these privileges came under fire.

Some critics were rising entrepreneurs who sought to compete with existing enterprises, while others voiced a more general resentment that these "artificial creatures" should be so favored by the state. "Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned," went a common complaint of the time.

The depression of the late 1830s and early' 40s, which led to massive failures of canal and railroad companies, cleared the way for new ideas about the scope and meaning of incorporation.

One result was easier access. By the mid-19th century, legislatures were passing general laws designed to make incorporation as cheap and easy as possible. No longer was it necessary to secure a legislative act. Now one filled out a simple form and paid a small fee. Incorporation became almost a perquisite of American citizenship, like voting or going to school. This democratization of what had once been an instrument of privilege made the corporation a form of economic organization more widely used in

the United States than anywhere else in the Western world. In New York, for inslance, more than 4,700 manufacturing firms were chartered between 1848 and 1866.

At the same time, the ability of the state (if it so chose) to regulate corporations was reinforced. The Supreme Court's Charles River Bridge decision (1837) set the tone. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney refused to let the privileges granted to an 18th-century Massachusetts bridge company block the construction of a second bridge nearby, even if the effect of the new enterprise was to destroy the economic advantage of the old one. The promise of economic growth lay not in the guarantee of old privileges (as Marshall had suggested in the Dartmouth College case) but in a process of "creative destruction" in which existing charter rights were narrowly interpreted in their duration and impact, and legislatures were empowered to foster economic change at the expense of vested corporate interests. tates that freely granted the gift of incorporation were ready to regulate or limit what they created. A number of them (including New York in its 1846 constitution) forbade subsidies or favors of any form to railroads and other corporations. While the courts remained sensitive to the sanctity of property and contract, they tended to interpret corporate charters narrowly; in effect, to say to a company that wanted to go beyond its prescribed powers, "Have you got it in writing?"

It was common for corporate charters to include a reserve clause allowing the legislature to amend them at any time. And by the 1850s, the "police power" to regulate the safety, health, morals and welfare of the people had come to be accepted in American law as a broad justification for economic regulation.

This, then, was the ambiguous status of the business corporation in the mid-19th century, on the eve of the rise of big business. The corporate charter had evolved into a readily accessible instrument for a vibrant entrepreneurial society. Simply and cheaply attained, stripped of its traditional exclusionary or monopoly character, it was an essential handmaiden of economic growth. But at the same time, the corporation had an aura of threatening economic power to which government was expected to respond.

The first corporate body to evoke such fears was the Second Bank of the United States. But it died in 1832, when President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill rechartering it. Next came the railroads. By the mid-19th century they had become America's first big business, a new and frightening source of unchecked power. In the early 1870s E.L. Godkin of the Nation observed, in his usual portentous way: "The locomotive is coming in contact with the framework of our institutions. In this country of simple government, the most powerful centralizing force which civilization has yet produced must, within the next score years, assume its relations to that political machinery which is to control and regulate it."

Popular anxiety over corporate power peaked at the turn of the century with the movement against "the trusts." In the late 1870s, John D. Rockefeller's attorney Samuel c.T. Dodd figured out a way for Standard Oil to absorb competitors without running

S

afoul of its Ohio charter, which forbade it from holding the stock of other companies. The stock of Standard Oil and the companies it absorbed was turned over to a Rockefeller-dominated board of trustees, which issued trust certificates in return. A trust was not a corporation, and thus no state laws were broken.

Only about 10 trusts were launched during the 1880s. But the potential for more such mergers, and the fearsome business practices of the Standard Oil combine, made the trust a lightnjng rod for public concern over corporations and big business. The author of an 1883 law journal article wondered, "The Standard Oil has grown to be a more powerful-eorporation, shall we call it? or what? for this is one of our questions-than any other below the national government itself." A number of states passed antitrust laws, and in 1890 the Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlawed "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce," swept through Congress.

But this legislation hardly eased the growing national concern over big business. In its early years, the Sherman Act proved to be difficult to administer. The Supreme Court, in the Sugar Trust case (1893), severely limited the impact of the law by ruling that although the American Sugar Refining Company controlled more than 90 percent of the nation's output, it could not be at-' tacked under the Sherman Act. Why? Because sugar refining was part of the manufacturing process, a concern of the chartering state; the federal government's authority applied only after the company's product began moving in interstate commerce.

At the same time James B. Dill, another creative corporation lawyer-it was soon after this that Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley observed that what looked like a stone wall to the ordinary man was a triumphal arch to the lawyer-eame up with a new legal device that nicely removed the remaining constraints on corporate consolidation. Dill's invention was the holding company: a corporation whose sole reason for being was to possess the stock of other corporations.

What to do about state laws that forbade corporations from doing this? That was easy: get a state or two to ease that restriction, and then interstate competitiveness would do the rest. Delaware and New Jersey soon obliged in response to intensive corporate lobbying and became the legal homes of many of America's largest corporations. The result, said one observer, {was that "the conduct and condition of [a corporation's] business 'are treated as private and not public affairs."

This legal-legislative transformation went hand in hand with a new judicial perception of the corporation. In its Santa Clara decision of 1886 the Supreme Court held, en passant, that a corporation was a person under the Fourteenth Amendment and thus was entitled to the guarantees of due process and equal protection that the amendment afforded to the nation's citizens. This quiet change sculpted a.constitutional safeguard of the rights of newly freed slaves into a potent instrument for use against state taxation and regulation.

It is not surprising that large American corporations felt free to go on a consolidation binge around the turn of the century. From

government. Public ownership of utilities was tried in a few 1898 to 1902 there were 2,653 mergers, with a combined capitalization of $6~3billion. Within a few years an economy dominated places, but the opposition of private interests and public suspicion of politician-run enterprises kept it marginal. Presidents by large, consolidated railroad, coal, steel, tobacco, oil and dozens of other giant firms-the world of the 20th century Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft proposed federal American economy-had come into being. chartering, without success. And while the Federal Trade Europe was creating its own economic megaliths at the same Commission was created in 1914, it did little more than try to block false and deceptive advertising. time: Great Britain saw 198 mergers during 1898-1900. But very different political, economic and strategic realities prevailed What developed instead was a heavily judicial and highly nonthere. Partnerships continued to be the rule in Britain (though ideological system of mixed state and federal oversight, domithey enjoyed limited liability and other corporate goodies). And nated by the federal courts. The number of antitrust suits varied English courts saw nothing wrong with-indeed, encouragedfrom presidential administration to administration. But in the last firms entering into cartel agreements on prices and production. analysis, antitrust policy was not set by elected officials or the As an observer of the time put it, "Combination has been ac- government bureaucracy. It was set by the Supreme Court. cepted without regulation in England because the entire English What was the character of that judicial policy? At first, relucsocial system is a series of closed groups." Nothing of this sort tance to use the Sherman Act to strike down large combinations. was legal in the United States.

Then, influenced in part by political and public opinion, a growThe popular American response to the rise of big business was ing readiness to order the dissolution of combines that clearly colored by very different social realities. American historical violated the letter and spirit of the Sherman Act, culminating in memory did not include the Standard Oil and sentimentalized feudalAmerican Tobacco deciaristocratic traditions of sions of 1911. In these patriarchal oversight, or cases, the Court set down a guilds that were part of a "rule of reason" for judgtraditional social order, or ing when combinations a tradition of class conand bigness passed, over flict. Rather, the most the invisible line from effipowerful economic creeds ciency to monopoly-and were individualism and it ruled that both compaself-reliance; enterprise nies had done so. But the was not to be cosseted but decisions made it plain was to be left alone by the that it would be the Court, state. The growing diverand not an administrative sity of early-20th-century or political agency, that American life-with manwould decide when that ufacturers, merchants, line had been crossed. farmers, railroads, shipThere were other forms of Money and politics are never far apart, and the big corporate houses of the late pers, retailers, consumers, corporate regulation be19th century were well-represented in the U.S. Congress. In this 1889 Joseph unions, lawyers, judges, sides court-driven antitrust Keppler cartoon from Puck, "The Bosses of the Senate" are shown as fat cats of economists, journalists and moneyed corporate interests. Trust-busting was becoming an important issue. policy, but none were very politicians pushing their insatisfactory.

Insurance terests and jockeying for position-served only to strengthen this companies, banks and securities markets were subject to state fluid social environment. regulatory systems-all notable for their inadequacy. Railroads, regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission since 1887, n theory, Americans could draw on several different polwere involved for decades in an intricate, politically charged and terribly costly regulatory drama. icy responses to the rise of big business. One was public , ownership of public utilities. Another was federal incorThe newer public utilities-gas and electric, bus and streetcar poration (and therefore oversight)-sometimes sought by and telephone companies-operated in yet another distinct regulatory environment. They were expected to provide a constant industry leaders themselves, who saw in it protection from burdensome state supervision. Yet a third was general federal reguflow of a necessary service, and by their very nature they were lation of industrial prices and services: the creation of an monopolies, or nearly so. To deal with them, the states resurinterstate trade commission to parallel the railroads' Interstate rected the old regulatory device of licensing. Public service or Commerce Commission. utility commissions issued "certificates of public convenience But these alternatives failed to suit the national temperaand necessity" to the companies under their supervision: a new ment-or to fit the prevailing realities in American politics and form of corporate oversight. But often these commissions were

"captured" by the utilities they regulated.

None of these problems reduced the ubiquity of the corporate form of business organization. Big business was only the tip of the American corporate iceberg. The vast majority of corporations were small enterprises, remote from the regulatory world of antitrust or utilities regulation. Easy access to the corporate form was now a century old, and taken for granted. There were more than 340,000 corporations in 1916 and 516,000 in 1931, when they controlled some 30 percent of America's wealth and accounted for four-fifths of business income. No one worried that hundreds of thousands of farmers, shopkeepers and small manufacturers availed themselves of the liability and, increasingly in the 20th century, the tax advantages of incorporation. hat did continue to concern courts, legislatures, and (intermittently) the public was how to restrict the corporation's potential for economic and political power while not crippling its potential for economic growth. This involved, first of all, an assault on the late-19th-century legal doctrine that a corporation was the equivalent of a person. That doctrine was the source of some of the more controversial judicial decisions of the early 20th century. It allowed corporations to claim Fourteenth Amendment immunity from much state taxation, and to beat back some attempts to regulate wages and working conditions. Companies argued with some success that the states had no right to interfere with the contracts that they as "persons" entered into with their workers.

Not until the 1930s did the Supreme Court finally come to accept that both the federal government and the states should have considerable regulatory authority over corporations. Congress then passed laws severely limiting the ability of employers to secure court injunctions against strikers and guaranteeing collective bargaining. Corporate taxation increased significantly during the New Deal and World War II. Big business came once again, as in the Progressive era, to be treated as what in fact it was: not a collection of legal "persons" more or less free to do what they would, but a potent American institution.

The decades since the 1930s have not fundamentally altered the place of the corporation in American life. Antitrust now, as throughout the 20th century, ebbs and flows with the forces of politics and the economy. Comparing the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 and of AT&T a decade ago gives one an overpowering sense of deja vu. The anticorporate strictures of Ralph Nader and other latter-day critics stand in a tradition that has its roots in the early 19th century. True, there is far more regulation of corporations today, including rules on environmental and occupational safety and health. And modern liability law makes

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companies much more subject to consumer and bystander damage suits than in the past. Yet big business today has as secure a place in American society as at any time during the past century.

One feature of large corporations has been a continuing source of trouble: the separation of ownership and control. Until the 20th century, ownership rested in relatively few hands-though rarely in the hands of only one proprietor, such as Henry Fordand owners were able for the most part to exercise effective control. But as companies grew bigger, and stockholders more numerous (4.4 million in 1900, an estimated 18 million in 1928), the separation of control from ownership loomed ever larger. In 1927 and 1929 leading New York corporation lawyers revised Delaware's statutes, already hospitable enough to make that state the home of 70,000 firms, further strengthening the hand of management against stockholders.

The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), by lawyer (and later New Deal brain truster) Adolf Berle and economist Gardiner Means, addressed the ownership-control problem in much the same way as, a generation before, Louis D. Brandeis's Other People's Money (1914) focused on corporate consolidation and size. Could stockholder-owners who were not actually responsible for the operation of a firm justly claim all of its profits? And given the impossibility of over-

sight by masses of stockholders, how could non-owner managers be counted on to maximize profits and secure the health of the company, rather than seek perquisites and power for themselves?

Berle and Means's larger point was that corporations were social as well as economic institutions and thus subject to public accountability. It took the Great Depression and the New Deal to bring about significant reform, though nowhere near as comprehensive as many corporate critics wanted. The Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 imposed strict new rules on stock issues and securities trading, and required full disclosure of executive compensation. State securities laws were also tightened.

But the gap between stockholders and management persisted.

Stockholders continued to be regarded more as investors than as owners-and, indeed, it is hard to see how any other assumption could work. "Faith in publicity," the sovereign Progressive remedy (along with antitrust) for corporate ills, has remained the guiding spirit of corporation law reform. In times of corporate profitability (that is, pretty much since the Great Depression), criticism of the management-stockholder relationship--like criticism of corporate size-tends to be muted. Even today's excessive stock options, golden parachutes and other arrangements that avaricious managers secure with the help of complaisant directors elicit more indignation than action. Of course, an economic catastrophe could very well change that.

f'

wo very different impressions emerge from the long history of the corporation in the United States. One is that the corporate form has been extraordinarily useful as a way of giving legal (and public) standing to economic or social ventures. Whether in regard to a covenanted New England town in the 17th century, a colonial college in the 18th century, a bank or a railroad company in the 19th century or the biggest of big businesses in the 20th century, some form of incorporation has been a sine qua non. It guarantees public standing or limited liability, helps attract capital or gives managers relatively free scope to operate.

No less striking is the halting and uncertain, slow and limited record of the state and of public opinion when it comes to subjecting corporations to significant government control. The usual explanation is that big business wields enormous political power. No one would deny the existence of that power, but it seems an insufficient explanation. Corporations seldom form a united political front, and big business is often vulnerable to adverse public opinion. The antitrust movement of the early 20th century, the New Deal, and the continuing strain of populist hostility to big business are all evidence of that. In American politics, an aroused public that knows what it wants usually can get its way.

It is revealing that the area in which modem corporations have been most vulnerable to public control is liability law. Customers or bystanders who suffer harm from a company's products, even if the harm was impossible to anticipate, now routinely win multimillion-dollar judgments against corporate giants. It is no accident that this is an area, like antitrust, that is the particular responsibility of the courts. Corporations to a considerable degree are legal creatures, and it is the law, more than politics or government, that seems best able to trace the bounds between their private rights and public responsibilities.

Much of the corporation's relative immunity from broad political assault exists because it has been able to lay claim to the status-and the legitimacy-that comes from being an old, massive, generally successful American institution. The corporate device is used by middling farmers and entrepreneurs as well as gargantuan businesses. And despite highly publicized episodes of downsizing, many big companies still command the loyalty of their managers and workers.

Corporations, as has so often been observed, are social as well as economic institutions, and the attractive power of the corporate culture should not be underestimated. Most of all, corporations, especially large ones, have been able to deliver the economic goods. For all their very evident faults and inadequacies, as long as they continue to do that, their place in American society seems assured.

0 About the Author: Morton Keller is Spector Professor of Brandeis University. He is the editor of The Encyclopedia of States Congress (1995) and the author of several books, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic America, 1900-1933.

History at the United including Change in

Home

Selling

Takes

an

American companies like Tupperware, Avon and Amway are big players on India's new direct sales scene.

"I have Tupper in my head. I have Tupper in my heart...in my toes ... all over ...."

Sounds like an unlikely song for a group of grown women to be singing. But then, this is no ordinary women's party. It's an assembly of dealers for Tupperware India Private Limited.

At this particular gathering, Dr. Jasbir Cheema, who has given up her medical practice to become a full-time distributor for Tupperware, has on display plastic food containers some of which will be offered free and some at a discount to the dealers in her network. The aim is to keep her managers and their units motivated, recognize their achievements and encourage them, as well as spur them on to make their next round of sales.

Tupperware is one of several American direct-selling companies that have come to tap the Indian market. Avon Beauty Products Dr. Jasbir Cheema, a Tupperware distributor, addresses a group of dealers at a company meet.

Private Limited, with its range of cosmetics and beauty products, is similarly tapping women to do direct selling for the company. The latest entrant on the scene is Amway India Enterprises, a whollyowned member of the Amway group of companies.

What is direct selling and how does it affect the average Indian? Direct selling is a unique distribution channel that relies on the personal touch as its main promotional tool. It is a method of marketing a variety of goods directly to the consumer without using fixed retailer outlets, mailers or advertisements.

The advantage for the customer is the product is sold to him/her at his time and place of convenience; he gets personalized attention; he gets a good selection of products and is often protected by a customer refund policy.

For the sellers, it means an opportunity to own their own business with minimal

investment to make some supplemental family income, sell to and meet people because they enjoy it.

"It's generally people who have the bread but want the butter that come forward to do direct selling," says Avon Lady Nina Bhatnagar.

Nina owns and runs a beauty parlor as well as manages a home and two small children. But since she has associated herself with Avon, she also does makeup demonstrations for the company using their products and takes classes to train new dealers.

"We keep in touch with the company.

We go maybe two times a month so that we know what offer schemes are going or the freebies we can make use of. The company does send out brochures, but it's good to go occasionally," says Nina.

Does owning a beauty parlor make it easier for her to find customers? Nina believes her opportUl,uty is equal to the op-

portunity open to anyone else who decides to sell Avon products. "Look at Geetha Chadha," she says of the person who introduced her to direct selling for Avon.

"She's a schoolteacher and she's doing much better than I am!"

Is it difficult to convince others to join the marketing network? According to Nina, it isn't. "Oriflame laid the foundation for this type of marketing." Oriflame, with its. line of skin care and cosmetics, had entered the Indian market two years ago. "So most women were already familiar with the concept of how Avon would sell."

Avon entered India in September 1996.

With 2.5 million sales representatives, its worldwide revenue sales were $5.1 billion. Already in 135 countries, Avon ranks 270 on the Fortune 500 list.

Veena Wadhwa was also familiar with direct selling before she was "Tupperized." "I was working for Time Life, an American company marketing catalogs

Left: lyoti Nargas (right), a manager in one ofTupperware'sfive

Delhi

distribution networks, demonstrates the company's food grade plastic containers to guests at a "sales party."

A typical party offers fun, games and gifts, besides Tupperware products.

Right: Amway has now entered the Indian market with both personal care and home care products.

Below: Avon sells its range of cosmetics and beauty products through company beauty consultants.

and encyclopedias for children."

Now Veena is happier selling Tupperware-food grade plastic containers.

"Earlier, I had to select my customers, make sure they had children, and then the minimum price for an encyclopedia set is Rs. 9,000. So I had to gauge whether they could afford it. But with Tupperware, you can even sell to your neighbor," she says.

Veena was introduced to the business in July 1997 and is looking forward to becoming a "manager" soon. "I've already recruited seven people into selling, and you need to recruit six to be made a manager," she says.

Veena enjoys what she does. "It's like your own business," she says. She hosts or attends three to four Tupperware parties a week where a hostess gift is given free and there are fun, games and other gifts. For many of the women who are dealers, these parties are an occasional getaway from the responsibilities of home.

The party plan is a concept wherein a host/hostess organizes a party or a gettogether at her house or a venue with the purpose of demonstrating the products collectively to a group. The participants. are fully aware of the purpose and share the interest. Orders are obtained during the course of the party or after the demonstration of the products is complete.

Tupperware, which launched in India in November 1996, has five distributors in Delhi, Dr. Cheema being one of them.

"Sunrise Party Sales" is the name of her distribution network. Jyoti Nargas is a manager in Dr. Cheema's network, and she calls her "unit" of six dealers "Tupper Tycoons."

"In Mumbai, I was all steel," says Jyoti referring to her kitchen. "Then we went to Scotland, and I switched to plastics." .

The customs official was surprised and perplexed at the amount of Tupper containers she brought back with her. So Jyoti was very happy when Tupperware

launched in India in November 1996.

"First I joined for the fun of it, and then I began to pick up the challenge of selling the product."

Tupperware plastic containers are foodgrade, virgin plastic with airtight, liquidproof seals. The company offers a lifetime guarantee on its products.

Jyoti, who had left her job with Hongkong Bank to look after her children, is now taking her new job seriously. She claims to have trained 80 dealers. And the rewards are also coming. In addition to the 25 percent discount a dealer enjoys on all products, the manager of a unit gets a 3 percent bonus on unit sales. Already, Jyoti has won a free trip to the Philippines where she was taken on a guided tour of the Tupperware manufacturing unit."It's nice to take my husband on a trip for a change rather than the other way round," she says.

Though most Tupperware dealers stress the use of the products for kitchen storage,

refrigerators and table use, creative people find novel uses for the airtight, moistureproof containers.

B.D. Garekar, who bought several Tupperware plastic containers from his dealer wife, Shakuntala, stores his expensive camera and lenses in them. Garekar is an engineer who pursues photography as a hobby. He has found that his expensive instruments remain protected from dust, moisture and fungus in these containers.

What's more, he says, "I even use Tupperware to store my floppies and discs." Call it high-tech storage!

But if the grapevine is to be believed, it's Amway that is the biggie in direct selling. It's the 20th largest private corporation in the U.S. and is among the top 110 companies on the Fortune 500 list. It has markets in more than 70 countries.

With over three million distributors worldwide, Amway's global sales reached $7 billion at estimated retail for the fiscal year ending August 31, 1997. Asia accounts for over $3 billion in sales for Amway, so India is an important market.

Amway operates through what is called a multilevel marketing system. Also known as network marketing, multilevel marketing encourages each salesperson to recruit many salespeople under him. And they in turn can recruit many more under them.

Together, all of them form a down line of the salesperson who initially joined the company. The bigger the network, the bigger the bonuses the salesperson collects from the company as volume sales grow.

The concept has excited many, and the first batch of registrations with the company saw tens of thousands line up to get their "computer nurnbers" and dealerships.

Afzal Mustafa and his wife Abida claim to be among the first to register with Amway. "Forty people, of my frontline and downline, registered with me," he says. And if all those who promised to join the network do so, he would have some 200 persons in his marketing network.

But the couple's responsibility doesn't end with forming a network. They are committed to help their downline expand the network further and to convince customers and potential distributors about the

high quality of Amway products.

So convinced is Afzal of the business opportunity he has in the Amway distribution network that he has all but left his profession as a music teacher. He has also put his PhD thesis on hold as he gives his all to the business he is making for himself.

His enthusiasm has caught on with others in his family. Both of his sisters have taken up dealerships and are in the process of creating their own networks, and likewise his sister-in-law.

Nishat Bano has come all the way from Malerkotla in Punjab, where she is a schoolteacher, to get her computer number and her business kit. Naznine is a final year student of BA in history. And though her examinations were underway, she found several other students who are keen to join up and form their own Amway businesses. Benazir Qureshi, a software engineer with Nugen, has recruited four to her network. mway is due to launch this summer, and most distributors ~ are convinced of the high quality of the six start-up products. Amway will launch more products with time.

Interestingly, nonresident Indians form a significant number of distributors in India. They have come from all over the world so as not to miss the "huge opportunity offered by the Indian market."

Stephen Robbins, managing director of Amway India Enterprises, has no figures to quote about the number of NRIs coming home to be part of the Amway distribution network in India. But he does have this to say: "Because of NRIs, we will have a huge response to the Amway opportunity." He sees India as an entrepreneurial country. "We are not asking people to sell products," he says. "We are targeting couples and giving them an entrepreneurialopportunity."

In addition to its commitment to quality, Amway also has an environmental and social commitment. All Amway products are environment-friendly, biodegradable and come in plastic packs that reportedly leave no residue when burnt after using the product.

In line with its social commitment,

A

Amway has endowed a chair on entrepreneurial development at the University of Delhi's Faculty of Management Studies.

Amway India is also sponsoring the printing, production and distribution of braille textbooks to blind students across the country.

But everything in direct selling couldn't be rosy. Prices for one are steep. Most distributors in direct-selling companies, however, believe that if the product is good, customers don't mind paying a higher price.

"The lipsticks and skincare range are so good, you can't get anything comparable in the Indian market. So people who use it once want to use it again. They are ready to pay a higher price for a better product," says Avon Lady Nina Bhatnagar.

"Amway's LOC (liquid organic cleanser) is so good that just a few drops can make anything clean. It comes in a liter bottle which can be diluted to make 165 liters of solution," says Afzal. That would mean the customer is getting his money's worth. Except that not everybody wants to buy in such large quantities.

Says Robbins of Amway: "We have introduced a half-bottle size in the Chinese market. We'll do the same in India eight or nine months down the line."

Says Veena Wadhwa: "Tupperware comes in a lot more colors abroad. In India, we have mostly sheer, buttermilk or yellow."

However, Linda Hagedorn, a consultant for Tupperware who has been in India for the past nine months preparing for the Chennai and Hyderabad launches, says: "We will launch more colors in India. But the colors we have now have been carefully chosen for the Indian market." The yellow color, it would seem, doesn't show the turmeric stains that most Indian foods would leave.

But nobody has any argument about the way Amway, Avon or Tupperware are marketing their products in India. As long as corporates can offer the average person an entrepreneurial opportunity through its selling methods, direct selling is here to stay.

D About the Author: N. Habibulla based freelance writer.

is a Delhi-

T

Confluence Civilizations

i:,

A chat with B.~ Singh During his many years in the Indian Administrative Service, Home Secretary to the Government of India B.P Singh has seen a great deal-and he has thought about it deeply. His two-year stint as culture secretary led him to think particularly about the importance of cultural values in our modern, fast changing world. This, infact, is the subject of India's Culture: The State, the Arts and Beyond, his book released earlier this year. Recently he shared some of his thoughts with SPAN on the importance of human values enshrined in various cultures and how these may be applied to solve global problems.

His views provide counterpoint to those expressed

by Samuel P Huntington. (See page 18).

SPAN: International power struggles appear to be changing from actual physical wars into something that is more abstract. Is this a genuine trend?

B.P. SINGH: After the end of the cold war military strength, which was the primary factor in determining the status of a country in the world, ceased to be the primary factor. It has yielded place to technology, trade and other economic activities. The economic interpretation of Karl Marx, which led to the establishment of what they call the dictatorship of the proletariat, has ended.

These days a capitalist society must be democratic, also. We are in a post-capitalist era. The capitalist society is democratic-not colonial, not feudal. Economic factors are more important in a capitalist society. With the primacy of the economic factors, the military becomes secondary.

My theory is that culture is clearly emerging as a third factor. In a manner of speaking, culture must challenge the primacy of both the economic market and the military. This won't happen because I say so or you believe it to be true. It will happen only when the major international concerns move more toward this. What are

these concerns, besides trade, today? Democratic movements.

Respect for human rights. And I see democracy and respect of human rights as two sides of the same coin. You can't have a democratic society, or a democratic state, which does not respect human rights.

Another concern is for ecological preservation. The ecology movement, in fact, has given primacy to some of the age-old beliefs held by Indian sages and saints. More than 3,500 years ago the sages said, "Mata bhoomi putro hanth pritivya,""Earth is my mother and I'm a son of the world." The concern was always global in terms of ecology, in terms of peace. Now this is a movement which is possible and can succeed only if supportive cultural factors in each society are enlisted. It can't be achieved by handed-down philosophy from the United Nations-that the United Nations has passed a res9lution and everybody must adopt it. You can't preserve the environment that way. The Anthropological Survey of India has made a survey of Indian communities and they say that 4,653 communities exist in India, and communities not in the sense of caste, communities not in the sense of religion, but communities which have different modes of worship, different values and beliefs and different forms of expression. These communities must be involved.

When global ecological concerns link with common factors, things a child in any culture perceives, which make his moral and social universe as he grows up, that will guarantee a more open society, a more interdependent society. That's why I say the third factor is culture. People are concerned with their identity in every society. And what is that identity? Indian society, before the beginning of the Christian era, had a cultural identity. And despite major changes which have taken place in the last 2,000 years in India, the people of India and the people of Indian origin living elsewhere in the world, retain that identity. Cultural identity is a force. And it is a force that can be used for clashes, also.

How will differing cultures find meeting points? India is a good microcosm for working out differences, but can these methods be applied worldwide?

This is an area of evolution and it is there where I see small things yet very powerful things happening. Thanks to the revolution in the electronic media, a work of painting done in a remote village or a piece of music from somewhere can become a world property in no time. We have that enormous potential today to create the visibie and transmit it through visible and invisible meeting points. There is the way Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar combined Eastern and Western music that led to a differ-

ent form of expression-which has enriched our music and Western music. Now these are the meeting points. You can't be in a hurry, just focus in the right direction. I consider the institution of the Nobel Prize as a meeting point. I consider UNESCO to be a meeting point. There can be private efforts, there can be UN efforts, there can be national efforts. The United States' Fulbright fellowship is a meeting point. It creates a community, and it creates an identity. It is not that an individual will have only one identity. He will have a number of identities. An MIT graduate from India, fully dressed like an American, when he comes home he touches the feet of his parents and elders. He combines the two identities. He does not want to give up his Indian identity because of his American experience. He combines them.

And that is what I want in terms of public life also. If organizations like the UN address these issues also, things are bound to change. Identities are important. There should be no pressure of inducement to make a community lose its identity. An identity will get lost on its own if it is irrelevant. Indian ladies have not discarded saris despite outside influences. Nobody has told the Indian males to throwaway the dhoti, but it is disappearing.

Certain manifestations of identity such as of dress, forms of W9rship, forms of workability of political discourse, will disappear.

What about those people who are afraid their cultures will be undermined by satellite television?

You know when I was a young student I met John Stewart Mill. He wrote a very famous book called On Liberty. One sentence I still remember, because it had a great impact on me subsequently. He said even if the whole of mankind wants to force its opinion on one individual, but he feels otherwise, that individual should be allowed to have that opinion. Buddha put it at a higher level, and he said, "Be a lamp unto yourself." Don't accept something because I say so, only when you are convinced it is right should you believe it. If you allow that discourse in a society-a democratic society where people have their say-things will settle down. Things will change.

Individual dissent is always welcome. The Indian freedom struggle is one of the most massive freedom struggles in terms of numbers that we have had in world history, and, many times, on many serious issues, there was dissent. Mahatma Gandhi never allowed dissent to be suppressed. If you look at the famous Quit India movement, when the Bombay resolution was passed, it was not unanimous. Some people opposed it. And Gandhi respected that. You know, the majority will have its say in a democratic society, and then the minority opinion can join, but there should be no attempt to stifle that opinion. There

should not be a society where for your opinion you will get "midnight knocks," as they call it. That is not a democratic society, when you cannot have an opinion.

How do you go about fostering secular ideals and pluralism in the light of many diverse cultures and religions? Religion is a point in many places where people disagree emotionally. How do you accomplish harmony?

Look at the Indian experience. Prior to the Christian era, we had two or three major divisions within the Hindu order. There were two sects, one followed Lord Shiva and the other Lord Krishna. We had also the Buddhist philosophy opposing the caste system and the Brahmanical order.

We had Jain philosophy. Subsequently, in the Christian era we had the powerful forces oflslam and Hindu orders challenging each other. India, which is, according to me, the topmost plural society in the world today, has not been able to completely resolve this problem-otherwise there would be no Partition according to some people. But it was in India that Islam flourished. It was in India that, as a result of interaction between Hindu philosophy and Islamic philosophy you had sufism, which is the finest expression in Islam of human brotherhood. You had a highly secular language of Urdu. And you had pockets in India like the Kashmir Valley and Assam where religion was not a factor. Although people try to incite them, age-old society is reasserting its secular values. These are challenges we have to face. But the Indian experience is a world-level guide.

A secular society does not have to be understood only in terms of religion. It has to be understood in terms of various other factors-ethnic factors, caste factors, language factors, dress factors, forms of worship, belief systems. A secular society must respect all these identities because Islam or Christianity or Hinduism have so many other factors to give identity to different people. And they are different. A Christian in Nagaland is different from a Christian in Mumbai or Tamil Nadu because he is a product of that society. He has not absorbed the Christianity of the Vatican, but he has absorbed the Christianity of a different ecological and social environment. People are in a hurry to divide society into three, four or five groups and sit tight. But that division is not correct. Even among groups there can be conflict, among Muslim states, among Christian societies, among two Hindu ways of life.

Do you really think it's possible for economic and technological development to be equaled by inner development, by the spiritual ethos that you wish to achieve?

The economic development is a real problem, because different

countries or even communities in a single country may be at different levels of economic development. And there are inequities in society. I do visualize that the type of poverty we see in Asia and parts of Africa may be eliminated in the coming century.

Maybe by 2030 or 2040 we will not have acute forms of poverty and illiteracy anywhere in the world. But it doesn't mean that the moral universe of individuals will necessarily improve unless there is a conscious effort by different societies to make democracies subservient to human rights, to let global village concerns promote ecological renewal, and by cultural movements to allow the plural character of societies to flourish. This has to be a conscious effort.

I also think there will be a mad rush for economic opportunity in more countries.

Similarly, at the individual level people may say that I should be a rich man rather than a moral man, "Let me be a rich man, and if in the process I cease to be a moral man I don't mind." At a national level you have a concern to get the market by any means. So these are challenges to the world community. Greed and ambition should be tempered by the cultural values of societies themselves. There are examples that reflect these common values: the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, we have the principles of human rights in our Indian scriptures. These are not the properties of one society. These are world properties.

In my book there are two persons I single out: Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. These are global personalities during the last 2,500 years that India could produce. Philosophies such as those given by these global leaders will temper this mad rush for economic opportunity.

Democracy and ecology are relatively new concepts as international issues. Ecology is something we have had to think consciously about only recently, yet these are points on which you see the future world being built. Are they durable?

I have tried to say how the Buddha himself favored democracy.

In the small princedom of Vaishali there was a democracy in Buddha's time and he supported that. Ecology was a concern in the Vedas and Upanishads. I am not sure the authors of the Vedas had a map or globe before them. Certainly they didn't have outer space satellites, but if you read closely, they had delved into those areas of the cosmos, and they did think that nature is one for the whole world. It is true, democracy and ecology are post-Second World War phenomena as global concepts. But they are going to stay because the concern for ecology, the concern for human rights, and government by consent of the people are basic concerns. These concerns will remain as major concerns.

e an aces 0 onventional wisdom tells us that we are witnessing the emergence of what VS. Naipaul called a "universal civilization," the cultural coming together of humanity and the increasing acceptance of common values, beliefs and institutions by people throughout the world. Critics of this trend point to the global domination of Western-style capitalism and 'culture (Baywatch, many note with alarm, is the most popular television show in the world), and the gradual erosion of distinct cultures-especially in the developing world. But there's more to universal civilization than GATT and David Hasselhoff's pecs.

If what we mean by universal culture are the assumptions, values and doctrines currently held by the many elites who travel in international circles, that's not a viable "one world" scenario. Consider the "Davos culture." Each year about a thousand business executives, government officials, intellectuals and journalists from scores of countries meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Almost all of them hold degrees in the physical sciences, social sciences, business or law; are reasonably fluent in English; are employed by governments, corporations and academic institutions with extensive international connections; and travel frequently outside of their own countries. They also generally share beliefs in individualism, market economies and political democracy, which are also common among people in Western civilization. This core group of people controls virtually all international institutions, many of the world's governments and the bulk of the world's economic and military organizations. As a result, the Davos culture is tremendously important, but it is far from a universal civilization. Outside the West, these values are shared by perhaps one percent of the world's population.

C

The argument that the spread of Western consumption patterns and popular culture around the world is creating a universal civilization is also not especially profound. Innovations have been transmitted from one civilization to another throughout history. But they are usually techniques lacking in significant cultural consequences or fads that come and go without altering the underlying culture of the recipient civilization. The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that nonWesterners may bite into the latter does not necessarily mean they are more likely to accept the former. During the 1970s and , 80s Americans bought millions of Japanese cars and electronic gadgets without being "Japanized," and, in fact, became considerably more antagonistic toward Japan. Only naive arrogance can lead Westerners to assume that nonWesterners will become "Westernized" by acquiring Western goods.

A slightly more sophisticated version of the universal popular culture argument focuses on the media rather than consumer goods in general. Eighty-eight of the world's hundred most popular films in 1993 were produced in the United States, and four organizations based in the United States and Europe-the Associated Press, CNN, Reuters and the French Press Agency-dominate the dissemination of news worldwide. This situation simply reflects the universality of human interest in love, sex, violence, mystery, heroism and wealth, and the ability of profit-motivated companies, primarily American, to exploit those interests to their own advantage.

Little or no evidence exists, however, to support the assumption that the emergence of pervasive global communications is producing significant convergence in attitudes and beliefs around the world.

Indeed, this Western hegemony encourages populist politicians in non-Western

e

societies to denounce Western cultural imperialism and to rally their constituents to preserve their indigenous cultures. The extent to which global communications are dominated by the West is, thus, a major source of the resentment non-Western peoples have toward the West. In addition, rapid economic development in non- Western societies is leading to the emergence of local and regional media industries catering to the distinctive tastes of those societies.

The central elements of any civilization are language and religion. If a universal civilization is emerging, there should be signs of a universal language and a universal religion developing. Nothing of the sort is occurring.

Despite claims from Western business leaders that the world's language is English, no evidence exists to support this proposition, and the most reliable evidence that does exist shows just the opposite. English speakers dropped from 9.8 percent of the world's population in 1958 to 7.6 percent in 1992. Still, one can argue that English has become the world's lingua franca, or in linguistic terms, the principal language of wider communication.

Diplomats, business executives, tourists and the service professionals catering to them need some means of efficient communication, and right now that is largely in English. But this is a form of intercultural communication; it presupposes the existence of separate cultures. Adopting a lingua franca is a way of coping with linguistic and cultural differences, not a way of eliminating them. It is a tool for communication, not a source of identity and community.

The linguistic scholar Joshua Fishman has observed that a language is more likely to be accepted as a lingua franca if it is not identified with a particular ethnic group, religion or ideology. In the past, English carried many of those associations. But more recently, Fishman says, it

uture

Major civilizations and their cultures have replaced the political blocs of the Cold War, and a world civilization is not around the corner.

Better than meddle in the affairs of other cultures, the author maintains, the West should preserve and renew its own civilization.

has been "de-ethnicized (or minimally ethnicized)," much like what happened to Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek and Latin before it. As he puts it, "It is part of the relative good fortune of English as an additional language that neither its British nor its American fountainheads have been widely or deeply viewed in an ethnic or ideological context for the past quarter century or so." Resorting to English for intercultural communication helps maintain-and, indeed, reinforce-separate cultural identities. Precisely because people want to preserve their own culture, they use English to communicate with people of other cultures.

A universal religion is only slightly more likely to emerge than a universal language. The late 20th century has seen a resurgence of religions around the world, including the rise of fundamentalist movements. This trend has reinforced the differences among. religions, and has not. necessarily resulted in significant shifts in the distribution of religions worldwide.

Of course, there have been increases among peoples through trade, investment, during the past century in the percentage . tourism, media and electronic communications is creating a common world culof people practicing the two major proselytizing religions, Islam and Christianity. ture; and that a universal civilization is the Western Christians accounted for 26.9 logical result of the process of global percent of the world's population in 1900 modernization that has been going on and peaked at about 30 percent in 1980: since the 18th century. while the Muslim population increased The first assumption is rooted in the from 12.4 percent in 1900 to as much as Cold War perspective that the only alter18 percent in 1980. The percentage of native to communism is liberal democChristians in the world will probably racy, and the demise of the first inevitably decline to about 25 percent by 2025. produces the second. But there are many alternatives to liberal democracy-includMeanwhile, because of extremely high ing authoritarianism, nationalism, corporates of population growth, the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to ratism and market communism (as in increase dramatically and represent about China)-that are alive and well in today's 30 percent of the world's population by world. And, more significantly, there are all the religious alternatives that lie out2025. Neither, however, qualifies as a uniside the world of secular ideologies. In the versal religion. modern world, religion is a central, perThe argument that some sort of universal civilization is emerging rests on one or haps the central, force that motivates and more of three assumptions: that the colmobilizes people. It is sheer hubris to lapse of Soviet communism meant the end think that because Soviet communism has collapsed, the West has conquered the of history and the universal victory of libworld for all time and that non-Western eral democracy; that increased interaction

peoples are going to rush to embrace Western liberalism as the only alternative.

The Cold War division of humanity is over. The more fundamental divisions of ethnicity, religions and civilizations remain and will spawn new conflicts.

The new global economy is a reality.

Improvements in transportation and communications technology have indeed made it easier and cheaper to move money, goods, knowledge, ideas and images around the world. But what will be the impact of this increased economic interaction? In social psychology, distinctiveness theory holds that people define themselves by what makes them different from others in a particular context: People define their identity by what they are not.

As advanced communications, trade and travel multiply the interactions among civilizations, people will increasingly accord greater relevance to identity based on their own civilization.

Those who argue that a universal civilization is an inevitable product of modernization assume that all modern societies must become Westernized. As the first civilization to modernize, the West leads in the acquisition of the culture of modernity. And as other societies acquire similar patterns of education, work, wealth and class structure-the argument runs-this modern Western culture will become the universal'culture of the world.

That significant differences exist between modern and traditional cultures is beyond dispute. It doesn't necessarily follow, however, that societies with modern cultures resemble each other more than do societies with traditional cultures. As historian Fernand Braudel writes, "Ming China ...was assuredly closer to the France of the Valois than the China of Mao Tse-tung is to the France of the Fifth Republic."

Yet modern societies could resemble each other more than do traditional societies for two reasons. First, the increased interaction among modern societies may not generate a common culture, but it does facilitate the transfer of techniques, inventions and practices from one society to another with a speed and to a degree that were impossible in the traditional world.

Second, traditional society was based on agriculture; modern society is based on industry. Patterns of agriculture and the social structure that goes with them are much more dependent on the natural environment than are patterns of industry.

Differences in industrial organization are likely to derive from differences in culture and social structure rather than geography, and the former conceivably can converge while the latter cannot.

Modern societies thus have much in common. But do they necessarily merge into homogeneity? The argument that they do rests on the assumption that modern society must approximate a single type, the Western type. This is a totally false assumption. Western civilization emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries. It did not begin to modernize until the 17th and 18th centuries. The West was the West long before it was modern. The central characteristics of the West-the classical legacy, the mix of Catholicism and protestantism, and the separation of spiritual and temporal authority-distinguish it from other civilizations and antedate the modernization of the West.

In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among people are not ideological, political or economi~.

They are cultural. People and nations are attempting to answer a basic human question: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way, by reference to the things that mean the most to them: ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs and institutions. People identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations and, at the broadest level, civilizations.

They use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity.

We know who we are only when we know who we are not, and often only when we know who we are against.

Nation-states remain the principal actors in world affairs. Their behavior is shaped, as in the past, by the pursuit of power and wealth, but it is also shaped by cultural preferences and differences. The most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocs of the Cold War but rather the world's major civilizations:

SINIC All scholars recognize the existence of either a single distinct Chinese civilization dating back at least to 1500 B.C., or of two civilizations-one succeeding the other-in the early centuries of the Christian epoch.

JAPANESE Some scholars combine Japanese and Chinese culture, but most recognize Japan as a distinct civilization, the offspring of Chinese civilization, that emerged between A.D. 100 and 400.

HINDU A civilization-or successive civilizations-has existed on the Indian subcontinent since at least 1500 B.C. In one form or another, Hinduism has been central to the culture of India since the second millennium B.C.

Originating on the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century A.D., Islam spread rapidly across North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula and also eastward into central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. Many distinct cultures-including Arab, Turkic, Persian and Malay--exist within Islam.

WESTERN The emergence of Western civilizationwhat used to be called Western Christendom-is usually dated at about 700 A.D. It has two main components, in Europe and North America.

LATIN AMERICAN Latin America, often considered part of the West, has a distinct identity. It has had a corporatist, authoritarian culture, which Europe had to a much lesser degree and North America did not have at all. Europe and North America both felt the effects of the Reformation and have combined Catholic and Protestant cultures, while Latin America has been primarily Catholic. Latin American civilization also incorporates indigenous cultures, which were wiped out in North America.

BUDDHIST

ORTHODOX This civilization, which combines the Orthodox tradition of Christianity with the Slav cultures of Eastern Europe and Russia, has resurfaced since the demise of the Soviet Union.

AFRICAN There may be some argument about whether there is a distinct African civilization. North Africa and the east coast belong to Islamic civilization.

(Historically, Ethiopia constituted a civilization of its own.) Elsewhere, imperialism brought elements of Western civilization. Tribal identities are pervasive throughout Africa, but Africans are also increasingly developing a sense of African identity. Sub-Saharan Africa conceivably could cohere into a distinct civilization, with South Africa as its core.

Beginning in the first century A.D., Buddhism was exported from India to China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan, where it was assimilated by the indigenous cultures and/or suppressed. What can legitimately be described as a Buddhist civilization, however, does exist in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia; and Tibet, Mongolia and Bhutan. Overall, however, the virtual extinction of Buddhism in India and its incorporation into existing cultures in other major countries means that it has not been the basis of a major civilization.

(Modern India represents a mix of Hindu and Islamic civilizations, while the Philippines is a unique Sinic-Western hybrid by virtue of its history of Spanish, then Ame11can rule.)

As Asian and Muslim civilizations begin to assert the universal relevance of their cultures, Westerners will see the connection

between universalism and imperialism and appreciate the virtues of a pluralistic world.

In order to preserve Western civilization, the West needs greater unity of purpose. It should incorporate into the European Union and NATO the western states of central Europe; encourage the Westernization of Latin America; slow the drift of Japan away from the West and toward accommodation with China; and accept Russia as the core state of Orthodoxy and a power with legitimate interests.

The main responsibility of Western leaders is to recognize that intervention in the affairs of other ci vilizations is the single most dangerous source of instability in the world. The West should attempt not to reshape other ciyilizations in its own image, but to preserve and renew the unique qualities of its own civilization.

0 About the Author: Samuel P Huntington is Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor' at Harvard University,

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rOldaf pgra Forget George Orwell, the new technology is providing us with more time, more freedom and a growing sense of community-goals sought by mankind since ancient times.

In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor cars, etc., etc.

-George Orwell, the most profoundly mistaken prophet of the century, writing in 1942 about the "spiritual emptiness" of the "machine age."

hen the Sojourner's tiny wheels rolled over the Martian surface on July 5 last year, it was in some ways a bigger leap for mankind than Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon. You may not have realized that if you were watching network television, which gave the Mars landing relatively short shrift. But that was the beauty of this extraterrestrial event: you didn't need a television to follow it.

Anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection could see pictures from the spacecraft. You could study Martian sunsets or put on cardboard 3-D glasses to take in a 360degree view of the landscape. With a few clicks of the mouse, you could read a treatise on Martian geology, check out the latest weather conditions on the planet, sit in on a news conference or watch scientists issuing commands from the mission-control room. One Web site provided a recipe for throwing a Mars Madness Celebration-red and brown M & M's were recommended-and gave directions to dozens of such gatherings across America. Other sites let you participate in on-line chats with plan-

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Reprinted from the New York Times Magazine.

Company. Reprinted by permission.

Copyright Š 1997 by the New York Times

etary scientists as well as religious fundamentalists convinced that the mission was a hoax being staged in the Arizona desert. During the week of the landing, the various Mars Web sites were visited more than 200 minion times.

It was easily the most popular event in the history of the Internet, proof at last that humanity could use this new medium for something loftier than viewing pictures of a naked Pamela Anderson Lee. The Moon landing was the apotheosis of the old technological order: a big-budget achievement of central planning, a cold-war triumph of the military-industrial complex packaged by politicians and presented to the masses by the media establishment. The Mars visit was a low-budget operation with a charming quirkiness to it, a peaceful scientific exercise instead of a propaganda victory over an enemy nation. In 1969, communist authorities suppressed coverage of the Moon landing; last year, Russians followed the Mars mission on the World Wide Web, using the very machines that helped end the cold war.

Is this a better world? Has technology made us better? Tools can't change human nature, but they can encourage or suppress certain qualities, and most people would probably agree on what constitutes "better": wiser, happier, kinder, more equitable and cooperative, less duplicitous and belligerent. The tricky part is defining "us."

In the two centuries after the Industrial Revolution, individuals reaped enormous personal benefits that were accompanied by some social liabilities. As people abandoned farms and small towns, they lost communal bonds; as personal incomes rose, public air and water got dirtier; as power became concentrated in capital cities, elites controlled new tools of mass communication and mass destruction. Indoor plumbing and washing machines freed women of onerous work, but there was less socializing at wells.

Trains and cars enabled workers to move away from industrial neighborhoods, but these suburbanites spent more time alone in

losing control now that their subjects have tools to communicate directly with one another. People are using the tools to do their jobs without leaving their families. They're forming new communities in cyberspace and forming new bonds with their neighbors in real space. Technology has the potential to increase individual freedom and strengthen community-even though at the moment, so many people complain it does neither. echnology's victims have become familiar images in the media: online addicts who don't know their next-door neighbors; satellite-dish owners who have stopped reading; computer users overwhelmed by E-mail, infuriated by software glitches and baffled by incomprehensible manuals; workers displaced by machines or forced to put in longer hours; frazzled parents, especially working mothers, too exhausted and busy to spend time with their children. We contrast these pathetic figures with images of a happier past, of families quietly relaxing in a pre-machine age when people still had time to read, contemplate the meaning of life, visit with their relatives and neighbors.

But when exactly were those halcyon days? If premachine means before the Industrial Revolution, the average person then was short-lived, illiterate and oblivious to most culture beyond the village. Women's lives were consumed with domestic chores and continual pregnancies, and women were especially unlikely to be educated. Marriage records from a region of 1750's England, then one of the world's most literate societies, show that two-thirds of the bridegrooms could sign their names, but only one-third of the brides could. It would be hard to call that a better world.

Living conditions and educational opportunities certainly improved after the Industrial Revolution, but people still didn't have much time to sit around discussing the classics or communing with nature. In the middle of the last century, the typical man in Britain worked more than 60 hours a week, with no annual vacation, from age 10 until he died at about 50. That left him with about 90,000 hours of free time over the course of his adult life-barely a third of the free time enjoyed by today's workers.

This trend shows no sign of abating, says Jesse H. Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University. He projects that by the middle of the next century, the average work-week in America will be shorter than 28 hours.

Since 1965, Americans have gained an average of almost one hour of leisure each day, according to social scientists at the University of Maryland who have been studying people's "time diaries" over the past three decades. Americans are now spending a little more time reading books and magazines, exercising, pursuing hobbies and attending adult-educational courses. Evidence from the diaries and other research shows that in recent decades, people have been going more frequently to art museums, the theater and the opera.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, the diaries show that the workweek has been shortening, that women have as much leisure time as men and that parents are spending as much time with their children as they did in the 1960s. These children, unfortunately, are less likely to live with two parents, which may be partly a conse-

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their cars and backyards, lapping up the wisdom of distant publishers and broadcasters instead of chatting with relatives and neighbors. Although new technology is often described as a Faustian bargain, historically it has involved a trade-off not between materialism and spirituality-lugging water from the well was not a spiritually uplifting exercise for most people, no matter how much it might appeal to the Unabomber -but between individual freedom and social virtue.

Today's technologies offer a better deal for everyone.

Individuals are acquiring more control over their lives, their minds and their bodies, even their genes, thanks to the transformations in medicine, communications, transportation and industry. At the same time, these technologies are providing social benefits and undoing some ofthe damage ofthe past. Technology helps to conserve natural resources and diminish pollution. Today's farmers are so efficient that unneeded cropland is reverting to forests and parks; the most high-tech countries have the cleanest air and water.

The Information Revolution, besides enabling people to visit Mars at will, is fostering peaceful cooperatiQil on Earth by decentralizing power. Political tyrants and demagogic warmongers are

quence of technology that has made divorce and single parenthood less of an economic burden: men and women are presumably more inclined to live separately now that they can both support themselves outside the home, relying on machines to make clothes, clean house and do most food preparation. But new technology is hardly the only cause ofthe traditional family's decline, and in any case it's hard to get too nostalgic for the days when women had no choice but to stay in the kitchen. hy, if men and women have more time and opportunity than ever to pursue their dreams, do they grouse so much about modern technology? One reason is that new technologies like computers usually are more trouble than they're worth-at first. They're hard to learn and create resentment among workers, particularly the unskilled ones who fear displacement and are jealous of higher-paid ex pelts in the new technology. The introduction last century of electricity to factories did not immediately increase workers' pay and productivity; the widespread benefits came only after several decades, when factory managers and workers finally learned how to use the new motors efficiently. Then wages increased for everyone, raising the standard of living and creating new kinds of jobs.

Luddites have been warning for two centuries that technology destroys jobs, but the overall effect of automation is to free workers to concentrate on other, less-tedious tasks. Today's workers are richer and more cultured than their Luddite ancestors (and better dressed, thanks to mechanical looms). While they may have fewer jobs in the textile industry, they have more opportunities to work as teachers, social workers, travel agents, personal trainers, writers and museum curators.

As much discomfort as the personal computer has caused, there's no reason to assume that the machines will remain complicated.

Gadgets become simpler as technologies mature and marketers appeal to the masses. George Orwell's despair over cars, gramophones and telephones was at least partly due to the crude state of those technologies in his day. The automobile was a relatively unreliable, high-maintenance machine until a couple of decades ago.

Gramophones were cumbersome and yielded tinny sounds.

Telephones were forever disturbing the peace of people trying to eat, converse or read. The phone didn't become wholly civilized until people were freed to ignore it by the invention of the answering machjne-a contraption that was despised before coming to be regarded as a necessity. Today, E-mail is a novelty that can be disruptive, but pioneers are developing techniques for coping, like automated responses when there's no time to deal with an overloaded mailbox and filters to sift out the junk mai I. Another reason we grouse about modernity is that our expectations are higher. The middle class wants perquisites once limited to the rich, from material luxuries to cultural experiences to intellectual fulfillment. Our ancestors may have been content to pass the time on the porch chatting with neighbors about the weather and crop prices, but they didn't have many other choices. Today most people-including those academics who rhapsodize about traditional communities while working in offices far from their

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hometowns-demand more stimulation than their relatives and neighbors can provide. We feel more rushed because we have more possibilities.

"Free time is increasing, but not as fast as our sense of the necessary," says Geoffrey Godbey, a co-author of Time for Life, a report on the time-diary research project. "With technology we've upped the ante. Instead of corresponding with six or seven people, we have 150 E-mail partners. Thirty years ago most people didn't bother shampooing their carpets or blow-drying their hair or making their own bread, but now that they have the equipment, they have higher standards."

The most dispiriting trend discovered by Godbey and his colleagues is the couch-potato paradox: people have been watching more television even though they rate it among their least-favorite forms of leisure. Americans average more than 16 hours a week, an increase of four hours since 1965, which means that most of our recently acquired free time has gone to the tube. A die-hard optimist could argue that television has been improving, that people are derivingjoy and enlightenment from all those new cable channels, but it would be just as easy to argue that they're staring at cubic zirconium rings. The increase in tube-watching seems especially perverse considering that it coincides with a decline of two hours a week in the amount of time people spend socializing; an activity they consider much more enjoyable than television. A society of solitary people sitting at home enviously watching the camaraderie on Friends does not seem like a triumph of the communications revolution. he good news is that people with computers are watching less television, and they've increased the amount of time sp~nt sociaUzing with family and friends (partly because they get together to play computer games). At the moment only about 40 percent of American households have computers, but the percentage is rising as the machines become cheaper and easier to use. Over the past year, home computers have begun outselling televisions in the United States, a statistic that cheers George Gilder, who in 1990 wrote a book titled Life After Television. Now the editor of the Gilder Technology Report, he expects the broadcast-television empires to collapse-and an intellectual culture to flourish-once the masses can easily receive video and text from a computer network as diverse as the Internet.

"When I debate network television executives," Gilder says, "they come up to me afterward and say: 'Look, you don't understand. People like the stuff we put on. We've done market surveys and we've found that people are boobs.' Well, I'm a boob when faced with conventional TV. It's too much work to find something good, and if you do, it probably won't accord with your particular interests. Television is a lowest-common-denominator medium even with 50 or 500 channels. You'd never go to a bookstore with only 500 titles. In the book or the magazine industries, 99.7 percent of the stuff is by definition not for you, and that's what the Internet is like. It's a first-choice medium with a bias toward each individual's area of excellence instead of a few commonly shared

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interests, which are mostly prurient and sensational."

Now that the computer is combining the television with the telephone, it's clear that George Orwell got things precisely wrong in 1984. He was remarkably prescient to envision society's being transformed by a two-way communication device called the telescreen, but he didn't foresee that these telescreens would promote freedom. One-way television is useful to Big Brother, but twoway communication devices undermine central authority by communicating with one another. Totalitarian countries have fewer telephones than televisions; democracies have more telephones.

Why was Orwell so technophobic, so sure that telescreens would promote tyranny and war? Peter Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who analyzes the mistakes of 1984 in his recent book, Orwell's Revenge, finds the answer in an essay Orwell wrote imagining how humans could free themselves of the drudgery of washing dishes. In this 1945 essay, Orwell considers the possibility of paper plates but settles on another solution: "Every morning the municipal van will stop at your door and carry off a box of dirty crocks, handing you a box of clean ones (marked with your initial, of course) in return." Orwell envisions a dish washing factory run by a public agency-Big Brother's Ministry of Crockery, as Huber calls it.

"The thought of private, automatic dishwashing machines never even surfaces," Huber writes. "For Orwell, the centralization of powerful machines is inescapable economic destiny in the industrial age." The most graphic refutation of Orwell was the famous Apple commercial broadcast during the 1984 Super Bowl, in which the enslaved masses were liberated by a lone woman hurling a sledgehammer at a demagogue on a huge telescreen.

At the time itwas a wonderful image of the home computer's revolutionary potential. In hindsight, it's even more apt, because the target of the attack, IBM, which then seemed to be the omnipotent Big Blue, was about to be humbled. It was more Wizard of Oz than Big Brother. The company had dominated the era of mainframe computers, but it floundered in the late 1980s when it faced competition from upstarts offering cheaper, decentralized machines.

As these personal devices proliferate, it's becoming impossible for political leaders to censor information. Africa's leaders can control newspapers, but citizens in remote villages are now getting uncensored news from Africa Online. And as information becomes central to economies, the incentives for tyrants to wage war are diminishing. Military conquest of foreign lands made a certain amount of sense when the victors acquired manpower and resources from farms, mines and factories. Access to scarce natural resources was vital-in the Middle Ages, armies fought wars over salt. Today wealth is based more and more on information, not natural resources, which is why the Congo is poor despite its vast mineral reserves, and why Hong Kong is rich even though it must import food and drinking water. The Beijing autocrats may have acquired title to Hong Kong's real estate, but they haven't conquered it. They can't seal its borders or appropriate its wealth. If they try to stop Hong Kong's telescreens from communicating, computer

keyboards around the world will respond, and Hong Kong's money will start to flow away, followed shortly by its populace. ow that the specter of Big Brother is receding, today's critics of technology have been focusing on the opposite danger: too much freedom. Conservatives worry that traditional values are threatened by online crudity; liberals worry that social injustice and selfishness will prevail in the unregulated realm of cyberspace. The critics correctly see that governments are losing some of their power to impose laws and moral standards, but that doesn't mean we're doomed to chaos and cruelty. Humans developed sociable rules and moral codes long before the era of centralized governments. The Internet may look like a dangerously anarchic world, but it's actually fairly similar to the ancient environment in which humans evolved to become the most cooperative, virtuous creatures on earth.

The original Information Revolution occurred during the Pleistocene, a decentralized era if there ever was one, when huntergatherers on the African savanna developed a powerful new computer: the human brain. The brain evolved to its large size because its information-processing capacity enabled humans to band together and increase their chances of survival. The size of a primate's brain correlates directly with the size of its social group, and the for- . mula worked out by scientists indicates that the human brain is sized for a group of about 150, which by no coincidence is the number in a typical band of hunter-gatherers.

The large brain enabled our ancestors to work together because they had so much information about one another. They knew whom to trust because they could store memories of past behavior and obtain news about others' reputations. They developed instincts and customs that stigmatized selfishness and encouraged voluntary cooperation, especially within the band but also with outsiders. Other animals make sacrifices for the common good of their immediate kin, performing acts of altruism that insure the survival of their mutual genes, but humans go further. "We are just about the only animals who act altruistically toward nonrelatives," says Matt Ridley, a zoologist and the author of The Origins of Virtue, a new book analyzing the evolution and economics of cooperative behavior. "Humans can be selfish, of course, but what makes us special is our instinct to be nice to one another. Every culture defines virtue almost exclusively as pro-social behavior, and vice as antisocial behavior."

This cooperative spirit has made possible the division of labor, which has been the source of all wealth, technology and culture.

Just as Stone Age toolmakers independently developed complex trading networks for obtaining rock blades from distant tribes, 11th-century merchants established a trading system across Europe without any central guidance or enforcement authority. The merchants traveling among disparate kingdoms developed their own legal code and observed it voluntarily because they knew that a violator would be ostracized and unable to conduct business. The mere communi-

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REFLECTIONS

U.S.-based photographer Maria Politarhos likes to study "social landscapes" through her camera. Her portraits of New York's Times Square, shown at an exhibition in New Delhi recently, are "an attempt to assemble the cluttered visuals ..jnto something meaningful."

or most part of this century, New York's Times Square, an area around the intersection of Seventh Avenue, 42nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan, has been known as the Crossroads of the World, the embodiment of the city's razzle-dazzle attractions: a dizzying swirl of neon and glitter, shops and theaters, and a magnet for visitors from all corners of the world. "Times Square has been a sort of icon of American society," says Maria Politarhos, the Greek photographer, visual artist and resident of the city for more than a decade. "Some New Yorkers even call it the center of the Western world. The mecca of art and artists. My photographs are, in a sense, an attempt to take the cluttered visuals of Times Square and assemble them into something meaningful."

For the past couple of years Maria has been trying to give a "personal interpretation" to Times Square. She recently exhibited her photographs at Atelier 2221, owned by artist printmaker Devraj Dakoji and his painter-wife Pratibha in Shahpur Jat, near the ruins of New Delhi's Siri Fort. And she is quite pleased with the response. "I got better feedback here on my work than I got in New York. People here could pick up on things that I had thought about much better than people in ew York. That's one of the most important discoveries for me during this visit to India."

Intrigued, I wonder if this has something to do with her multilayered approach to the subject. Maria agrees that her method envisaged assimilation of little details of consciousness and various levels of understanding things, a treatment more in tune with Indian philosophy or, rather, with the Indian perception of life. "I've always been interested in seeing things through reflections or in layers, looking into the multiconsciousness of things and different levels of experiencing things," she says, and that is

what she decided to do for this particular project. The idea was to bring out the different aspects of America's consumerist culture as epitomized by the flamboyant Times Square.

Born in Lorain, Ohio, to Greek immigrant parents, Maria grew up in Greece when her parents decided to return to their homeland. She, however, returned to New York to pursue photography in 1988 and now lives in the vicinity of Times Square.

"I live in the neighborhood, next door to all these things that I photographed. Even though Athens, where I grew up, is not a small place, the bombardment of advertisements from the moment I landed in New York was a big cultural shock to me. These photos are my way of dealing with it."

Beginning in 1995 and over the next couple of years, Maria took pictures through reflections in shop windows, trying "to combine the visuals of the advertisements with whatever is reflected in the background, and what they mean and how they can be interpreted in a myriad different ways." Scratch the surface of these random collages of human and consumer images set against neon signs and famous brand logos and you may discover underlying political, sexist and other themes running concurrently like so many subtexts across the works. "I rather prefer the viewer to discover the other aspects. They can only see the surface, or if they want they can analyze and read more into the images," she says.

The images are not "pretty" in the conventional sense; the Times Square aesthetic has never been subtle. Nonetheless (Text continued on page 33) Times Square Mirage Series # I

61 x 51 ems., gelatin silver print Fall 1997.

Left: Times Square Mirage Series #2 152 x 102 ems., gelatin silver print Fall 1997.

Right: Times Square Mirage Series # 3 61 x 51 ems., gelatin silver print Fall 1997.

Below: Times Square Mirage Series # 4 51 x 61 ems., chromogenic print Fall 1997.

Left: Times Square Mirage Series # 6 61 x 51 ems., chromogenic print Fall 1997.

Right: Times Square Mirage Series # 7 61 x 51 ems., chromogenic print Fall 1997.

Below: Times Square Mirage Series # 8 152 x 102 ems., gelatin silver print Fall 1997.

they are large and powerful (the bigger prints are 102 x 152 cms.), reverberating with the vitality and energy for which the area is justly famous. "A well known photographer, I forget his name, once said that the mind can see much more than the eye and the camera," Maria says. "So when you shoot, you see certain things. But later when you develop and when you print, other things come into play. By editing or working on certain elements, the photographer can make the works truly his own.

One can take the work to another step and show the things one wants to show."

What does photography mean to her? "I'm mostly interested in people and what I call social landscapes: how things change through time in different places," she explains. Whether it is documenting New York's Times Square or Central Park, or capturing the remnants of Greek glory in Alexandria, Egypt, which is what she is currently working on, Maria's creativity as a visual artist lies in her ability to present a multiplicity of ideas in just a single frame. It rescues her work from being mere documentation and raises it to the level of a sociological treatise.

As she travels around the world capturing lifestyles of our

times and studying social landscapes that are either vanishing or surfacing due to social and political changes, Maria is constantly expanding her oeuvre. More and more, her photography has come to incorporate photo printmaking, Polaroid transfers, painting and computer techniques. "I'm new to computers and I find it really exciting, but I'd rather have my computer work stay in the screen. I prefer to do the manipulations through my eyes and my camera or through printing in multiple levels so it grows on you.

I may change my opinion very soon though," she says laughing, hastening to add that while technique has its place, her work is really about ideas. "My work on Times Square, as it happens, has happily corresponded with the efforts to rejuvenate the area from the squalor it had descended into during the 1970s and 1980s. It is fascinating to see the area making a strong comeback as the commercial and entertainment hub of New York, without the ills that plagued it in recent years." . As in the case of Times Square, so Maria believes that social and economic conditions of communities across the world drive change or progress. "Things get lost in the process, and things are born in the process. I'm happy simply to participate in the flow of change." 0

he concept of a battery-powered light motor vehicle is not new to India.

Over the years many auto manufacturers have introduced electric vehicles but these failed to catch the fancy of Indian buyers. The unveiling recently of two prototypes of an "environment-friendly, zero-emission" electric car to be eventually manufactured in India with American collaboration, however, is being seen as the most promising venture so far. The prototype car, named "REVA," was unveiled by then Lt. Governor of Delhi, Tejinder Khanna and the U.S. Ambassador, Richard F. Celeste at the U.S. Embassy premises in New Delhi.

REVA is a collaborative effort between the Bangalore-based Maini group of industries and Amerigon Inc. of Monrovia, California. Commercial production of the car will s?on be undertaken in India by the Lucknow-based Scooters India Ltd. (SIL) under a joint venture agreement between Amerigon, Maini and SIL. Amerigon Chairman Lon Bell and SIL Managing Director A. Sahay were present at the ceremony in New Delhi.

The low-budget REVA, priced approximately Rs. 200,000, is targeted at the average Indian urban commuter. It is a two-door hatchback with space for two adults, two children and cargo. It can travel up to 80 kilometers per charge at a maximum speed of 70 kilometers per hour. The operating cost per kilometer is a meager 90 paise.

REVA incorporates state-of-the-art technology. The 2.6-meter-Iong car's body is made from dent-proof, high-impact ABS plastics with a strong steel chassis. Weighing 650 kilograms, the car is powered by eight lead batteries of six volts each, which provide acceleration from 0 to 30 kmph within 3.5 seconds. Eighty percent charge of batteries can be done in three hours, whereas 100 percent charge will take seven hours. The engine is supplied by General Electric of the U.S., and more than 50 percent of the parts will be manufactured in India. Phased rapid indigenization is planned in the coming years.

As part of its renewable energy program, the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) has provided support to Amerigon Inc. to conduct a series of tests at the Indian Automobile Research Institute in Pune and also in the United States to document REVA's performance and to utilize the resulting data to refine future production of the car.

Besides, USAID has also provided a grant of $100,000 to Amerigon through Winrock International's Renewable Energy Project Support Office (REPSO) to develop credibility for electric vehicles in India by showing that a commercially viable and environmentally beneficial product can be manufactured here. USAID is also promoting a multi-year program of technology transfer and joint ventures between several U.S. and Indian firms for the introduction of two- and three-wheel eco-friendly vehicles.

How was the name "REVA" chosen for the new car? Ambassador Celeste explained: "REVA is named after Sudarshan Maini's wife and I understand that Maini credits my predecessor, Ambassador Frank Wisner, with the idea for its production." If the concept succeeds, it may well be an answer to India's problem of pollution and oil conservation.

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ious Society An early monument to East- West religious dialogue in America is the Old Temple of the Vedanta Society of Northern California in San Francisco. It was established in 1905 by Swami Trigunatita.

Despite what you see in the movies, America is a religious society. The following articles explore religious trends in America, particularly those influenced by ancient religions of Asia. ociologist Talcott Parsons observed that the human in culture cannot tolerate a merely random existence. Things have to be meaningful; people have to be able to lend meaning to their joys and sorrows. This can be achieved through religion, which includes' a symbol system that evokes man's deepest response. It is pervasive in culture and has an impact on the individual and society. "Religion is the soul of culture," said Paul Tillich, "and culture is the form of religion."

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Importance of Religion in America The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to keep the Congress from doing anything to establish religion by law or to prohibit its free exercise. Against this backdrop, the state did not patronize any religion, and left it to individual choice. Over the years, people in general came to give religion a prominent place in their lives. Polls reveal that Americans want to be religious or to think of theirs as a nation under "God." A recent survey conducted by the Princeton Religion Research Center and the International Social Survey Program Study shows that 94 percent of Americans believe in religion, 79 percent believe in life after death, 58 percent say that religion is very important in their lives and 78 percent believe that angels and devils are real. These figures are higher than those found in most European countries. They are also higher than the figures for previous years in America. The figures reveal that the number of Americans who regard religion as personally important and who have confidence in religious institutions is rising.

However, these figures come as a surprise to an ordinary Indian, because we generally believe that American society is irreligious.

Such an impression has been created partly by the images of American life as projected by Hollywood films and television shows. It is also because Americans do not wear their religion on their sleeves. Whatever comes out of America are their products and ideas but not religion, which is seen as a totally self-regarding action. It has also to do with the difference in perceptions and attitudes ofIndians and Americans concerning religion.

Diversity, Tolerance and Pluralism Religion in America is characterized by its diversity and multiformity. There are over 220 religious denominations and around 1,200 religious groups inAmerica. The overwhelming aim of religion there has been to accord meaning to temporal existence.

The American form of enlightenment was against particularist claims. It propagated universalism committed to public virtue and civic character. Another significant virtue has been tolerance. Americans have always believed that diversity of sects and interests need not be the basis for conflict. The faith

of others must be tolerated and respected. "It does not matter to which faith you belong, as long as you are an American," observed Douglas C. Makeig, a visiting U.S. State Department official. Any new church or sect may be founded there. Many a church founder has died disappointed, but a large number of others have succeeded. The state, however, continues to be a neutral observer, and in regard to the society, we find a liberal homogenizing which relativizes all creeds to an ethic of "live and let live."

Moreover, in the American society there is emphasis upon pluralism, characterized by coexistence. Tbe coexisting ideology insists that one man's opinions are as good as another's.

Pattern of Religion Only a minority in America are formally enrolled in religious institutions, but the majority is not irreligious. They have acquired路 the liberty to practice or not to practice their belief. Religion to them is one among the many choices they make in life.

There are coalitions of factions and movements, and interspersed between them are many ephemeral private and highly individualized sects. Occult and oriental religions provide alternatives on a continuous basis. There are even humanisms and different shades of secularity. All these have a place in America.

A large section of the population emphasizes the social importance of religion. They maintain that religious institutions are important for imparting moral training and spiritual direction to the youth.

Summation Notwithstanding the drift toward hedonism and consumerism, where the mad race for survival and material success eats up an individual's time and leaves him totally exhausted, religion remains an important factor in the life of Americans. It is a matter of personal responsibility and religious prejudices generally do not color people's social behavior. There is multiplicity of religious faiths and sects but they are not competitive. People are free to make their own religious choices, and they tolerate and respect each other's faiths.

It is because of these factors that religion is not a basis of conflict in American public life. Instead of being divisive, it is a binding force. It helps in the generation of values that produce an integrated character and culture, making America a stable society.

0 About the Author: Mirza Asmer Beg is a lecturer in the department of political science at Aligarh Muslim University.

ew Isfam Young American Muslims are bent on breaking stereotypes and revitalizing their religion, using all the tools a multicultural democracy can offer.

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EI Cen-ito, California, Shahed Amanullah knows it's time to pray, not by a muezzin's call from a mosque minaret, but because his PowerMac has chimed. A verse from the>Koran hangs by his futon. Near the bookcases-lined with copies of Wired magazine and Jack Kerouac novels-lies a red Arabian prayer rug. There's a plastic compass sewn into the carpet, its needle pointing toward Mecca.

At the programmed call, Amanullah begins his prayers, the same as those recited across the globe-from the Gaza Strip to Samarkand.

In his goatee and beret, 30-year-old Amanullah wouldn't remind anyone of Saddam Hussein or a member of Hizbullah, the sort of Muslims who make headlines. He has never built a biological weapon, issued a fatwa or burned Uncle Sam in effigy. "You think Muslim, you think Saddam Hussein, you think ayatollah," says one Muslim-American twentysomething.

Not after meeting Amanullah. A native Californian, Amanullah grew up running track, listening to Nirvana and reading the Koran. He is a member of a burgeoning subculture: young Islamic America. The children of the prosperous Muslim immigrants of the 1960s and '70s are coming of age, and with them arrives a new culture that is a blend of Muslim and American institutions.

Online and on campus, in suburban mosques and summer camps, young American Muslims are challenging their neighbors' perceptions of Islam as a foreign faith and of Muslims as fiery fundamentalists or bomb-lobbing terrorists.

That image problem may be this generation's biggest challenge in the New World.

Within hours of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Muslims were prime suspects. "You' 11 die," was one of the printable messages left on mosque answering machines around the country.

America's Muslims are not only taking on stereotypes, they're taking on the status quo. As it was for Christians and Jews before them, America is a laboratory for a re-examination of their faith. America's Muslim community is a quilt of cultures: about 25 percent are of South Asian descent, Arabs represent another 12 percent

and nearly half are converts, primarily African-Americans.

U.S. society allows them to strip away the cultural influences and superstitions that have crept into Islam during the past 1,400 years. By going back to the basic texts, they're rediscovering an Islam founded on tolerance, social justice and human rights. Some 6 million strong, America's Muslim population is set to outstrip its Jewish one by 2010, making it America's second-largest faith after Christianity. Richer than most Muslim communities, literate and natives of the world's sole superpower, America's Muslims are intent on exporting their

modern Islam. From the Mideast to Central Asia, they'd like to influence debate on everything from free trade to gender politics.

At home, it is a generation committed to maintaining its Islamic heritage while finding a niche in the New World.

America's 1,500-odd mosques are spread from Alaska to Florida. Muslims pray daily in State Department hallways, in white-shoe corporate law firms and in empty boardrooms at Silicon Valley companies like Oracle and Adaptec. Last year Muslim organizations made life miserable for Nike when the company marketed a shoe with a design resembling the name of Allah in Arabic. After protests, Nike discontinued the style and started sensitivity training for employees. In Washington, the American Muslim Council lobbies on issues from school prayer to the Mideast peace process. "We're learning to use our clout," says Farhan Memon, a Muslim and 27-year-old partner in Yack!, a multimillion-dollar Internet publishing business.

Clout doesn't come without confidence, says Manal Omar, a Muslim woman raised in South Carolina. Tall and leather-jacketed, with a trace of Southern drawl, she explodes any stock image of the crushed and silent Muslim woman. In high school, she played basketball in hijab--the Muslim woman's head covering ("my coach nearly freaked"); at college, she won national public-speaking prizes. Friends thought she should become a stand-up comic. Instead, Omar went into refugee relief. In her off hours, she's working on a series of books for MuslimAmerican teenagers.

If fighting stereotypes is American Muslims' biggest battle, it is women who are on the front line. Raised playing touch football and reading Seventeen magazine, women are returning to the Koran to discover whether Islam sanctions the veils, seclusion and silence that many Muslim women endure. (Short answer: no.) In Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, wearing a veil is the law. In Savannah, Georgia, or Topeka, Kansas, it's a statement. "For some young women, the veil in America works a bit like the Afro during the blackpower era," says Mohja Kahf, a professor at the University of Arkansas. Anura Al-

Sarraf, 34, a teacher at an Islamic school in the Islamjc University of Gaza. "The U.S. Los Angeles, explains: "I don't have men Constitution describes the perfect Islarruc flirting with me. I enjoy the respect I get." state," says Muhammed Muqtader Khan, At her wedding four years ago, who teaches American politics to Muslims.

"It protects life, liberty and property."

Amanny Khattab wore an Islamic veil under her translucent lace tulle one. She reGrowing Muslim-American political consciousness may be the surest sign of asmembers the "living hell" of her freshman similation. While their parents may have year at Farmingdale High School on New York's Long Island. "The week before been happy to sit on the sidelines and pine school started, I bought all the cool stufffor the Old World, the new generation realizes that to protect its rights as Reebok sneakers, Guess! jeans," recalls Americans-and Muslims-it has to Khattab. "I wanted to look just like everyspeak out. Some mosques educate their body else, but with the scarf." It didn't work. "Non-Muslim women think I'm op- communities to be more politically aspressed because I wear too much?" says sertive, registering voters and holding programs on how to be an active PTA parent.

Khattab. "Well, I think they're oppressed because they wear too little."

Freshly minted Muslim lawyers are joinIn Pakistan, tradition dictates that ing other ambitious young politicos in women pray at home rather than at the Washington. "When people say we'll mosque. In America, women not only go never have elected Muslim-American offito the mosque-they're on the mosque's cials, I say, 'Hey, those are the same things board of directors. Saudi Arabian clerics they said about a Catholic named Kennedy running for President,' " says Suhail Khan, . have ruled that it's un-Islamic for women a 28-year-old congressional staffer. to drive. But try telling a l6-year-old from Toledo, Ohio, who's just gotten her dri- Muslim and Arab groups have protested ver's license that the Koran prohibits her against airport-security profiling, which from hitting the road. She'll probably re- they say unfairly targets them as potential tort that the Prophet's favorite wife, terrorists. Last month the American Muslim Council organized a fax-andAisha, once directed troops in battle from the back of a camel. phone campaign against bombing Iraq.

That willingness to challenge conven- . The No. 1 foreign-policy concern is the tion is revitalizing a religion that many Arab-Israeli peace process. Recently, the Arab American Institute-which involves think has stagnated since the Middle Ages. Today a reformation is afoot. both Muslims and Christians-took a conMuslims worldwide are working to square gressional delegation to Syria for a threeand-a-half-hour meeting with President a faith founded in Arabia with modernity: Hafez Assad to discuss the issue.

Debates rage: Is Islam compatible with Western-style democracy? With modern In the 1996 election, three times as many science?

With feminism?

American Muslims supported Bill Clinton as Bob Muslims, wealthy, wired and standing on Dole. The White House has not forgotten. the fault line between cultures, are well During the last Ramadan, the First Lady positioned to bring a 13-century-old faith threw an iftar party in the marble-and-gilt into the next millennium.

Indian Treaty Room in the West Wing.

Hillary Clinton's talk-which touched on e United States is arguably the everything from peace to democracy to the best place on earth to be Muslim. trials of being a beleaguered minorityMulticultural democracy, with its drew fervent applause. Long after the First guarantees of religious freedom and speech, Lady left, guests loitered, munched baklava makes life easier for Muslims than in many and hummus and took snapshots of one anIslamic states in the Middle East. It's an other. Having made it to the White House, idea they'd like to export. The Web site of it seemed, they didn't want to leave.

0 the Minaret of Freedom Institute, an organization devoted to "promoting the establishAbout the Author: Carla Power is a general ment of free trade and justice," has links to editor with Newsweek magazine.

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e that OU-rrim Ancient Eastern Philosophy and the New American Spirituality

Desire for inner peace attracts many Americans to traditional religions of the Orient, according to three American gurus. And the old religions are flourishing in new ways on Western soil.

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eligion has always held an important place in American life, partly because the formation and growth of the country in its early years often depended upon religious groups. Waves of immigrants who sought refuge on American shores did so to escape religious persecution-from the Puritan Pilgrim founders who landed at Plymouth in 1620 and the Roman Catholics who established Maryland 15 years later, to the Jews of the 1930s and 1940s fleeing Nazi persecution. While the U.S. in modern times has been viewed as an essentially Judeo-Christian society, that is changing.

During the past few decades, religions from the East have found a place beside church and synagogue.

Interest in Eastern belief systems is not new in the United States.

After the first meeting of the Parliament of Religions in Chicago more than a century ago, the teachings of Asian religions became more available and interest of non-Asian Americans has steadily grown. Teachers from India, China and Japan first visited and then set up centers in the United States. Paramahansa Yogananda founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in California in the 1920s, and it attracts a large following to this day with its cOiTespondence courses in kriya yoga. Buddhist scholars like D.T. Suzuki made Buddhist texts accessible in English. By the 1960s a new generation began to explore consciousness and new spiritual options in a big way. Some of these "hippies" traveled far in their search, to sit at the feet of spiritual teachers in India, BUlma, Japan, Korea and even Morocco. Now seekers from the 1960s counterculture have grown up and reared families, often inculcating their eclectic religious

values in their offspring. New immigrants from Asia have put down roots in America, and so have their religions: Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras can be found all over the country. Buddhjsm and Islam are the fastest growing religions in the United States today.

Several American spiritual teachers visiting India during the past few months reflected upon their own paths and how they see religious trends in the United States. The first two, Shabda Kahn and Shahabuddin David Less, are followers-and teachers-of the sufi tradition of Hazrat Inayat Khan, whose dargah is in New Delhi's Nizamuddin Basti. The third is Lama Surya Das, whose early trek to India on the hippy trail brought him in contact with Hindu saints and eventually to hjs chosen Tibetan Buddhist path. Today he is a well-known Buddhist teacher in the United States.

Shabda Kahn and his wife Tamam live in San Rafael, California.

They run two retail shops in San Francisco. Shabda is also a teacher of sufism and a long-time student of Indian vocal music. His links with India go back more than 30 years, when he began studying with a disciple of sufi philosopher-musician Inayat Khan. Inayat Khan was born in Baroda and was a disciple of Abu Hashim Mehdani, a Chisti sufi master from Hyderabad, Shabda relates.

"His teacher, before dying, told him to go to the West and unite East and West through the harmony of music. He and his brothers formed the Royal Hindustani Musicians." They came to America in ]910, the first Indian classical musicians to do so. Beyond the music, Shabda says, Inayat Khan was an extraordinary sufi master.

"His message was for all human beings to aspire to their full poten-

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Left: Musician Terry Riley and Shabda Kahn sing with local qawwals at the Hazrat Inayat Khan dargah in New Delhi. Above: A dervish from Seattle whirls during VI'S celebrations.

tial, regardless of race, caste or religion." Shortly after being exposed to sufism, Shabda was "inspired by the search for truth through Indian classical music." The late Pandit Pran Nath arrived in America from India and Shabda began studying music with him in 1972. "He was a direct disciple of Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Chisti Sabri, another lineage of Chisti sufis. That also made a great link not only to the soil of India, but to the spiritual India, the heart of the extraordinary message of mysticism that comes out of this land." His third strong link is Tibetan Buddhism.

Spiritual disciplines notwithstanding, Shabda has maintained a frrm footing in the practical world, integrating it with family and business. "In America spiritual practice somehow doesn't pay the bills, and you have to negotiate your spiritual practice through everyday life." Integration is central to the teachings of his guru: "The sufism that Hazrat Inayat Khan brought to America was a completely universal system. Inayat Khan made it clear in his teaching that though sufrsm borrows or uses the forms of many of the great religions, and maybe especially the rehgion of Islam, it can't be owned by any religion. It's not based on form. It's based on experience. The idea that sufis are the mystics of Islam, according to my point of view, would be incorrect. It's an incomplete answer. Yes, they may be mystics of Islam, but they are not owned by any form.

They have a freedom and universality to recognize God in every-

thing and in themselves as well." When Shabda's American teacher Sam Lewis died in 1971, his disciples continued his work. "So I find myself today as a sufi teacher. I have a lot of students in America. We meet regularly, it is a nice family kind of feeling. Maybe 50 or 60 people meet every week for prayers, meditation and lessons. I travel around the country and help wherever I can. We have sufi camps. Three hundred people get together. It's like a big mela."

Shabda first visited India in 1976, and has come here many times since. In 1985 and 1986 he worked on In Between the Notes, a docum~ntary about Pandit Pran Nath. ''I'm here this year for the seventh year in a row.

My music guru, before he died, requested I start a music school in America, called the Chisti Sabri School of Music, in order to continue to teach this form of music as a spiritual path and as a musical path, and he authorized me to do that. And so the Chisti Sabri School of Music has come here to India. We bring about 25 students from America every year and rent a guest house and set up a music school where we have three full classes a day taught by my guru brother Terry Riley-who is an illustrious musician from America and a long-time student of Pandit Pran Nath-by myself, and by my music guru's other disciples Pandit Jagdish Mohan, Hafiz Ular Khan and Shrikunta Mayi:" He says that despite the great expense, every year people come back again. "It says something: that some spiritual food is here that they just don't get otherwise. Coming to India is very exotic. There's nothing like it in the world. It's so deep and beautiful and sweet. On the surface it can be as ferocious as possible, the dirt and the flies and the squalor, and how people are treated so poorly here by one another, can be unsettling. So all of those responses happen at once." habdafeels many Americans want a real experience of spirituality. "They are not looking for a culture or conventions or to be part of some club, but looking for real experience. People will pick their religion or spiritual path according to their need rather than according to what has been assigned to them." He feels this is why there is a resurgence of mysticism in the United States. "All the same teachings are there in Christianity, in Judaism and Islam, but sometimes they get covered over by form and by the people who are trying to hold everyone at a certain level, who are afraid of what will happen if their congregation gets to a higher level. Real teachers want their disciples to be better than them. I think there is something about conventional religions that discourages the exquisiteness of real experience. My sufi master Sam Lewis used to say, 'The trouble with the church today

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is, if you believe in angels, you're in. If you see' em you're out. ' " There is still a big following for conventional religion, as well.

"All the counterculture hippies are now ordinary people. They are lawyers and doctors and businessmen. The essence of the hippy movement, at the beginning, was this quest for real honesty, real joy, real experience, and not that kind of fake thing that was happening in the 1950s in America. Those people, the hippies of the '60s, are now 50 years old. For the most part very involved with life, they have raised children who go to university or have jobs."

The hippy spirit survives in the quest for spirituality: "They go to work in the morning, come home at night, but instead of turning on the TV they might go meditate, or maybe after getting up in the morning they may practice music for a few hours before they go off to work. And what is so valuable is when they bring their spirituality into everyday life. They are in the workplace with the idea to bring tolerance, compassion and awareness of other human beings.

Be a demonstration of what you want. You yourself are peaceful and people around you get peaceful."

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hahabuddin David Less, in his fifties, is another wellknown teacher on the sufi circuit in the United States. He was in India recently with his wife Anna, who is a practitioner of homeopathic medicine. Sitting in the Hazrat Inayat Khan dargah one evening, he shared his views on religion in America today.

"Culturally America has changed so much in the last 20 years because of the int1ux of Hindus and Muslims, if nothing else. The Indian population, and the populations of other-than-Judaism and Christianity has increased so much, there are more Muslims than Jews in America. So things are really changing. And also the communities that were very inbred in the past-Indian people, for instance, who would just meet with Indian people-now are not so shy about sharing their religion and culture with people who are fifth and 10th-generation Americans, and that's creating quite an opening. There was a controversy recently in a fairly large town where they built a mosque. Nobody complained about the mosque, but the reality is that there's the call to prayer five times a day, and it's noise in this city that has a noise ordinance. You're not allowed to do this. The people from the mosque are saying, 'Well, you ring church bells on Sunday and that's noise.' It hasn't been resolved yet.

"Now I think these are very healthy questions. People are becoming aware of each other, and they are being forced to recognize the similarities rather than the differences. You could say the call to prayer is different from a church bell from one level. From another level it isn't, and people see that. They say, 'Well, I guess it's true, we have a right to have church bells. Why not a call to prayer?' So because of the diversity of immigration in America people are being offered the opportunity to expand their horizons about religion.

"Religion in America, in a very bizarre way, is the same as religion anywhere else in the world. There are people who are very fundamental and very narrow, and they have their role to play.

And there are people who are very broad, sometimes too broad, and they have their role to play. There are people who are looking

for moderation and middle ground, and they have their role to play. And it's the same everywhere I travel. Sometimes people use different words. What we might call religion, others might call politics. But basically it's the same seeking for the natural path of each soul's incarnation." ndia had its impact on Shahabuddin's life, also. "I was very fortunate in that I was exposed to an India that was beyond the limits of religion and culture. I had no difficulty at all following Buddhist teachers, and yogis-I used to go traipsing in the Himalayas looking for that one rishi who could touch me, and I found many who did. Sadhus or sufis I would find wandering around, all offered me something. I always sought people who were beyond the narrow confines of dogma, and because I sought that, I always found that. And I learned a great deal that way. Most sufis believe in the power of transmission, they think the truth can't be spoken. I saw transmission. I saw it in the company of saints.

"In that way India had, and still has, this gift to offer the world, in that it represents the potential for sainthood in humanity. And that I can't find in America, and I can't find in Europe, and even when I go to the Middle East for business, I can't find it in many cities there. Still India has that magic. It might be more buried. They are definitely fewer and farther between, but there are human beings who are alive who are offering a very special gift.

"For myself I don't know what sufism is-or any other 'ism' for that matter. I find it interesting, looking at some instructions of the Buddha a few months ago, when he said 'Don't make any images of me.' And yet was it wrong to make the images? No. It was just how things developed. I don't know about right and wrong in that way.

There are many sufis who say, 'Oh, you can't be a sufi unless you are a Muslim.' Ano then there are sufis I have seen in India who are Hindus and they seem to be practicing it quite well. For those who say you must be a Muslim, for them you must be a Muslim. I don't know if I'm a sufi. Certainly not a traditional sufi. This year I did Ramadan, and I usually do this-and people asked me why, and I said 'Why not?' That's the only answer I had. It just seemed the natural thing to do at the time. I've done it many times. I enjoy it. That's really why I do it. To me it's not a sacrifice, it's a wonderful time of prayer and remembrance. I also fast on other holidays, I observe holidays in many religions. Sometimes people say, 'Isn't that kind of like being a dilettante or going to a cocktail party?' And it isn't, because personally I try and touch the living path of that religion, and that's there for the taking for anybody. There is no place you have to sign or join. And that gift India's got. India, with all it's apparant religious strife, still offers the world an example of harmony-religious harmony and openness. I notice for all of the narrow paths in India, there still is an opening for all the Tibetan Buddhists to come in and find a home here.

"There seems to be this divide between those who follow the path of spirit and those who we say are materialists. Actually, it's almost a semantical difference, because for those who follow the path of matter, if we could just see that matter is really spirit; and for those who follow the path of spirit, oftentimes the spirit is really

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LIFE AT

HIGH-TECH U oWthat Chelsea Clinton is settled at Stanford University, one thing is certain: she's not getting her father's education. In 1968, when the President graduated from Georgetown University, the personal computer hadn't been invented. The Internet wasn't turned on. The World Wide Web was many years away. At Stanford, Chelsea was greeted with an Internet connection in her room, a cluster of public computers in her dorm and a resident computer coordinator to offer tech support should her system crash in the middle of a term paper. If she takes a graphics course, she can do her homework at one of the 33 Silicon Graphics workstations in the graphics lab. If music is

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her muse, she can train her ear at the computer studio. And of course the First Daughter can send and receive E-mail from one of the hundreds of computers that dot the campus.

To baby boomers this probably sounds like a scene from another planet. Over the last decade, as more and more American universities have gotten wired and computerized, college life has changed dramatically for students. At some schools assignments are posted on the Web and discussions held online. Need a date? Try your luck at a college's digital cafe. Students at the University of Oregon get their grades via the Web or by phone. At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) stu-

Students now have tools that were not around when their parents graduated. pes in dorm rooms and digital cafes are commonplace-along with technical support to help get through that term paper.

dents can sign on to a mega-Web site that includes descriptions of all 3,000 or so undergraduate courses. The online experience begins even before students enter school.

Scores of colleges, from the State University of New York to the University of California, now accept online applications.

The University of Texas put its information packet on CD-ROMs and mailed them to all 1O,000-plus high-school seniors who'd been accepted. "It's anything but a fad," says Brian Copenhaver, provost of UCLA's College of Letters and Science. "We have no choice but to engage the technology."

The march toward computerization has its critics, of course. It's not cheap, nor is it easy to smoothly integrate teaching and computer technology. Others worry that it may divert resources from the classroom.

But the popularity of E-mail, multimedia and especially the World Wide Web among .techno-savvy teens means that colleges either get wired-or lose customers. And proponents say computers and new media, when used thoughtfully, have some surprising benefits.

Take E-mail. Some academics dismiss it as an unhealthy substitute for human contact. But Stanford's Richard Holeton, who tracked E-mail discussions of first-year students in one dorm, found that 87 percent of their messages involved important social or critical dialogue. Those issues included "pornography, free speech, a potential grape boycott on campus and a sexual-harassment allegation," says Holetoll. And the people who dominated dorm life in face-toface encounters were not the same folks who ruled the E-mail debates. Electronic discourse, it seems, offered a voice to some students who might not otherwise be heard.

At the University of California at Los Angeles, students can work individually on physics problems using a CD-ROM developed by Dr. Maha Ashour-Abdalla. She

created the program when she realized that students weren't learning as much in the large classes. In addition, students are asked to solve physics problems on an interactive Web site. A computer tabulates the results, giving Ashour-Abdalla immediate feedback on how well students are doing. She can then tailor class time to areas where students need work.

A program at the Center for Long Distance Art and Culture in the Bronx, New York, brings together art, math and computer-science majors. They sit side by side in courses on computer-graphics imaging and create Web sites and other online projects for nonprofit organizations, including the Guggenheim Museum. "It was really shocking having art students in half of the class and computer science in the other half," says art major Livia Nieves. "They couldn't draw, and we couldn't use the computers." But the course changed her perspective. ''I'm more excited about math, because I know I will make better drawings." Computer-science students report similar conversions about art.

Emerson College, a small performingarts and communications school in Boston, offers a new course called Digital Culture, which combines academic readings with technical training and attempts to immerse students in the computer world. They were required to live on the same floor in a dorm that was wired with fast T1 connections to the Internet. They built and ran the Web server that carried their class projects. "We figure that what we're teaching and modeling is the new workplace," says professor David Bogen.

At other colleges students can hand in their homework online or read their professors' lecture notes and study aids electronically. Thanks to the Internet, students at Middlebury College in Vermont can communicate with faculty who are teaching at the college's Madrid campus. Of course, some professors will go to their graves without ever touching a mouse or swapping E-mail. Academics say colleges are just starting a long learning curve in the goal to mesh teaching and technology. Incoming students like Chelsea Clinton probably have more immediate concerns. How fast is that Internet connection, anyway?

D

Looking for a university that's hip about high tech? Tech experts recommend looking at several areas when comparing the computer savvy of one school against another. Here's a few: • Access: The most-wired colleges have a network connection for every student, also known as a port-to-pillow ratio of 1:1. That means roommates don't have to fight over Internet time. But sometimes you'll want to check E-mail and work on projects outside your dorm room or the resident computer cluster. So ask what type of computer access exists outside the dorms, including in the classroom.

• Training: Round-the-clock computer access isn't helpful if you don't know how to use a mouse or a search engine. Make sure computer and Internet training courses are available if you're not up to speed.

• Technical support: What kind of support is available and when? Some colleges recognize that students often write papers in the early morning hours and give them access to tech support accordingly. The hippest schools pay in-dorm students to provide support.

• Digital libraries: Many colleges offer students access to an electronic library catalog. Much more ambitious and more helpful is the move toward making library texts available online.

• Faculty support: Do instructors get support and training to learn how to integrate technology into their courses? In 1996 the University of Texas established cash awards to faculty for the best uses of technology. Middlebury College let selected professors spend a month educating themselves about technology. Some schools may be less supportive, refusing to promote professors for authoring CD-ROMs rather than books.

• Responsiveness: Can you apply online? Do instructors and administrators respond to E-mail? Use the Web? Verify the official university line by contacting a random sample of students through their home pages.

D About the Author: Deborah Branscum staff writer for Newsweek magazine.

is a

O.K., so you passed the exams, qualify and have been accepted into the university of your choice. How do you pay for it? Higher education in the United States is expensive. Cost of attendance ranges between $13,000 and $30,000 a year. For most people the price is prohibitively high, unless help is available.

And it is. Most universities award full or partial scholarships to qualified students, waive tuition or offer part-time employment

in university

work/study programs, which might be in the form of research or teaching assistantships.

Foreign students

in the United States are allowed to work 20 hours a week on campus.

They can also hold off-campus jobs in the summer providing they have completed nine months of study.

Many universities have special endowments for foreign students. The best source of information on financial aid and other facets of higher education in America is the U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI). Facts about colleges, universities, fellowship grants available to scholars in the Fulbright program and U.S. visa requirements

for

students are there for the asking.

Visa counseling sessions are held almost every month. USEFI has several branches in India:

NEW DELHI Dr. (Mrs.) Vijaya Rao (Educational. Adviser) United States Educational Foundation in India "Fulbright House", 12 Hailey Road New Delhi -110001 Telephone: 011-3328944 Fax: 011-3329718 E-mail: vijaya@usefid.ernet.in

MUMBAI Ms. Manisha Rajadhyaksba (Educational Adviser) USEFI American Center 4 New Marine Lines Mumbai-400020 Telephone: 022-2624603/2624590 Fax: 022-2624595 E-mail.: manishar@usefib.axce.ss.net.in

CALCUTTA Dr. Uma Das Gupta (Director-Regional) USEFl The American Consulate Building 38-A, lawahar Nehru Road Calcutta-700071 Telep.hone: 033-245121/1636 Fax: 033-2451616/2445 E-mail: usefical@giascl01.vsnl.net.in

CHENNAI Dr. (Ms.) Seetha Lakshmi (Educational Adviser) USEFI American Consulate Building Mount Road, Chennai -600006 Telephone: 044-8257196/8273040 Fax: 044-8263407 E-mail: useti.mas@md2.vsnl.net.in

Not all grants are based on outstanding academic performance. A person may have good, yet less than outstanding marks, and still get a grant if he or she falls into a category outlined by a specific endowmentAsian students pursuing a particular line of study, for instance. Among those universitjes giving aid to foreign students are: Brandeis University, Cal Tech, Dartmouth College, Eastern Michigan University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Institute of Technology, Harvard and Radcliffe colleges. Illinois Institute of Technology, JuilJiard.School, Louisiana State University,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Mount Holyoke College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Princeton, Texas Christian University, University of Houston, University of Miami and Yale. There are many others. Look for them in The College Handbook Foreign Student Supplement published by the College Entrance Examination Board, New York. With shrinking budgets, less aid is available directly from the college or university than itonce was. Another resource is the private foundation. These foundations are funded by corporations or philanthropic trusts. The following are a few possibilities:

ABBOTT FOUNDATION 14th Street and Shridon Road North Chic'3go, Illinois 60064 PURPOSE: Grants forindividnals through the university. Medicine, pharmacy and nursing.

ACADIA ASSOCIATION INC. 159 St. Paul Street Brookline, Massachusetts 02146 PURPOSE: Scholarship support largely for educational and scientific programs.

ADOLPH'S FOUNDATION P.O. Box 828 Burbank, California 91503 PURPOSE: Scholarship in the fields of arts and humanities with emphasis on visual and performing arts.

ALFRED FRIENDLY PRESS FELLOWSHIPS Institute of International Education.

Interested journalists should write to: AFPF Program Office C/oITE,1400KStreetNW Washington, D.C. 20005 PURPOSE: To qualified journalists for six months in the U.S.

AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY 1115 Sixteenth St. NW Washington, D.C. PURPOSE: Field of petroleum.

ANDERSON FOUNDATION P.O. Box 6 Barrington, Illinois 600 I0 PURPOSE: Scholarships.

ANDREW FOUNDATION I 53rd Street Orland Park, IlLinois 60462 PURPOSE: Scholarships.

THE ASIA FOUNDATION

DU BOIS FOUNDATION

550 Kerney Street San Francisco, California 94104 PURPOSE: (a) Three associate Nieman fellowships for experienced Asia journalists to study at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (b) Two Asia Foundation graduate journalism fellowships at Stanford University, $3,OOO/Stanford University, Department of Communications and Journalism, Stanford, Palo Alto, California. (c) Two Columbia University journalism fellowships $3,500 each for study at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York.

3620 North, 32nd Street Phoenix, Arizona 85012 PURPOSE: All subjects.

AURORA FOUNDATION

THE FORD FOUNDATION

32 Water Street Mall, P.O. Box 1247 Aurora, Illinois 60507 PURPOSE: All subjects.

320 East, 43rd Street New York, New York 10017 PURPOSE: Grants for research and training in international studies, science and engineering, journalism, community development, law and economics, non-commercial television, humanities and agriculture.

CONTINENTAL CORPORATION FOUNDATION 80 Maiden Lane New York, New York 10038 PURPOSE: Scholarships.

DAVIES CHARITABLE TRUST P.O. Box 45000 San Francisco, California 940145 PURPOSE: Performing arts

DETTMAN FOUNDATION 108 SE, 8th Avenue Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301 PURPOSE: Any field.

DU PONT FOUNDATION 803 Edward Ball Building P.O. Box 1380 Jacksonville, Florida 32201 PURPOSE: Scholarships for higher studies in the communication field, specially radio and TV.

EXXON EDUCATION FOUNDATION III West, 48th Street New York, New York 10020 PURPOSE: Education, economics and management.

GENERAL ELECTRIC FOUNDATION 3135 Eastern Turnpike Fairfield, Connecticut 06431 PURPOSE: Grants for research in physical sciences, engineering, computer science, mathematics, industrial management and business administration.

GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION DEWAR FOUNDATION 177 Main Street Oneonia, New York 13820 PURPOSE: Scholarships andJoans.

90 Park Avenue New York, New York 10016 PURPOSE: Fine arts and music.

HALl'ZMANN FOUNDATION DOUGHERTY FOUNDATION 3336, North 32nd Street, Suite J 15 Phoenix, Arizona 85018 PURPOSE: Loans and scholarships to needy college students of high academic ability to study in Arizona.

C/o Haltzmann, Wise and Shepard 745 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10022 PURPOSE: Grants for higher education in any field through college and universities.

DOW JONES NEWSPAPER

HARTFORD FOUNDATION

FUND INC. P.O. Box 300 Princeton, New Jersey 08540 PURPOSE: Scholarships for practical newspaper tr~ining and for college students of journalism.

45 South Main Street West Hartford, Connecticut 061 07 PURPOSE: Fund to the universities in Connecticut for graduate study in any field and research.

DREYFUS FOUNDATION 575 Madison Avenue New York 10022 PURPOSE: Chemistry/chemical engineering.

HAYNES FOUNDATION 727 West, 7th Street. Suite 618 Los Angeles, California 90017 PURPOSE: Sponsoring research projects in the fields of social sciences in Califomia universities.

HAZEN FOUNDATION 400 Prospect Street New Haven, Connecticut065l I PURPOSE: Scholarships or fellowships through the university, to deserving students for higher education in law, health sciences, engineering and business administration.

HUTTON FOUNDATION One Battery Park Plaza New York, New York 10004 PURPOSE: Any subject.

KENNEDY FOUNDATION 75 Chestnut Ridge Road Montavale, New Jersey 07645 PURPOSE: Grants for higher education througb the respective universities.

KLEIN FOUNDATION 700 Park Avenue New York, New York 10021 PURPOSE: Educational grant for college students studying in the specific areas of advertising and mass communications.

LALOR FOUNDATION Building B-1 08,3801, Kennet Pike Wilmington, Delaware 19807 PURPOSE: Grants and awards for advanced study and research in biochemistry and biophysics.

MONSHER FOUNDATION 3278 Loma Riveria Drive San Diego, California 92110 PURPOSE: Arts or scienCe. THE NEWSPAPER FUND INC. P.O. Box 300 Princeton, New Jersey 08540 PURPOSE: For teachers of journalism.

OVERSEAS FOUNDATION INC. 511 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10017 PURPOSE: All deserving students.

PARAPSYCHOLOGY INC. 29 West 57th Street New York, New York PURPOSE: Research in parapsychology.

POYNTER FUND 490 First Avenue, South P.O. Box 1121 St. Petersburg, Florida 33731 PURPOSE: Scholarships and fellowships to train and assist journalists of all media.

REPUBLIC STEEL CORPORATION EDUCATION TRUST Republic Building Cleveland, Ohio 44101 PURPOSE: Grants for higher education, scbolarships, fellowships and professorships for the study of metallurgy, metallurgy engineering, mining and other arts and sciences.

REUTER FOUNDATION 85 Fleet Street London EC4P 4AJ England PURPOSE: U.K. Reuter fellowships in journal ism are for Oxford, England, or Stanford University, California.

Applicants must be aged between 25 and 40 and must have five years experience injournalism.

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL WOMEN'S CLUB INC. 2012 Massachusetts Ave, NW Washington, D.C. PURPOSE: Grants to professional women in the field of business administration.

The Internet is an outstanding source of information which is utilized lavishly by educational institntions. One of the following web sites may have the in formation you need. Or, if you have a particular college or university in mind, a simple name search on tbe Net should turn up plenty of information about it. (Please note that SPAN assumes no responsibility for the content and availability of the sources listed below.)

FINANCIAL AID FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS (http://www.fmaid.org/fmaid/ focus/itJ-stud.htrnl) INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION FINANCE CORPORATION (http://members.aol.comlJEFC) NAFSA ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATORS (http://www. nafsa. org/nafsa! studen ts/stnden tS.htrnl)

THE COLLEGE BOARD WEB SITE (http://www.collegeboard. org/i e/ html/indexOOO.html) PETERSON'S (http://www.petersons.com/stdyabrd/s asector.html) YAHOO FINANCIAL AID INFORMATION (http://www.yahoo.comlEducation/Fi nancial Aid!) SPIN SEARCH (SPONSORED PROGRAMS INFORMATION NETWORK) (http://www.drda.umich.edu/drda!online/online.html) RESOURCES FOR SCHOLARSHIPS, GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION WORLD SERVER (http://www.nsf.gov)

WIDE

AMHERST COLLEGEFOUNDATION AND CORPORATE SUPPORT FUNDING INFORMATION OFFICE (http://www.amherst.ednl -devel op/resources/resmenu. html) MACARTHUR FOUNDATION (http://www.macfdn.org) Scholarship search (read instructions carefully-you mayor may not have to pay for this service) (http://www.fastweb.com) A link to this service is also available from the UMKC Financial Aid Office homepage.

FELLOWSHIP OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (http://www.ednlfo.index.htmJ) This is a search for fellowships which are open to international students such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Pre-doctoral Fellowsbip in Biological Sciences.

FINANCIAL AID INFORMATION PAGE A great source of general information (http://www.finaid.org) FASTWEB (http://www.fastweb.com) Database of 180,000 private scholarships; Emails data on grants that match your profile updated daily. It asks you questions about yourself and then matches just one downside.

(http://www.finaid .org/finai d/ database/) (http://www. iupu.edu/-informl scholarships) (http://www.adm.pdx.edu/ admin/schindx.htm) (http://www.studentservices.com/ searchlmajor-search.cgi) This one is almost like fastweb, except that fewer questions are asked.

OTHER SELECTED INTERNET RESOURCES AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES (http://www. cIas. ufl.edu/CLAS/ ameri can -uni versities. html) A single-source Uok to the home pages of hundreds of American colleges and universities. Links to lists of international and community colleges are provided as well.

MIT MEDlA LABORATORY (http://www.media.mit.edu/) The laboratory comprises both a degree-granting academic program and a research program organized into three areas: learning and' common sense, percepttlal computing and information and entertainment.

SRI INTERNATIONAL POLICY DIVISION (http://www.sri.com/policy /) Founded as the Stanford Research Institute in 1946, SRI is an independent, nonprofit research, technology development and consulting organization. The policy division includes a Center for Technology in Learoi ng (http://www.sri.co.rn/pol icy / teched/) and a Center for Education and Human Services (http://www.s.d.com/polic y/cehs/) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION (http://www.ed.gov) This comprehensive site provides information on the department's programs, priodties and services.

Newsletters, journals, research syntheses, reports, guides, strategic plans, annual reports and stndies are also available in full text. Since the site contains over 400 links to departmental resources, itis searchable and browsable.

ON THE

LIGHTER SIDE

-r=== I~

~

"It appears you're a bit overqualified to be exploited but somewhat underqualified to exploit others. "

"Try our product free for 90 days, if you decide to keep it, we'll rip you off later."

Drawing by Eric & Bill; Š1998 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Drawing by Eric & Bill; Š1996 Tribune Media Services.lnc.

A II rights reserved.

"Dave, could you hold on a sec while ftake care of some personal business?

oh-my-God-we're-about-to-see-him vibe swilling in the space around us. Now any die-hard Dylan fan would say (and rightfully so) that Dylan's achievements far outweigh any award, but the Grammies are a sign that the once-spluttering flame again bums steady. The old master seems to have rediscovered purpose in his battle to reignite his creative imagination. So come on all ye faithful, rejoice. There is still time for that costume party. It's not all over yet, Baby Blue.

Much of what happened that night is a blur except when Dylan came up to accept his trophies. He wore a shiny Las Vegasstyle suit and seemed healthy and alert, not a trace in his appearance that he had suffered from a near-fatal heart ailment last May. But for me the highlight of the evening was when Dylan performed "Love Sick," the opening song from his new album. It was not the familiar voice, which is now a deep, gravely bluesy growl, that got our attention. Some time into the number, a half-naked man with SOY BOMB scrawled across his chest jumped onstage and began throwing his limbs about wildly. At first Dylan did not appear to notice him, but when he did he merely raised a quizzical eyebrow and went on unfazed to finish the number. Still cool after all these years. The intruder was quickly whisked away. Another lighter moment: the man announcing nominations for album of the year called Bob "Bill Dylan." Dylan won anyway.

B

ecause I have thought about it so many times, I remember very clearly when I first heard Dylan. I was still in school and the world was in the grip of "disco fever." It is almost unhip now-not to say embarrassing (as perhaps it was even then)-to mention that one used to jive to Hot Chocolate's "You Sexy Thing" or the Village People lustily belting out "YM.C.A." or Donna Summer moaning "Love to Love You Baby" at our afternoon dance parties during the summer break. I say afternoon because the girls had to be back home before dark. It was that long ago and not very much fun either, but all the fun one could hope to have in dull Chandigarh

those days. Somewhere along the line I made the transition from disco and pop to rock. And my life turned over. I remember borrowing a disco tape from a friend and discovering Deep Purple instead. It was "Highway Star" and I was immediately bowled over. Disco promptly went out the window and soon I was discovering the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and others. Suddenly music took on meaning. It became much more than something to play while entertaining the opposite sex. I was in rock 'n' roll heaven and cursed myself no end for not having known "such great stuff' earlier.

Well, I was so much younger then and am much older than that now.

Once hooked I used every spare moment in furtherance of my new-found passion. Old friends dropped away, I found new ones whose tastes in music now matched mine. I bought, borrowed and yes, even stole tapes (actually forgot to return them!). I discovered old copies of lS magazine left by my music-loving uncle when he left to study at the IIT in Delhi. I remember the guy who used to write on music for the now-defunct Weekend Review. One such piece he wrote was about a guy called Bob Dylan whom he described in such attractive terms that: I made a mental note to check him out.

Alongside the article was reproduced the handwritten lyrics of "All Along the Watchtower." 1'd never seen such lyrics before, not in the rock context at least. It wasn't a song, but poetry, I felt. And although the imagery was strange ("All along the watchtower princes kept the view .../Outside in the distance a wild cat did growl/Two riders were approaching/The wind began to howl") it had a mesmerising effect even before I had heard the song.

More than anything else, for me it shall always be the voice. When I managed to finally lay my hands on a Dylan tape (Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. II) and play it, I can't describe the disappointment I felt.

That rasping, nasal voice whining about watching the river flow. Worse, I felt cheated. How could he be "such a great singer" with a voice like that? It took me a

couple of years more, and college, to get back to understanding and enjoying Dylan. And I've never left. wenty years later that same voice that hurled scorn at the establishment in such songs of protest as "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Masters of War," and that echoed the thoughts yearnings of an entire generation in such songs as "Mr. Tambourine Man," "I Want You," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Maggie's Farm," "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Visions of Johanna" and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" among many other gems, can still wound' or heal. Dylan's power of modulation is unparalleled; he's master of a thousand different inflections. He achieves with ridiculous ease that empathy between guitar and voice that many attain only on occasion. On Time Out of Mind, Dylan's voice is right upfront, adding another color to the shimmering instrumentation. At the same time it is an altogether different record from anything he has recorded in recent years. It is a dark, spooky album and Dylan sings of heartbreak in a tone that allows no redemption for his bruised and tortured soul. As listeners we miss the social commentary of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," we miss the wild spilling poetry of "Like Rolling Stone." The lyrics this time are simple and accessible. But the emotions are not. Still tangled up in blue.

In many ways the Dylan of the 1990s is not the Dylan I idolized when I was young. But it is comforting to know that he is still around and is still searching for' his answers. As a matter of fact he seems to have come full circle. In one of his earliest songs, "Blowin' in the Wind," he asked the question: "How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man?" In the first song on his new album he sings: ''I'm walking/Through streets that are dead .... " The lesson here for us is that he is walking, and still talking to us in a voice of myriad shades about the need to "keep on keeping on."

And that's good enough for now.

0

T

Folksinger Arlo Guthrie is alive, well and touring. He's still doing social work-more ambitious now than when he collected friend Alice's garbage-and his attitude is still down home. While in Delhi he talked about his music, his life and his famous father Woody Guthrie.

hose who remember Arlo Guthrie probably recall his most famous-and longestsong "Alice's Restaurant," which also was the name of a movie he made with some friends circa 1968. There was the ocher-bordered album cover with a somewhat clueless-looking Arlo staring at the camera, apparently naked except for a hat and a napkin pasted to his chest. His movie Alice's Restaurant was an episodic rendering of issues central to the Woodstock Generation: peace, love, protest against authority, good times. After "Alice's Restaurant," Arlo became a counterculture icon of moderate scale, particularly in the folk music circuit-a figure in his own right, emerging in his individual way from the shadow of his extraordinary father, Woody Guthrie.

Woody Guthrie was a balladeer of America s hard times and hard luck people. Born in Oklahoma in 1912, he lived through the worst of the Great Depression in the worst of places: on the roads and rails traveled by migrant workers who scraped for a living anywhere they could. He chronicled people who lost their jobs, lost theirfanns in the Dust Bowl drought of the 1930s and who fought to maintain their dignity all the same. He was controversial, as protest songwriters often are. Among the thousands of songs he is credited with writing are some of the greatest music tributes to the land that stretched "from California, to the New York Island, from the redwood forests to the Gulfstream waters." Songs like "This Land Is Your Land" and "This Train Is Bound for Glory" are Woody Guthrie classics. Fellow folk-protest singer and contemporary Pete Seeger called him a national folk poet, saying: "His music stayed rooted in the blues, ballads and breakdowns he'd been raised on in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, " adding, "A generation of songwriters learnedfrom him." One of the best known of those is Bob Dylan.

Besides writing songs, Woody Guthrie wrote the autobiographical Bound for Glory, an account of his life on the road-guitar picking in hobo camps and riding the freight cars with migrant workers. The end of his life was a long, drawn-out dying from a rare disease, Huntington~' chorea. Guthrie married three times and

T

fathered seven children. Once asked if there were other singers in the family, he is said to have replied: "Not professionally, but they are loud around the house." Guthrie died in 1967, the year his son Arlo's record Alice's Restaurant was released.

Recently in Delhi on a casual visit with his son and manager Abe-during a break in a performance tour of Ireland and Australia-Arlo Guthrie talked to SPAN about the folk tradition, about his father Woody, about his own music, philosophy and life in general.

'.

My father gave me.a guitar for my sixth birthday, which I still have. It was a little guitar, but it was a good one. It wasn't something you would buy in a toy store. It was made by the Gibson company. On my sixth birthday he went out to get the guitar, and our neighbor stopped him and said, "What are you doing?" And he said, "Oh, I'm getting a guitar for my son."

And it was my neighbor's birthday also. A little girl. We were both the same age, and he said, "Oh, get one for her too." So my Dad said, "You sure?"

And he said, "Yeah, yeah." So he goes out and buys these guitars and I think he paid like 60 dollars each for them, which back in the late' 40s, especially for my father, was a fortune. Nobody had any money like that. We lived in a real poor part of Coney Island in Brooklyn where nobody had any money. This guy, when he learned what he now had to pay back to my Dad, he flipped. He went out of his mind. And my Dad said, "No, you know, if you get the kid a toy, he's gonna play it for a day or two and throw it away and never play Father and son: it again, but if you get him a real instrument, he'll Woodycarrying learn how to play it, and it'll be a friend for life." infant Arlo.

And Ijust found out a few years ago that this little

girl is still playing, also. Of course, she's 50 now. It just goes to show you he was right. Whether for professional reasons or for sittin' around playing for your own kids, it was a great gift.

People think of Woody Guthrie in different ways, depending on where they come from. Political people think of him in terms of his politics, musicians think of him in terms of his music, people involved in art look at his artwork, literary people talk about his books. There's a lot of parts to this guy. Regular people think about how he traveled around on freight trains and was stickin' up for the little guy, the working man. I mean, there are all these different parts to him, and they're all true. The unique feature is that he combined them all into one short lifetime and in one short little guy.

The part I know about is probably one of the least known parts because at the end of his life he was in the hospital for 15 years, before he died. I know that part of him. That was not the most fun part, or the most exciting, although it may have been one of the most courageous parts of his life, it's not one of the better known ones.

When I think of my Dad, I think of him as any kid would think of their own parent. You don't think of them like gods, they are real human beings with real flaws. In a family you don't put people on pedestals too often. You can afford to do that if you don't have to live with anyone, but in my life he's a real guy, and I love him dearly, and he did a tremendous amount of work in a short space of time, and people are still writing about him. There are still books coming out. He's gonna be made into a postage stamp this year, which is kind of funny. He wouldn't have known what to do about that. That would be so awkward a position for somebody who was a real rebel, and who fought against being nOlmal for his whole life, to find himself established and official would be almost like ..J don't know what he would have done about it. It would have been fun to watch, though.

played on the radio to make people happy. They were the kind of songs that sometimes made you angry enough to do something.

The kind of songs that would rally people together to get something done. And whether it was at the end of his life or when he was singing songs to help beat Hitler, as he put it, he would be out there rallying the troops and singing songs to give people the courage to keep going, sometimes in the face of death.

But he also wrote the kinds of songs that kept people feeling good about who they were, that their jobs were important and their lives were not just wasted when they were planting potatoes or picking grapes, whether they were migrant workers or whether they were farmers or they were cowboys or ranch hands, and he was singing songs that-I don't like the word, but-"empowered" people to be themselves. He wanted to sing the kinds of songs that made people feel they had the value that was equal to anybody else, no matter what anybody else is doing. Whether you were the president of the country, or whether you were sweeping the streets of the country, and for anybody in the world, no matter what country they came from, he was interested in singin' the songs that gave people hope, courage to form the kind of groups and do the kind of things that would make the world better for everybody.

I got born into that wbrld. I think it gave me a place to come from, a philosophy that I could start out from. No one in my family ever wanted me to be a clone of Woody Guthrie. There were enough Woodys just in the one that we had. But they expected me to be myself in the same sense that he was himself. And he took the liberty to be himself. It was not something people were necessarily fond of at the time. He was not reliable. You couldn't depend on him, I mean, you couldn't sign a contract with the man, or something like that. You couldn't even give him anything to hold onto.

He would give away everything that he didn't find immediately necessary, no matter how valuable it was.

Somebody wOlild give him an expensive guitar just to write songs and as soon as he was done with the song he'd give it away and walk Well, there are different kinds of music. That is not to say one is away.

Or a car, or anything like that. He had absolutely no use for better than another. There are different kinds of music because money, and disdained it, was uncomfortable with it. there are different kinds of musicians, When he was offered good jobs, he would probably and different kinds of people who make be tempted by it for a while, think about doing it, and music-for all the different reasons that then just turn it down. He couldn't do it. Something there are. If you had to divide them into just inborn.

He thought it would restrict him, or two, there would be the people who were make him biased, or something like that. really entertainers and performers, who Well, I wasn't like that, not totally like that. I unare less concerned about what it is derstood there were dangers in being an extremist in . they're saying and more concerned about any situation. There's extremists who don't want to their ability to remain a performer as a touch any money and there's extremists who want all livelihood. There are people who study the money in the world for themselves. There are exthat livelihood, they study how to be a tremists, in philosophy, in religion, in politics, in performer. My Dad was not in that catesports, in dance and in literature and theater, there are gory. He was somebody who had a lot of always two sides.

And I think the great task I had ~s a things he thought needed saying. He was kid was to see where I fit in all that and to still write a person who used music as a way to say my own songs, and make my own living and make those things, and in that sense he was not My decisions have been more in my own decisions. an entertainer. He wasn't always funny. the middle of things than on either edge. My father Sometimes he was bitter, and sometimes was married three times and has seven kids. Next what he had to say was ugly, or very sad, year will be my 30th anniversary and I don't want to Woody Guthrie doing the thing that or very moving, or very unpopular. They have a whole lot of wives and a lot of kids. I'd rather were not the kind of songs that were made him an American legend.

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stick with the ones I got and not have them feel the kinds of thoughts and turbulence that I had to feel when I was a kid. So that was a decision that I had to make. I don't think it's better, it's just mine. My Dad was not interested, at all, in the business side of what he did, and I'm very interested in the business of what I do. I don't think it was right for people doing nothing to be making money off his songs. So I wanted to learn about publishing, and the music business and stuff like that. The record companies made a lot of money off my Dad by doing absolutely nothing. I didn't want that to happen again. I'd just as soon have my kids understand what's going on, too, so that the business of it isn't a rip off, it is just, and everybody actually earns what they deserve. So in that sense I have taken on the business, and that's very different from my Dad. But I've also tried to remain true to the philosophies that I thought were the most important thing in the long run. I think my songs have represented that, and there is nothing I'd not be able to share with him or show him. The anti-authoritarian nature is the same. I don't trust authority in general, or people who like to be there.

I'm one of those people who found myself there by accident. I had no intention of being an entertainer or performer or musician. I was always going to be a musician in the sense that I always wanted to go home and play music with my friends because when I grew up in the '50s, nobody in their right mind thought you could make a living singing folk songs. Folk songs was the kind of music everybody played when they got home from real work. When you got home, sat around with your friends on the back porch pickin' banjos or playin' fiddles-at least in America that's what we play. I learned all those instruments to be able to sit around and play with my friends. But as I was growing up an odd phenomenon took place in the music business, and all of a sudden folk songs became business, big business. My folk songs got sort of picked up along with a lot of other people and I was suddenly, at 18 or 19 years old, making a lot of money without even realizing it. Of course I spent it all in a very short time. I bought myself an old farm up in the country, where we still live, and so it wasn't all wasted. It just set us up, and we've been touring and living and doing our thing ever since.

I think it's an interesting transition that Pete Seeger made. You know, my generation is probably the first generation in the world who had to deal with the immediate destruction of an entire planet.

Nobody ever dealt with that before. Never in the history of the world could one country, or even all countries combined, utterly destroy everything within minutes. And the technology to do that is not some fantasy. It's not a technology that we are wondering if it will be used or not. It has already been used. The question for my generation wasn't whether or not, it was when-and what can we do to prevent this moment when we'll destroy each other. If there was anything we could do, we were gonna do it, because we were sick of it, and we were kids. I'm not talking about America-kids all over the world suddenly stood up, without knowing why, and said "This is crazy! We've got to do something else." And so people started doing different things.

Much to Pete Seeger's credit-he was probably the last generation of the old world-but he was able to transcend his own culture

and his own generation and understand that things had to be different, that it couldn't continue the same way, that if we did nothing, and thjngs continued in the same way, with our old tradition, religion, culture the only one that's right, and everybody else's is wrong, there would be a big problem. So somebody had to say, maybe we're not right. Maybe other people are right, too. Maybe we're not the only right people, maybe there's room for other opinion.

This is the great thing in India, about traditions. Everybody has allowed great traditions of spirituality to exist side by side, for the most part. You can go and see there's a temple for this and a temple for that, there's a Buddha one, a Shiva one, a Catholic one right down the street. This is very enlightened. Not every part of the world is like that. And, of course, this has to extend into politics, art and theater. This is the one great thing Pete Seeger was able to do.

He was able to move into the next generation and be an elder spokesman, not just for the ideas, but for the way to behave, the way to be. A guy who showed you could be honest, you didn't have to cheat, you didn't have to payoff the record companies or get your stuff played on the radio. None of these songs that everybody knows was made famous on the radio. They were all made famous by people learning them in schools, in camps, on the streets, and then they got played on the radio by people who said, "Well, these are great songs, how come no one's ever recorded them?" And that's talking about whether it's "We Shall Overcome" or "If I Had a Hammer" or "Guantanamera." We know these songs because of Pete Seeger. But he never had a hit. These people, they never had to be somebody, they never had a spotlight, their goal was to get the songs out there, and they succeeded. Pete succeeded. There are a lot of people now around the world who are doing that same thing.

You wi II never hear about them, you'll never hear their names, but their songs will creep into the civilization without us knowing who they are. And that, to me, makes them greater than all the known ones, the people who needed to be somebody.

Songs in the early 1960s, and throughout the '60s, were the main means of communicating our generation had. We could do it sort of globally without our parents even understanding what we were talking about. Blues always had that. This is the power of the blues, it's a language that speaks to people who know what it means. And this is the power of the '60s music, that it speaks not just in its words, but in its form. It speaks to something different than the old tradition. It incorporates it, but it moves it along. In some cases we did everythjng different just to be nontraditional. Now, in some ways that ended up being stupid.

Folk music is not a style of music. It is the way that music is handed down from generation to generation. In classical music the music is learned and written, and that's just as true for Western classical music as for Eastern classical music. It's written, it's learned, you have a teacher. Folk music is the music that people come to know instinctively just by being a human being. It's music that they hear other people singing and then they join in and sing it. No one teaches it to them. This happens on the level of a tribal town somewhere or even a big city, there are kids on the streets who sing little children's songs. No one's taught it to them, they just learn it from each other. That's true folk music, in that it's handed down from generation to generation, but it's not really taught. It doesn't mean you can't go learn something about it from a book or teacher, but

you don't have to do that to be a folk musician. So folk songs-in America anyway---encompass all of the non-learned musical forms, whether it's rock 'n' roll or bluegrass or blues ...there's no blues school, you don't go to blues school. You don't go to bluegrass school to play the banjo. You learn it from other people who are doing it before you. And there are some gray areas. Jazz used to be an area where you just learned from other people but now it's being taught and written down. And so these things are always changing.

When I'm thinking about folk music, I'm thinking about all of these forms of music-the modem ones, the traditional ones, the intermediate ones-that are all things I love.

I think those kind of influences, once they are there, they are always there, you can't take them away. That was a terrific infusion of a whole different sound that happened as a result of probably the Beatles, more than anyone else, coming to India. They brought. back something that was, for a while, too easy to confuse with drug-related stuff. But it hasn't anything to do with that, it has more to do with the sounds and feelings and things. Years ago I was actually going to study with Ravi Shankar. And he said I'd never be a good student, so he said no. He turned me down. And he was probably right....I got over it when my first record came out few months later, and "Alice's Restaurant" did pretty good, and my ego was not damaged irreparably. I and a lot of my friends started listening to Indian musicians not just as a vehicle to add to our own stuff, but in its own right. I think our musical tastes expanded to hear what other possibilities in other places were. What it actually did, it opened the door for everyone else. If music from India was this cool and this great, what else was out there? All of a sudden we started listening to African music and Chinese music and Mexican music, and we were listening to everything, because of one thing. It was a tremendous experience, I think, for all of us.

In fact, I just made a record with a guy from India, a friend of mine, and it's out on our own Rising Son record label. It's called Bridges and his name is Russell Paul.

The Parliament of the World's Religions is a great organization, one of the few that is really trying to create a dialogue between all of the traditions that will make it possible for us to move into this next thousand years with some degree of a relationship. Maybe it will begin to bring about the day when we're not fighting each other and killing each other off, deciding whose idea's better, or something like that. One of the guys who started it was an old friend of mine, a Franciscan monk, who became a follower of a man named Bede Griffith who came over here to India to start one of the first Christian ashrams in the South called Shantivana. He was a Benedictine monk, and my friend came over here and studied with him for years, worked with him. Bede Griffith was trying in some way to create a Christian Vedanta. If such a thing could exist, this man could do it. He was a wonderful old man. I met him toward the end of his life. He's gone now. But my friend Wayne Teasdale is one of the fathers of this Parliament

of the World's Religions. Because he is an old buddy of mine, and because I have my own inter-faith church foundation where we do work with people dying of AIDS and things like that, he invited me to participate. So I have been going, and I have become their song person.

The Parliament of the World's Religions was actually started more than a hundred years ago when they had a big ecumenical meeting in Chicago, and an Indian showed up. His name was Vivekananda. And he so impressed them that he basically took over the whole thing with his brilliance and his sense of humor and his knowledge and the force of his personality, he changed the world. Aside from having Vivekananda places everywhere, he opened up this wonderful dialogue. So on the 100th occasion of that, they did it again. The Parliament of the World's Religions is working toward the year 2000 when we are hoping to get documents signed by everybody that basically say, "In the name of God, you can't go around killing anybody anymore." If we got that far, it would be a big step. It's not gonna stop people from killing each other, but it would be wondelful if we couldn't do it in the name of God, if we just took the responsibility ourselves. That would begin to change things.

And helping others can change things. AIDS is still, in many places in the world, dreaded almost like the plague. People don't understand. There's so much to be learned about AIDS, even back in the United States. People need to know that this can happen to anyone. It's a disease like any other disease. And it's not something that only happens to bad people. It happens to your Mom and your Dad and your kids and your brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. It could happen to anyone for any reason and people don't understand that yet. There are still stigmas attached to it that make it impossible to stop it. And until we get past that, you can't work on it. We need people who we will believe when tbey say something to go around and say something about AIDS. A few years ago we bought the church where Alice s Restaurant was filmed, and that's where we have our foundation. We visit people with problems like AIDS, we bring whatever they need, we do the things that are needed in our local community, and we refer people to different.medical situations and different organizations, people who don't know where to go or who to call. Though I got to say, Massachusetts is a very enlightened state, and so there's not a whole lot we have to do back home. So what I do is I travel around the country and go to places where we are still having problems, where people think it's only black people who get AIDS, or it's only gay people who get it. I've held little dying kids in my arms and it's not fun. Once you do that, your life changes. And I've seen some of the most unbelievable courage, and things that have made me think, what am I afraid of? I've seen people dealing with real problems.

Sometimes the world seems so self-indulgent, "Oh, I've got this problem, I've got that problem, I can't do this, I need that..." And then you see somebody with real problems. I think if we'd all look at each other's problems a little more, our own would disappear.

And then we wouldn't feel so bad and then the whole world would be feeling a lot better about itself. I encourage people to do things like caring for others. If we all do just a little bit, we could change the world dramatically. I'm convinced that it's worth doing, not just 0 for me but for my kids and grandkids, and for the future.

THE

SPINNING WHEEL The modern American corporation keeps an eye on the consumer, but it also has evolved into a public-spirited organization that supports bright research scholars and universities as part of recruiting and training, research and development. Recently two American corporations endowed chairs at Indian universities: Amway Corporation endowed a chair on entrepreneurial development at the Delhi University's Faculty of Management Studies; the Henry Ford Chair in Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, was established by the Ford Motor Company.

Mahindra Ford India Limited is a 50:50 joint venture between Ford Motor Company and Mahindra & Mahindra

As I traveled to India my mind was on a very low-tech machine which is kept in a place of honor back in Dearborn, Michigan-Ford Motor Company's hometown.

That machine is a humble spinning wheel. It was a gift to Henry Ford by Mahatma Gandhi, brought to the United States at great peril during World War II, by an emissary who had to travel submarine-infested waters.

Now, a spinning wheel might seem like an odd gift to send to the man who was then the world's leading industrialist.

But to Henry Ford, who had conducted a lengthy correspondence with the Mahatma, that gift spoke volumes.

Gandhi, as you know, was an outspoken critic of traditional industry. He felt that most industry subjugated people. He was

Limited. It has already begun producing the Escort at a Mahindra & Mahindra factory in Nasik. Next year the company hopes to start production at a new plant near Chennai. Ford Motor vice president-technical affairs, John McTague outlined the relationship between Ford and partner universities, a philosophy and commitment路 shared by other large corporations-when he spoke to IlT students and faculty in Chennai. In the following excerpts from. his talk, he also reveals a long-standing special relationship between Ford and India-and between the father of the corporation, Henry Ford, and the father of the Indian Republic, Mahatma Gandhi.

frequently heard to say that a cottage industry of millions of India's spinners was preferable to political patties which would only enrich themselves.

But in Henry Ford, Gandhi saw an exception to the self-serving industrialists of the day. Ford's famous five dollar workday-an increase of some 400 percent over the going factory rates of the timedifferentiated him from most of his industrial peers. So did his approach to employee housing, employee benefits, employee training and schooling.

Ford cared for people, he would frequently go into his plants and work among the common folk, helping solve problems and getting their opinions.

But industry and technology are never more than a subtheme to the real purpose of any company, or, for that matter, any

university. And that purpose is people.

We build products to improve people's lives. Our industry and our products will have many effects on our customers and on people in general. We have a duty to gauge those effects, to control them, to guard the sacred trust we are given-the lives of the people who are affected by our industry.

In any activity in which we engage, including company-university interactions, that trust, and those people, must come first. It is a golden principle which cannot be broken, ever.

I stress this today because here, in India, the presence of Ford and the automotive industry is going to escalate rapidly in coming years and decades.

In North America, and in Europe, aljtomotive markets are saturated. The campaigns there are no longer for growth; they

are for share of a market which can expand only very slightly in the coming years and decades.

I don't claim to be able to foretell the future. We do not maintain a department of prophecy at Ford Motor Company. But it is clear that, worldwide, automotive industry growth is going to come from someplace else, and all indicators say that India will be a crucible of that growth.

Latin America and the Asia-Pacificregions have the greatest potential for industry growth in the projectable future.

India is already well advanced both as a

domestic manufacturer and as an importer of components and technology. We foresee rapid development here.

With its growth centers in Latin America and Asia-Pacific, it obviously is no longer desirable to operate Ford as an American company with overseas affiliates. Rather, it is preferable to recreate Ford as a global company, with equal corporate citizenship in each nation in which it operates. And we have done just that.

You may have read about "Ford 2000," our company's major global reorganization which was implemented in 1996.

University partnerships are a significant. part of that globalization strategy. Universities give Ford: • A place in which to recruit the talent needed for worldwide growth • A qualified atmosphere in which to conduct collaborative research, and • A proper environment within which we can develop and implement continuing education programs.

Some of these functions are traditional.

Some are innovative. But all are changing as Ford changes and solidifies its global persona.

This 1942 photograph shows newspaper editor T.A. Raman presenting the gift of a spinning wheel to Henry Ford as Clara Ford (left) looks 011. The spinning wheel was sent by Mahatma Gandhi to Ford, with whom he conducted a lengthy correspondence.

Those of you in industrial research outside the automoti ve area will already know that globalization pressures are not unique to Ford or the auto industry.

I'm using Ford as an example today, because it's familiar-Ford Motor Company is my home environment-and because it's hard to get concise information on companies other than one's own.

But don't be misled. Mutatis mutandis, you would probably get similar impressions from any other representative of a major transnational company.

What does Ford look for from universities? Above and beyond all else, we look for talented people with technical skills-skills that facilitate effecti ve competition, and the effective discharge of social responsibilities with the global marketplace.

Some of these folks will be Ford employees. Some will work for suppliers, still others will be on-staff at uni versities. But all have effective responsibilities.

In a global economy, it's clear that many of these people will be educated and trained at universities far removed from the United States and Europe.

This is not simply a matter of geographic convenience. Language, culture and logic all call for talented people who know their national situations, on site and working with Ford as we establish and grow our company in emerging markets.

Industry today is looking to universities around the world as sources of worldclass curricula which recognizes no na-

nical personnel hold degrees in mechanitional borders. Through university partners, Ford and its transnational peers are cal engineering. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that we have more, and better, reactively involved in developing the course lationships with mechanical engineering material which fulfills these needs. departments than we do with, say physics But our need does not stop with technologists. We expect universities to preor biology.

That's Ford. Other transnational compapare students for participation in the nies trading in pharmaceuticals or chemiglobal arena, and to keep their graducals may link more closely to chemistry or ates-and our employees-up-to-date with continuing-education programs. We chemical engineering departments. look to universities for the research and We consider some universities to be strategic partner universities. These are development to generate needed hardmajor contributors in recruiting, nearware, software and telecommunications.

And we see our university partners as term problem solving proposals and continuing education. We also have affiliate problem-solving partners as well. And partners and special partners which adwhile these universities traditionally have been in our mature markets, we have ex- dress special niches.

Emerging-market partner universities panded to include institutions in emerging meet Ford's globalization challenge headmarkets, especially India and China.

In addition to providing recruiting and on. Many involve government partnerships in emerging-market nations. Our continuing-education forums, universities give Ford a mechanism for focusing on work here, and our recent gift of emisspecific disciplines, such as technology, sions-test equipment to the Automotive finance and management. Some are tied to Research Association of India, is just one narrow and clearly defined company ob- local example of emerging-market partnerships. Oftentimes these emergingjectives. But in the spirit of a company market universities, in turn, partner with which has long placed people, and society, as its priority, some are tied strictly to American or European universities on good corporate citizenship and produce no matters of curriculum, certification, traintraditional capital benefit. ing of overseas students and so forth.

If we were to pie-chart the funds going . Most of what I've said applies not only into our university partnerships, the lion's to Ford, but to any large transnational share-well over half-would go into company.

I'd like to take you back where we near-term problem solving. Our university started-to that spinning wheel and the budget for the United States alone is well over $60 million a year. Our aim, as we recognition it symbolized, a recognition that, in the end, it is people, not product, expand globally, is to judiciously invest that makes a company great. and modify programs based on regional That thesis applies both within a comexpectations.

We at Ford have come to call this a pany and without. That is why we helped "Reasoned Approach" to investment. By initiate a recent conference in Thailand on environmental issues. It betters our relainvesting in proportion to expected outtionships with our customers and everycomes, we are able to project consistent one who is impacted by our industry. funding, not affected by feasts or famines That's corporate citizenship. in year-to-year results. It's a long-view As the spinning wheel goes round, we approach and the best approach, we feel, understand that ours is a multifaceted for all parties. As telecommunications company, and each facet must continually mature and globalization spreads tradiimprove and we can only do that with the tiona~ "headquarters" responsibilities worldwide, distance will be of decreasing help of institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology, and individuals importance. who are part of it.

What we will focus upon are specific As the Mahatma and Henry Ford knew, departments within individual universiit all boils down to people.

D ties. Right now, about half of Ford's tech-

just matter. So that difference doesn't work so well, it's not so important. The other thing is, no sufi presumes to act alone. They always, without exception, act with all the illuminated souls, the illuminated essences who are ever-present, who are neither limited to saints or masters, but just those who are representing the lumination of God. And what we can do is reflect that illumination. We don't have to make ourselves anything that is not natural to believe in. Each person's path is their own. There are as many paths as there are human beings. The persons who limit themselves to taking someone else's path will ultimately come back to their own, because we each have our own way. And that's what makes people happy.

How can faiths like Buddhism or sufism become homegrown American religions?

Lama Surya Das, "Joe Miller, another of my teachers, used to American writer, poet say that America was a do-it-yourself and Buddhist teacher, who qualified by country. People like to go out, build their completing a sevenown houses, go to the store, re-do everyyear meditation thing. He said religion in America is a doretreat according to it-yourself religion. So we go out, we find the Tibetan Buddhist our own path, and pray that it doesn't make tradition. our egos too big, that we can keep the ego reasonably balanced, and that God will take care of the rest. Inayat Khan said, 'Make God a reality and God will make us the truth.'

So that's what's happening." ama Surya Das, in his forties, is another old-timer in India. Here, in the 1970s, he met his most important teachers, both Hindu and Tibetan. He got the name Surya Das from Neem Karoli Baba. He subsequently completed two three-and-a-half-year meditation retreats according to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, under the guidance of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and Dudjom Rinpoche, masters in the Nyingmapa lineage. He often visits India, most recently on his way to the enthronement of the new incarnation of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche in Nepal. He organized the first Western Buddhist Teachers' Conference in Dharamsala a number of years ago, a continuing forum for Western and Eastern Buddhist teachers to bridge the gap that culture sometimes creates. He is a poet and author of several books, the latest of which is the best-selling Awakening the

L

Buddha Within.

To put the exchange between the East and West in perspective, Surya Das looks back: "When I was traveling in America as an interpreter with my teacher, the venerable Lama Kalu Rinpoche, in the 1970s, an American woman named Joya with a following of spiritual devotees came to see him. She told Rinpoche that she was the incarnation of God, and asked for his blessing for her divine mission on Earth. Kalu Rinpoche asked her: "Which God?" This little interchange points, I think, to the ships-crossing-in-the-night

phenomena of much religious discourse between East and West until very recently. The world Kalu Rinpoche knew believes in so many different gods and has so many names for the Ultimate, that he needed clarification before responding to Joya's question.

"Today our inteneligious dialogue is much more connected, more subtle, more mutually informed. Recently we had a week-long meeting of abbots of various faiths, East and West, at Gethsemene in Kentucky, Thomas Merton's old Trappist monastery. We find Jesuit priests trained injapa and authorized as Zen Buddhist masters, and rabbis who teach meditation as well as Jewish Buddhists who teach rabbis how to practice mindfulness in intensive one-week retreats. We have yoga and meditation workshops and retreats for psychotherapists, for women, and prayer circles, and on and on. This is where we find ourselves today-in pluralistic America.

"My cousin, the dentist, in New Jersey, tells me that she goes to yoga class one night a week, meditation on Wednesday evenings, synagogue on some Sabbaths and holy days, is in psychoanalysis with a fine female doctor trained in Switzerland and at Harvard, takes astrology lessons, has lost weight and feels good, thanks partly to her personal trainer at the health club-when she can get there. She says that she herself is not particularly religious. And she wonders how I could have spent so many years of my life meditating in ashrams' and monasteries in India! What is the difference?"

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he reasons for this avid search for insight are rooted in modern history, according to Surya Das. "There is a great hunger today for spirituality in our fast-paced consumer culture and materialistic information age. We have an almost painfully felt need for some kind of religious practice, experience, t~aching and inspiration that postmodern, in many cases postdenominational, Americans can relate to as fulfilling their spiritual longings and needs. The churches and synagogues have been somewhat barren and less than well attended during the middle of this century in the U.S. Many of the best and brightest have turned instead to science-often dubbed 'the modern religion' -or to politics and business for their life and career paths.

This has given rise to the 'New Age,' a renaissance of spiritual values and holistic consciousness supposed to lead us into a new, happier and healthier, more sane and peace-loving world.

"The advent of the tried and true religions of man, Buddhism and.

Hinduism, as forces on the American horizon in this century offered us a refreshing new gateway to inner peace and timeless wisdom, and something deeper and more vast and profound than any New Age philosophy. We have become interested in the essence of these ancient traditions, if not in the forms of them; Aldous Huxley called it 'The Perennial Philosophy': the spiritual essence of all religions, regardless of denomination or cultural accouterments.

"In recent decades the Eastern religions and psychologically astute philosophies have had a great appeal to Westerners for several interlinked reasons. First, we have found that we can, without being encumbered by too much belief, dogma, priestcraft, patriarchal church hierarchy or ritual, get something tangible for ourselves out of specific oriental spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation,

chanting, breathing exercises and self-inquiry; benefits derived are physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually satisfying and therapeutic-in a way that our Western religions have not been presented to us in this century. Secondly, the presence of numerous enlightened masters, gurus, sages and saints from India, Tibet and other ancient Asian spiritual lineages has greatly inspired we Westerners in a person-to-person way. This is almost nonexistent in Western religions today, where the priests and rabbis are generally only trained in their religious disciplines at college level, far less than the great elder sage swamis, lamas, sayadaws and roshis of the East. Sages of the East such as the Nobel laureate Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Beatles' guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Swami Satchidananda, 1. Krishnamurti, the Sixteenth Karmapa, Suzuki Roshi, Swami Muktananda, Sai Baba, Neem Karoli Baba, Ananda Mayee-ma, Aung San Suu Kyi and others have been widely appreciated as exemplary models of spiritual authority, leading many to seek out their books and writings, teachings, guidance and representative teachers. Countless new Asian-oriented spiritual practice centers have emerged on the American scene."

A merica has wholeheartedly embraced Buddhism during the past few years. Surya Das feels it has penetrated mainstream culture from Hollywood to Capitol Hill because of a peculiarity in the modern American psyche. "Buddhism seems to fit the need of Americans for something without much talk of an unseen God to believe in or credo to adopt. It provides something Americans really want, and provides it Right Now-not in the afterlife-by offering practical steps and simple training in mindfulness, ethics, self-discipline, loving kindness and wisdom, as found in Buddha's traditional, yet timely, Eightfold Path to Elllightenment-which even includes such practices as Right Livelihood, so applicable for we laymen and laywomen today. Buddhism has had a great effect in American culture, especially in the fields of health and healing, alternative medicine, psychotherapy,. the hospice movement (the entirely new field of conscious death and dying), the creative and the performing arts, pacifism and nonviolent social action, human rights, ecological consciousness, ethics, vegetarianism and macrobiotics, mindfulness and emotional intelligence, a belief in reincarnation, etc.

"Buddhism is a fad in the USA today; yet has also been practiced seriously over long periods of time by an estimated 1.5 million

Americans, as well as five million Asian-Americans. There are thousands of American Buddhist teachers today, many trained in Asian monasteries. So an authentic American Buddhism and contemporary Western dharma has emerged that is firmly grounded in, but also autonomous from its traditional Asian roots. Part of the faddish element of Buddhism in America today is 'Tibet Chic,' seen everywhere in our popular culture-from Buddha and Dalai Lama T-shirts to large Buddhism in America Conferences, to Buddhist best-sellers and Brad Pitt on cover of Time magazine as the star of Seven Years in Tibet." addishit may be for some, but there are a significant number of others who have adopted a Buddhist way of life, in tegrating it with home and family, forming Buddhist networks that include schools and social action organizations that coexist and complement the towns, cities or rural areas where the Buddhist practitioners happen to live. This is why Surya Das feels Buddhism is growing, adapting, and will remain a part of the American scene. "Conventional religions in America seem to be somewhat threatened by the so-called 'new religions.' 'All our young people seem to be reading your dharma books and going to meditation retreats, yoga classes and workshops, tai chi and sufi dancing,' one Rabbi lamented to me. 'What do you teach that we don't?' On the other hand, our pluralistic society has lately become far more tolerant toward, and familiar with, if not entirely educated about, Eastern religions and more accepting of them as venerable and worthy of respect. American religious institutions have begun to be inspired to find ways to revitalize themselves by offering more experiential, innovative, joyous spiritual practice classes, retreats and even eclectic religious study courses, and so on. This is, I think, a highly positive development in Western religions today.

"I am not alone in feeling sure that the Eastern faiths are definitely in America to stay. Ongoing deepening practice among their adherents will produce more visible, highly trained, elder American sages and leaders in our own country; and from there it is anybody's guess what will ensue. For as far as spirituality is concerned, people will go for an authentic experience of it, almost without regard for where it comes from or what it is called. As Joseph Campbell said, 'People today don't want to know the meaning of life as much as they want to have an experience of it.' " D

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cation of information was enough to make them behave honorably.

"The Information Revolution is taking us back toward our better social instincts," Ridley says. "The Industrial Revolution helped centralize authority, creating hierarchical bureaucracies that tried to coerce cooperation but often brought out the most selfish instincts in both the rulers and their subjects. The way to regain community spirit is to have small institutions and horizontal networks of equals who voluntarily cooperate, like the people you see chatting on the Internet today. These virtual communities formed spontaneously because our brains are naturally inclined to this sort of information exchange. It's what we spent most of our time doing in the Pleistocene."

The Pleistocene savanna makes a good image for the Internet: a wide-open frontier being settled without any central planning.

A few sociopaths are out there spreading computer viruses, and encounters among strangers can provoke viciously uncivil "flame" wars. But rules of etiquette are evolving as people coalesce into communities and networks. By trading information, they're discovering whom to trust and whom to avoid. They're writing E-mail letters to relatives and scheduling meetings with friends. Some, like merchants, are cooperating for profit, but a surprising number seem to be acting out of pure goodwill. They're freely providing information, from software to consumer advice to counsel for the lovelorn.

Most of the information is of no interest to most people, which is why the Internet can seem so pointless. My first few forays persuaded me that it was the world's most

effective way to waste time. But in researching this article, I decided to give it another try. I had just read a good review of Data Smog, a book by David Shenk about the dangers of the Information Revolution, so I looked for it among the 2.5 million books at the Amazon.com Web site. I found it right away, along with an assortment of reviews from newspapers and magazines. Some of the most succinct analysis ("Excellent at describing info glut, not so hot at solutions") came from laypeople who had volunteered their own comments. here was also an area-"Check out these titles !"-listing other books ordered by buyers of this one, an extraordinarily useful cross-referencing feature. I began clicking from book to book, each time benefiting from the expertise of previous buyers to discover new related titles. It was like going from one Pleistocene water hole to another, at each stop picking up advice and directions to the next one.

Within a couple of hours I had found enough technophobic literature to keep Georg~Orwell happy for years-hundreds of books ranging from old scholarly critiques of the Industrial Revolution to titles like Surviving the Media Jungle apd Under Technology's Thumb. I discovered Technolopoly, by Neil Postman, revealing that America has become the world's "totalitarian technocracy," a place with no "transcendent sense of purpose or meaning.~' Within a week, Amazon.com had graciously delivered to my door a small library assailing its own electronic technology. I read Data Smog-which decried

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the Internet's "fragmented, asynchronous, decentralized 'free-market' culture where the public good is sacrificed"-as well as Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil and Amusing Ourselves to Death, another lament by Postman. I went through treatises on information have-nots and spiritually deprived Internet surfers. I learned about a degraded electronic culture that is rendering books obsolete-an ominous trend revealed in books purchased on line at the largest, most helpful bookstore in history. I tried to take the warnings seriously, but as the experts described the terrible plight of Americans drowning in data, there was something I couldn't get out of my mind.

It was the line spoken by Emperor Joseph II after the premiere of The Abduction From the Seraglio: "Too many notes, my dear Mozart." He was expressing the feeling common among the day's elite that Mozart's complex music was too fast-paced and stimulating for the average listener.

Like new music, new technology is always disturbing, especially to the establishment, and it always causes unforeseen problems. The agricultural and industrial revolutions were accompanied by new plagues, pollutants and weapons of destruction. Today's revolution will bring troubles and trade-offs, but we can cope with them. Transmitting information from one willing individual to another is hardly a new menace.

Like Mozart's music, this is something our brains are equipped to handle. This is what we're good at, and what makes us better. 0 About the Author: John Tierney is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine.

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