SPAN: March/April 2001

India Honors Americans Benjamin A. Gilman is the longest serving Republican congressman from New York, elected for a record 14th term. He served as the chairman of the House International Relations Committee for six years. Gilman was a congressional delegate to the U.N. in 1981. In the 1970s and '80s he won worldwide acclaim for championing the cause of human rights, helping to free political prisoners. He is a crusader against narcotIcs trafficking, hunger and malnutrition. During Prime Minister Vajpayee's visit to the U.S. last September, Gilman played a key role in adoption of a resolution to expand and strengthen relations between the two countries and cooperation in fighting terrorism.

Arun N. Netravali is the first IndianAmerican to head the world renowned Bell Laboratories, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies. He is a pioneer in digital technology.

Raj Reddy is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsb~gh. He began his career as an assistant professor at Stanford University in 1966.

Reddy's research interests include human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence.

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, Indian-born professor of statistics, is director of the Center for Multivariate Analysis in Pennsylvania State i University and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Rao is currently engaged in investigating methods for detecting the number of objects in space and tracking their trajectories. He was director of Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, 1948 to 1980. Apart from receiving innumerable international awards and medals, he has also been honored with the prestigious Mahalanobis Birth Centenary Gold Medal. He has authored more than a dozen books on the subject he pursued throughout his life-statistics.

Dr. Chitranjan S. Ranawat, the taciturn doctor came into national focus after he successfully operated on the knee joint of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Currently he is the director of the Center for Total Joint Replacement at Lenox Hill Hospital, New York. He established the Ranawat Research Foundation in Pune to share his knowledge and expertise with Indian doctors.

Swadesh Chatterjee was born in Somamukhi in West Bengal in 1947. He is president of Brandt Instruments in North Carolina. In 1998, he was elected national president of the Indian American Forum for Political Education, whose goal is to boost the political participation of the IndianAmerican community. He played a major role in the successful visit of Prime Minister Vajpayee to the United States.

John K. Galbraith, the Canadian-born American citizen, is Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University. He is internationally known for his development of Keynesian and post-Keynesian economics.

He has had a distinguished career in .

American and international politics. During the Kennedy administration he served as ambassador to India from 1961 to 1963. He is known for his lucid and persuasive writing style and has published more than 30 books and novels, the popular titles being The AjJluent Society, The New Industrial State, American Capitalism, Ambassador s Journal and The Scotch.

Bala V. Balachandran is the director of Accounting Research Center and J.L. Kellogg Distinguished Professor of Accounting Information and Management in Evanston, Illinois, since 1984. Balachandran has written books, articles and edits Management Science.

Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet was voted as the "Man of the Year" by The Week magazine. He is described as a "pilgrim with a scalpel."

The wheelchairbound plastic surgeon, despite poor health, spends half the time in India and completed more than 45,000 free reconstructive surgeries for the poor. He views the operation theater as his temple, sees God in his patients, and each visit to India a pilgrimage.

March /April 2001

SPAN VOLUME

XLII

NUMBER

2

Inauguration 2001 President George W. Bush

Publisher James Callahan

Missiles, Nukes, Trade, and the New Administration

Editor-in-Chief John Burgess

By Pram it Pal Chaudhuri

Editor Lea Terhune

Engaged Democracies

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

An Tnterview with Dennis Kux

SELCO Power

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

By Dipesh Satapathy

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

Lying with Pixels

By Ivan Amato

Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar

The Earth Will Shake, but People Needn't Die

Deputy Art Director Hemam Bhatnagar

By Lea Terhune

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

Judy Frater: Kutch Artisans' Relief

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Earthquake Engineering Sharing Knowledge and Expertise

By Dinesh C. Sharma

A Timely Handclasp Front cover: President George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States on JanualY 20. See speech on page 3. Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/AP.

By A. Venkata Narayana

A Discovery Makes the Light Fantastic

By Charles W. Petit

.

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscripts

and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

STATEMENT FORNI IV The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars aboLlt SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press and Registration of l300ks Act, 1867, and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956.

2. Periodicity of Publication 3. Printer's Name Nalionality Address

4. Publisher's Name Nationality Address 5. EdilOr's Name ationality Address 6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and parlners or shareholders holding more than one percent of the total capital

By Simon Anholt

As American as Cricket

Public Affairs Section American Embassy American Center 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 11000 1 Bimonthly Aroon Purie

By Rob Nixon

Flimflam Land

By Nicholas

Yon Hoffman

Indian Thomson Press (lndia) Limited 18/35, Delhi Mathura Road Faridabad, Haryana 121007 James J. Callahan American 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg ew Delhi 11000 I Lea Terhune American 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 11000 I The Government of the United States of America

America's Latest Hang-Up

By Martha Fay

Branded Knowledge: Copyrights and Wrongs

By Ben Gerson

America's Invisible Export

By Bernard Avishai

Magic of the Ghats

I, James J. Callahan, hereby declare that the particulars are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

(Signed) Date: February 26, 2001

The Nation as Brand

James J. Callahan Signature of Publisher

given above

Photos by Ian Lockwood

Spotlight-Ma

By K. Muthokul11ar

Renu

A LETTER

FROM

pring is usually a time of lightheartedness, but this spring finds India struggling to reconstruct an entire region after one of the worst natural disasters in its history. The awesome devastation of the earthquake in Gujarat elicited generous responses throughout India and the world. We are proud that the United States offered relief as quickly as it could be loaded onto aircraft and flown here. Part of this issue of SPAN is devoted to the earthquake and ways to meet the challenges of reconstructing life afterwards: "Earthquake Engineering: Sharing Knowledge and Expertise" has Dinesh C. Sharma reporting on the latest methods from the U.S. to forestall earthquake damage; in "The Earth Will Shake, but People eedn't Die," expert Kanwarjit Chawla discusses how l1''IOdernand some ancient technologies can be applied in a rural setting to save lives; "A Timely Handclasp,"

by A. Venkata Narayana, details the work of the Disaster Assistance Response 1eam sent by the United States Agency for International Development, relief efforts by the U.S. military and others; and in "Kutch Artisans' Relief," quake survivor and Kala Raksha co-founder Judy Frater talks about the needs of villagers after the devastation.

January saw the inauguration of George W. Bush as 43rd President of the United States, and in 2001," we bring you some moments "Inauguration fron"\ that day, including the President's inaugural address. Of course, the inauguration of a new administration brings questions. What will that mean for U.S. foreign policy, and will Indo-U.S. relations change? In his analysis "Missiles, Nukes, Trade, and the New Administration" Pramit Pal Chaudhuri tacldes this subject, as does Ambassador Dennis Kux, in an interview with SPAN editor Lea Terhune.

"A Discovery Makes the Light Fantastic," by Charles W. Petit introduces an amazing new material called Multilayer Birefringent Light Management Film that may soon be making rainbows in all our homes. Still

S

THE

PUBLISHER

on the subject of light, Dipesh Satapathy tells the story of SELCO, the subsidiary of an American company, that is bringing solar energy and affordable light to rural areas of India. But the most ingenious technologies must be monitored, as "Lying with Pixels," by Ivan Amato, makes clear. The video replay you see on TV may not be what actually happened, thanks to digital insertion techniques. Amato examines the ingenuity and its implications in this cautionary essay.

A related technology is causing print and music publishers to lose sleep in the information age.

"Branded Knowledge: Copyrights and Wrongs," by Ben Gerson, tells why copyrights have moved onto slippery ground in the past 10 years. "The Nation as Brand" takes the marketing approach with a discussion of what makes nationally-identified trademarks so successful.

"As American as Cricket"-say again? Rob Nixon tells of how the old English sport may be gaining a foothold in the U.S., thanks to afficiandos from the subcontinent who are forming serious cricket clubs in-you guessed it-Seattle, with the encouragement of Microsoft and others.

For fun there is "Flimflam Land," Nicholas von Hoffman's profile of L. Frank Baum, the creator of He Wondelful Wizard of Oz, which the author characterizes as "a peculiarly American fairyland, a mechanic's fantasy." Finally, American Ian Lockwood's haunting photos of the Western Ghats have tremendous eye appeal. His pictures and text showcase a delicate ecosystem that is teetering on the edge of extinction. Lockwood, born and raised in India, and a graduate of Kodaikanal International School, will exhibit his photos in Delhi at the India International Centre in late March.

We hope you enjoy our spring issue.

d~d e~

INAUGURATION 20G1:, President George W :Bush

In his Inaugural Address to the nation January 20, George W. Bush made clear the United States will remain engaged in the world.

"The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake" about the intentions of the United States, he said.

"America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We

Top: George W Bushfaces Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who swears him in as the 43rd President of the United States. By his side are First Lady Laura Bush and his twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Also in the picture are outgoing President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillmy Rodham Clinton. Above: Republican presidential candidate George W Bush and running mate Dick Cheney wave to the cameras after Cheney:S arrival at the Governor:S Mansion in Austin, Texas, July 25, 2000.

will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without arrogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth."

Speaking from the West Front of the Capitol moments after taking the oath of office, Bush said that the United States will build its defenses "beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge" and it "will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors."

In his 14-minute speech, Bush asked the nation to fulfill its promise by dedicating itself to the premise that "that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born."

"Today, we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion and character," the new President said.

"Together, we will reclaim America's schools, before ignorance and apathy claim more young lives."

"We will reform Social Security and Medicare sparing our children from struggles we have the power to prevent," said Bush. "And we will reduce taxes, to recover the momentum of our economy and reward the effort and enterprise of working Americans."

P

resident Clinton, distinguished guests and my fellow citizens, the peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history, yet common in our country. With a simple oath, we affirm old traditions and make new beginnings.

As I begin, I thank President Clinton for his service to our nation.

And I thank Vice President Gore for a contest conducted with spirit and ended with grace.

I am honored and humbled to stand here, where so many of America's leaders have come before me, and so many will follow.

We have a place, all of us, in a long story-a story we

continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer.

It is the American story-a story of flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals.

The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.

Americans are called to enact this promise in our lives and in our laws. And though our nation has sometimes halted, and sometimes delayed, we must follow no other course.

Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations.

Our democratic faith is more than the creed of our country, it is the inborn hope of our humanity, an ideal we carry but do not own, a trust we bear and pass along. And even after nearly 225 years, we have a long way yet to travel.

While many of our citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice, of our own countly. The ambitions of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their birth. And sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a countly.

We do not accept this, and we will not allow it. Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders and citizens in every generation. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity.

I know this is in our reach because we are guided by a power

1. The President and Pirst Lady wave as they walk in the Inaugural Day Parade through the streets of Washington, D.C., shortly after George W Bush:SO swearing-in ceremony.

2. Vice President Dick Cheney. 3. President-elect Bush smiles as he introduces retired Gen. Colin Powell (left) as his nominee to be secretmy of state during a ceremony in Crawfor~ Texas, on December 16, 2000.

Powell served as chairman to the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George Bush, father of President George W Bush.

4. President with Secretmy of Labor Elaine Chao.

larger than ourselves who creates us equal in His image.

And we are confident in principles that unite and lead us onward.

America has never been united by blood or bilth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American.

Today, we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

America, at its best, matches a commitment to principle with a concern for civility. A civil society demands from each of us

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defeflse He is a former member of Congress trom Illinois who was also defense secretary during the Ford administration. He previously served in the Nixon administration as director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He has been CEO, president and chairman of pharmaceutical house G.D. Searle & Company. During the Reagan administration he was adviser to the U.S. Departments of State and Defense and on the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control.

More recently he was chairman of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Threat Commission and a member of the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission.

Photo Credit:

Robert B. Zoellick, U.S. Trade Representative He is an experienced trade negotiator and well acquainted with foreign policy, international economics and law. He most recently was a member of the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, and served under the former Bush administration as White House deputy chief of staff. He also served in the Treasury Department during the Reagan administration.

Condoleezza Rice, Natioflal Security Adviser Well-versed on nuclear issues and foreign policy, Rice served on the staff of former President George Bush's National Security Council. She was director and then senior director of Soviet and East European Affairs at the NSC and later, special assistant to the National Security Affairs Advisor. An early mentor was Joseph Korbel, fonner Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's father.

Don Evans, Commerce Secretary Chairman of the Bush 2000 campaign, he is president of an independent energy firm, Tom Brown, Inc., and was finance chairman for the Bush Texas gubernatorial campaigns.

Middle

row from left, first: U.S. Department of State;

second: American Enterprise Institute Bottom

row last: by Bill

George Tenet

Ann Veneman

CIA

Agriculture

Mel Martinez Housing

& Urban Dev.

Norman Mineta Transportation

Records Photography, courtesy Supreme Court of Texas. Rest all: AP,iWide

World

Photos.

Spencer Abraham

Roderick Paige

Energy

Education

Tommy G Thompson Health & Human

Servo

Christine Todd Whitman EPA

Ari Fleischer WH Press Sec.

Andrew H. Card WH Siaff Chief

good will and respect, fair dealing and forgiveness.

Some seem to believe that our politics can afford to be petty because, in a time of peace, the stakes of our debates appear small.

But the stakes for America are never small. If our country does not lead the cause of freedom, it will not be led. If we do not turn the heat1s of children toward knowledge and character, we will lose their gifts and undelmine their idealism. If we pelmit our economy to drift and decline, the vulnerable will suffer most.

We must live up to the calling we share. Civility is not a tactic or a sentiment. It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos. And this commitment, if we keep it, is ~ way to shared accomplishment.

America, at its best, is also courageous.

Our national courage has been clear in times of depression and war, when defending common dangers defined our common good. Now we must choose if the example of our fathers and mothers will inspire us or condemn us. We must show courage in a time of blessing by confronting proWems instead of passing them on to future generations.

Together, we will reclaim America's schools, before ignorance and apathy claim more young lives.

We will reform social security and medicare, sparing our children from struggles we have the power to prevent. And we will reduce taxes, to recover the momentum of our economy and reward the effort and enterprise of working Americans.

We will build our defenses beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge.

We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors.

The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake: America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests. We will show purpose without anogance. We will meet aggression and bad faith with resolve and strength. And to all nations, we will speak for the values that gave our nation birth.

America, at its best, is compassionate. In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's prom ise.

And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault. Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love.

And the proliferation of prisons, however necessalY, is no substitute for hope and order in our souls.

Where there is suffering, there is duty. Americans in need are not strangers, they are citizens, not problems, but priorities. And all of us are diminished when any are hopeless.

Government has great responsibilities for public safety and public health, for civil rights and common schools. Yet compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government.

And some needs and hurts are so deep they will only respond to a mentor's touch or a pastor's prayer. Church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend our communities their humanity,

and they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws.

Many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do.

And I can pledge our nation to a goal: When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side.

America, at its best, is a place where personal responsibility is valued and expected.

Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats, it is a call to conscience. And though it requires sacrifice, it brings a deeper fulfillment. We find the fullness of life not only in options, but in commitments. And we find that children and community are the commitments that set us free.

Our public interest depends on private character, on civic duty and family bonds and basic fairness, on uncounted, unhonored acts of decency which give direction to our freedom.

Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love. The most important tasks of a democracy are done by everyone.

I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well.

In all these ways, I will bring the values of our history to the care of our times.

What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy.attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor. 'I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.

Americans are generous and strong and decent, not because we believe in ourselves, but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves. When this spirit of citizenship is missing, no government program can replace it. When this spirit is present, no wrong can stand against it.

After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson: "We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?"

Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation's grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity.

We are not this story's author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another.

Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous, to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life.

This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm.

God bless you all, and God bless America.

0

Missiles, Nukes, Trade, and the New Administration The Clinton administration saw unprecedented improvement in Indo-U.S. relations that culminated in an exchange of state visits by former President Clinton and Prime Minister Vaipayee last year. Will things change now that President Bush is at the helm?

T

hroughout his election campaign and after assuming the office of the President of the United States, George W. Bush used the phrase "a distinctly American internationalism" to describe his foreign policy. In substance this meant a continuing engagement with the rest of the world. As a presidential candidate, Bush vehemently rejected claims he was an isolationist. In style, it meant a foreign policy that sought to wield American influence more by example than direct action.

As President Bush told US. State Department employees in mid-February, "Our goal is to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace. This requires America to remain engaged with the world and to project our strength with purpose and with humility."

"Humility" is one of the favorite terms Bush invokes when speaking of US. foreign policy. In October last year, during his second television debate with the Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, he said the world would "welcome" the U.S. if it remained "humble" but strong. In a foreign policy speech he gave as a presidential candidate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Bush said in a similar vein, "We propose our principles, we must not impose our culture."

Subsequently, after election, Bush introduced his new Secretary of State, Colin Powell, at the latter's swearing-in ceremony as a man who "understands that our nation is at its best when we project our

strength and purpose with humility."

Secretary of State Powell has picked up this baton as well. During his confirmation hearings before the Senate, he noted that the U.S. was the center of an emerging new international system. But that the United States' role in this position was "not as an arrogant national telling everybody else in the world what to do, but as a nation that conveys what is possible, what is possible when you move in this direction. " As both candidate and president, Bush has repeatedly said the United States cannot afford to turn its back on the world.

Speaking shortly after his inauguration, he said, "America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom."

Secretary Powell iterated this sentiment in January. "There is no inclination whatsoever to have our nation withdraw from the world into a fOJ1ress of protectionism or an island of isolation."

Himself the son of Jamaican immigrants, the Secretary of State said that one reason America remain globally engaged was the makeup of its own population.

"There is no country in the world that does not touch United States. We are a country of countries, with a citizen in our ranks from every land."

President Bush has also stressed that an America that does not deal with the rest of the world will find its choices lessened rather than increased. As he warned, soon after becoming president and speaking

about U.S. foreign policy, "If we do not set our own agenda, it will be set by others, by adversaries abroad, or by the crisis of the day."

Nuclear Though Powell has stressed the degree of continuity in foreign policy, it is generally accepted that the new administration has placed a unique amount of stress on missile defense systems. President Bush and his top officials have indicated the U.S. Government's intention to pursue the development of missile defense systems that will protect the United States itself as well as strategic theaters that wi II defend key allies.

The new President declared such a system would be among the most important security priorities of his administration.

Near the end of December last year, he listed three top goals for the US. militmy.

Number two was defending "our people and allies against missiles and terror." He elucidated further, "To defend our forces and allies and our own country from the threat of missile attack or accidental launch, we must develop a missile defense system." Soon after his inauguration, Bush told journalists that when it came to national missile defense (NMD), "I'm going to fulfill that campaign promise."

Before Bush selected him as his Secretmy of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld had been the author of a report warning of the threat posed by missile proliferation

"Humility" is one of President Bush:S favorite terms; "We are a countly of countries, " says Secretwy of State Colin Powell, "with a citizen in our ranks ji-om evelY land. "

and the need for the United States to develop a missile defense system. After he was nominated by President Bush to head the Pentagon, Rumsfeld quickly picked up this strand of thinking. "There's no question but that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the delivery systems for them is extensive across the world. And I consider that, myself, to be a threat," he said on December 29 last year.

The U.S. argument for NMD has largely revolved around the rise of new security threats that have followed the spread of missiles and missile technology to rogue states and the likelihood such weapons could come into the hands of terrorist groups. In February, Secretary Rumsfeld told Fox TV that the United States today faced a "broader range of threats" and that these were quite different than massive land wars, or massive air wars or nuclear exchanges-the type of concerns that dominated Cold War thinking.

As he explained during Senate confinnation hearings, defense policy can "no longer be based solely on the prospect of punishment through massive retaliation."

Rumsfeld said a refashioning of"detenence and defense capabilities" was required.

However, it is clear the Bush Administration does not see NMD as simply a crude shield. Colin Powell fixed missile defense in a larger strategic constellation.

Missile defense, he said, is "an essential

part of our overall strategic force posture." It was one of four elements that made up this posture, he explained. The other three legs being "offensive weapons, command and control systems, intelligence systems."

As he told CNN, NMD would not "destroy the entire scheme of arms control that we've built up over the last 40 years. I think it will add to that system by adding a new element of deterrence.

Don't see the NMD standing alone and separate from what we're doing with offensive weapons, what we are doing with arms control activities, what we are doing with nonproliferation activities."

William Peny, defense secretmy during the first Clinton administration, had in 1996 argued the U.S. strategy against nuclear and missile threats also had three components: multilateral treaties, superior offensive weapons capability and missile defense. The Clinton administration had tended to stress the first of the three elements the most. The new administration is placing the greatest importance on the last.

Given the radical path he has taken, President Bush recognizes that he will face considerable opposition both at home and abroad. As he admitted to journalists near the end of December last year, when it came to missile defense, "There's a selling job to do." Powell similarly confessed that NMD would entail "tough negotiations" with

other countries of the world.

Besides arguing that pursuing MD only enhances deterrence and is part of a larger strategic framework, the Bush Administration has also pointed out its essentially defensive nature. Rumsfeld, during his first policy statement overseas after assuming the cabinet position, noted that NMD "should be of concern to no one, save those who would threaten others." Powell told CBS News in February that NMD was a protective technology which threatens no one."

The administration has expressed its intention to spread this shield, when it is eventually finished, over its allies as well.

Speaking in Gelmany, Rumsfeld said the U.S. was "prepared to assist fi'iends and allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses."

Washington has also sent strong signals that it does not intend to back down on this issue, in particular from opposition from Russia. Russia has argued NMD would be a violation of the existing Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that places restrictions on such missile defense systems. Secretary Powell.admitted on ABC TV that at some point "We will bump up against the limits of the ABM Treaty. At that time, we will have to negotiate with the Russians what modifications might be appropriate ... it may be necessary to leave that treaty if it is no longer serving our purposes." President Bush was similarly blunt. He has told the press, "I want America to lead the world toward a more safe world when it comes to nuclear weaponry."

One of the goals of NMD, the Bush Administration argues, is to debase the very idea that nuclear weapons are wOlih acquiring. Rumsfeld explained during his confirmation hearing_that defense policy "should be aimed at devaluing investment in weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems by potential adversaries."

The Bush Administration has so far expressed less interest in multilateral nonproliferation treaties. Powell informed the Senate that the administration would not present the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty for ratification in this session of Congress. China, for example, has linked further progress on negotiations for

a Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty to a treaty on banning weapons in outer space~a ban that would make an NMD difficult to install. The FMCT is a proposed international agreement under which all countries with the ability to produce nuclear fuel would curb and monitor the production of such material.

Ambassador Robert Grey said in Februmy at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that America was willing to "join in a decision to launch FMCT negotiations right now." The U.S. was prepared to agree to a work program on simultaneously establishing an ad hoc committee on nuclear disarmament and outer space along with one FMCT talks. But he indicated the United States would not be prepared to go Miher. This would seem to underline the ovelTiding impOliance of the MD to the new administration, at least relative to multilateral nonproliferation treaties.

Powell has said during his confirmation hearings before the U.S. Senate that Washington would continue to pursue nonproliferation in general. He said the heart of the proliferation policy would have two chambers: "To constrict the supply of nuclear materials and the means to deliver them and to discourage other countries from believing any gains will accrue from possession of such weapons."

Trade Commentators on President Bush say that when he was Governor of Texas he was impressed by the positive impact of the NOIih American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the economy of his state.

This strengthened a personal enthusiasm for free trade and trade agreements in general. During the swearing-in ceremony of his Secretary of Commerce, Donald Evans, he said the two shared a conviction that open trade is a powerful force for good in the world." The President went on to add, "In all our dealings abroad ... we must stand for free and open trade, without favoritism and without baITiers."

Bush chose to grant the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) cabinet-level status because, he said, "of the importance of trade in the global econo-

my." It is an opinion shared by the USTR for the new administration, Robert Zoellick. Soon after his nomination, Zoellick noted that the signing ofNAFTA and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade~an agreement that led to the creation of the World Trade Organization, "contributed to the longest period of economic growth in U.S. histOly, with levels of full employment, and without inflation3ly pressures, beyond the forecasts of any economist."

Zoellick has indicated a desire to be proactive in the field of trade diplomacy.

Speaking before the U.S. Senate in January he warned that the _European Union and Japan were taking away the role of being the world's trade leader from the U.S. "This would be a huge missed oppOliunity," he said, "indeed an historic mistake."

The new USTR has made strong pleas for the U.S. Congress to grant him fasttrack authority to negotiate trade deals with other countries. Under this authority, Congress waives the right to add amendments to any trade agreement. Instead the legislators cast a straight yes-no vote on the final text of the treaty. Without this, it is nearly impossible for a U.S. adminjstration to sign an intemational trade agreement.

Zoellick has said he would use such authority to conduct negotiations for a new round of WTO talks, building on the progress made by the Uruguay Round.

He is particularly interested in putting together an expansion of NAFTA that would incorporate most of Latin America and be called the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. There are a host of other bilateral and regional trade agreements he believes the U.S. should be actively pursuing. "American openness is high and our trade barriers are low, so when we negotiate free trade agreements with our counterparts we almost always open other markets more than we must change our own," he told U.S. congressmen.

Zoellick, like USTRs before him, has also promised to take strict action against trade practices that unfairly keep out American goods from foreign markets.

"We must enforce, vigorously and with dispatch, our trade laws against unfair practices. In the world of global econom-

ics, justice delayed can become justice lost." However, he has said labor and environmental clauses should not be pali of trade treaties unless they can be shown to not be "protectionist."

Among the various regions of the world, the Bush Administration has an especially strong interest in Latin America. This reflects the President's own long experience with Mexico, the only country bordering his home state of Texas. It was no surprise that the first foreign trip he made as President was to Mexico.

Bush explained this to State Department employees in February. "Our future cannot be separated from the future of our neighbors in Canada and Latin America.

Our bonds of language and family and travel and trade are strong, and they serve us all well. Some look south and see problems. Not me, I look south and opportunities and potential."

Among the regional issues that commanded immed iate attention from the Bush Administration were the sanctions regime against Iraq and the West Asia peace process. Powell explained the United States would seek to maintain an international coalition in sUppOl1of such sanctions on the basis of concerns about Iraq's continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. "We all have a common objective, and I think we can rally everybody around that common objective. And it's an anns control objective to not let this regime get access to weapons of mass destruction." Washington has also said it would seek to play the role of the "honest broker" in the troubled relations between Israel and the Palestinian authority.

The Bush Administration will also路 inherit a much better relationship with the United Nations. Thanks to a deal negotiated in December last year, Washington had agreed to payoff its arrears to the U.N. in return for a reduction in its share of the U.N. budget. The Secretary of State said in February, that the U.S.-U.N. relationship was "on a very good footage, particularly now that we have removed the main irritation that we have had for some time~the financial debate."

The details of the Bush Administration's policy toward South Asia remain unclear.

However, during the election campaign many Republican aides to the then presidential candidate showed a positive interest in India.

Bush himself, during his Ronald Reagan Presidential Library speech, spoke in glowing terms.

"This coming century will see democratic India's arrival as a force in the world," he said. "India is now debating its future and its strategic path, and the U.S. must pay it more attention. We should establish more trade and investment with India as it opens to the world. And we should work with the Indian Government, ensuring it is a force for stability and security in Asia, " Bush continued.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Richard Armitage, a key foreign policy advisor during the campaign who has since been nominated as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State. "We see the key elements of Republican foreign policy as being the management of the rise of two great powers-China and India," he said in an interview in October last year. "We acknowledge the desire and right ofIndia and China to take a place on the world stage," Armitage said.

A similar stance was taken by Condoleezza Rice, the Stanford University Provost who has since become Bush's National Security Advisor.

The U.S. "must pay closer attention to India's role in the regional balance," she wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine early last year.

"India is not a great power yet, but it has the potential to emerge as one," the article says.

After the election, the Bush Administration has continued to speak of India in a similar vein.

SecretaIy of State Powell, during his confitmation hearings, said, in response to a question about India and the U.S., "I certainly agree with you that India has to be a high priority for foreign policy activities of the United States of America." He admitted that during the Cold Wm he had had to give little thought to India. "But now it's all opened up, and it is the soon-to-be-largest country by population on the face of the earth, and it is a powerful countty and it is a nuclear-armed country. And so I think we have to engage more broadly with India." He promised to review all sanctions imposed by the U.S. Government "and especially with respect to India."

His personal commitment to this issue was evident. "I want America to lead the world toward a more safe world when it comes to nuclear weaponry."

0 About the Author: Pram it Pal Chaudhuri is an associate editor of The Hindustan Times, New Delhi.

Engaged

Democracies An Interview with Dennis Kux

ennis

D

Kux

is cognizant

about the political tions

in South

has

been

the

Association

Studies,

executive for

Arlington,

was a member Foreign

condi-

Asia.

He

director

of

Diplomatic

Virginia,

and

of the American

Service since

1955.

He

served in both India and Pakistan, and worked as country director for India in the u.S. State Department.

He has been u.S. Ambassador the

Ivory Coast,

director

to

of the

Center

for the Study of Foreign

Affairs,

deputy

of Intelligence deputy

director

Operations

assistant secretary Coordination

for Management

at the u.S. State Department.

Estranged Democracies, ical relationship 1991.

and

He is author of the book

which comprehensively

analyzes the polit-

of the United States and India between 1941 and

He has just completed

Pakistan

relations

entitled

released

in America

a companion

Disenchanted

this spring

by Johns

book

Allies,

about

which

Hopkins/The

U.S.-

will

be

Wilson

Center, and is due out this summer in South Asia under the Oxford University Press imprint. Ambassador Fulbright

Kux is currently in India as a

Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses

(IDSA), New Delhi. He shared some of his thoughts SPAN Editor Lea Terhune.

recently with

SPAN: Could you say something about the research you are doing now, and a bit about the book on Pakistan that is coming out?

DENNIS KUX: Why don't I start with the book on Pakistan?

Because that is what I spent the past five years working on. It's essentially a twin, parallel volume to the book I wrote earlier about the U.S. and India. It covers U.S.-Pakistan relations from 1947 up until 2000. It is again a comprehensive story of the relationship, a narrative diplomatic history, and its title is Disenchanted Allies.

It's very similar to the India book in the approach. But it was a tougher book to write. The India book took only two years, and this took five, because the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is a much more tangled and volatile one. A lot of it was covered by secret and top secret, and I had to disentangle that: the Afghan war and the nuclear issues.

I tried to do the same thing in this book as I did with the India book, to give both points of view, the American point of view and the Pakistani point of view. I have a chapter where each President is described chronologically. In some ways it is a more dramatic story, because at points there is a much sharper clash.

There is a sharper convergence part of the time and even broader differences part of the time.

Having finished the Pakistan book I thought about what I was going to do next. I settled on something that I thought would not be the most arduous task, and that would be to bring the India book up to date, because it has been about a decade since it came out. When I wrote the proposal-because I am here on a Fulbright grant as a fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses-,-I posed the question: objectively speaking, relations should be better between the U.S. and India after the Cold War, and they weren't really, and 1 wondered why. And of course to find out why, you need to go through and see what happened, and then the why will flow from that. So that is what I decided to do.

Step number one, which 1 am involved in now, is to get back into India after spending five years in Pakistan and visiting India. I kept up in a general way, but it isn't the same. I can see right now, from talking to people in the past month, the many things that are different.

I find interviews are terribly important. A lot of people when they write, they sort of pull it out of the air, base it on newspapers or what have you, but don't talk to the people who were actually involved in the relationship in a serious way.

In your first book you maintained the clashes between national security interests of the United States and India were the bases for sour relations from the beginning. Do you feel these points are closer to resolution now, and if so, how?

I think it has changed. And I didn't realize, sitting in Washington, to what extent it has changed. Look at the substructure. In the Cold War they developed a substructure that

was at odds. The Indians got together with the Soviets, we got together with the Pakistanis-though it's more complicated than that. That has ended. So the substructure of the Cold War is over. We are not terribly concerned about India's relations with the Russians, except on some specifics. We don't have a relationship with the Pakistanis to speak of, in the security area. So those big problems are gone. The fundamentals are different.

Then you have what you didn't have earlier, you have quite an important economic relationship developing. After India opened up in 1991, first with more traditional investments, and in more recent years there was a big change in information technology, which was not there in the beginning. This is just in the past four or five years. It has come on very rapidly. Ifsome of these studies, like the McKinsey Report, are even 50 percent accurate, it will change the relationship in a fundamental way. As you know, today Indo-U.S. tradeis about $14 billion with the Indians having about a $1 billion advantage in their favor. McKinsey speaks about a $50 billion industry in 2008 with $30 billion in exports to the U.S. That quadruples what you have now. It puts India almost in the China league. And it is also 6 percent of India's GNP right now, so that's a real sea change. Even if it's only 50 percent of what they project, it's going to make a big difference.

So that's one element.

The second element is the emergence of the Indo-American community, which to some extent is related to IT. What did Clinton say, 30 percent of programmers in Silicon Valley are Indian-Americans or Indians? And so this development has come about partly because of the Indian community. It has been growing since the mid-'60s but now has reached the critical mass. The critical mass in the U.S. is seen in the India Caucus of some hundred members. In a relatively short time span, India's congressional enemy number one, Burton, put in a killer amendment on aid to India. It came within a few votes of passing, and it took Steve Solarz tremendous effort to stop it. Today Burton-either he isn't putting in the resolution or he's snowed under. You saw it the other day with the response to Gujarat, where they took an hour's time and some 40 members spoke out, and whatever the U.S. is giving, they said give ten times that. And Clinton, I guess in part to upstage the new administration, went out and said he was going to raise a mil- . lion dollars. And the Indian-Americans are trying to raise $30 million. So this is different, and this has had a big impact on the Indian image in America.

America has become more sensitive to Indian sensitivities, but what about public opinion?

Well, I think the public in the States is more aware of India, and IT has given a much more positive twist to it, and in a perverse way the nuclear explosion has, too. India did get our attention. And I think in India this change in perception has an enormous effect. This is below the surface, in the structural elements.

Every upper or middle class Indian has a relative in the United

States. And these are not the illegal taxi drivers, of which there are plenty. These are people who are leading figures here in India. This creates a bridge. There is infonnation going back and fOlih. People here understand the United States better, and people there understand better because the Indian-Americans have learned to play the game, and because the community is successful, they are well received. And they are not coming in, necessarily, with a general grouse. There is not one issue, other than the issue of "let's have better relations with India." So there is broader appeal.

Coming to the other question on sensitivities, it's much more important than we think. I know in my book I talked about the burden of history: why relations haven't improved faster is the burden of history. The Indian man on the street, the officials, up until very recently still perceived the United States as being against them, and for Pakistan, which wasn't the case. But they perceived it, so they acted that way. They didn't take into account what was going on between us and the Pakistanis. They were quite ignorant of that, or they misread it. Our relations were terrible with Pakistan. You should talk to the Pakistanis, as I have over the past few years. Indians don't say we betrayed them. Pakistanis do, and feel and believe it. The thing that tipped this around, as far as I can tell, is paradoxical. There are two things: the nuclear tests where we had to put on the sanctions, and they didn't like it. Then follows a dialogue with Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh, which in fact, though it didn't resolve nuclear questions, it did improve the bilateral relationship between India and America because they covered the waterfront. We understood the Indians better and they understood where we were coming from better. We hadn't had a dialogue like that since Kennedy was President. So they got our attention.

And you had sustained, high-level discussion.

Then Kargil came. And I think Pakistanis were very surprised about the way we reacted to Kargil. Because it wasn't to sit on our hands, it wasn't to accept what the Pakistanis were saying, just to dust them off. It was, in fact, to accept what India was saying. And we intervened behind the scenes, but it wasn't behind the scenes, we did it quite publicly, to prevent things from getting out of hand. It meant that we would lean on the Pakistanis to get them to pull back. You had the President spending the 223rd anniversary of our independence holding Nawaz Sharif's hand at Blair House. I'm sure he had better things to do.

The reason for it, from the American perspective-and I think here people don't understand that fully-was the nuclear matter.

We got scared. I can see why, sitting here, there is probably a lot less chance that these two people are going to lob bombs at each other than we think. Anyway the upshot was, from India's perspective and certainly from the Pakistani perspective, we were siding with India. This was step number one. And step number two was when Clinton came here and laid down the four Rsrestraint, respect for the Line of Control, renunciation of violence and renewal of talks between India and Pakistan. He said that here and then went and said the same thing in Pakistan. That

really sunk in, on both countries. And then, of course, you had the public aspects of the visit. I don't think, personally, the visit would have been successful if he hadn't taken those steps. I think, for the policy makers here, that was seen as a big change.

And then the return visit by Vajpayee, which was quite successful. So it has come together. It has crystallized now.

Do you think that the recent positive overtures that the Indian Government has made in regard to Kashmir are partly the result of this climate of trust and interest in conflict resolution by America, although America continues to say it will not mediate?

Well, I think it is because of two things: their own desire to settle Kashmir-the Prime Minister makes no bones about it.

And, secondly, a general desire to not get themselves behind the public relations eight-ball internationally, which tends to mean with us. So I think this was an element, but not the most decisive element.

To move to the nuclear issue, there are some analysts here who feel the Bush Administration might make it easier for India because Bush makes so clear his commitment to reinforcing America's defenses. This could be a vindication of India's stand on its own defenses over the long term. What do you think?

Well, intellectually, you can say yes, that's true. His approach, that it is in our national interest to do this, parallels India's own view, that it's in.their national interest to do that. I don't know where we will'come out on the nuclear issue. I think that it is less of a theological issue with this administration than it was with the Democrats. Strobe Talbott was one who said we cannot realize the full extent of Indo-U.S. relations because of the nuclear issue. I'm not sure the Republicans will take the same approach. I don't know. The CTBT is off the table, so that problem isn't there. The sanctions are probably going to go.

And there may be an effort to weave India and Pakistan in some fashion into the nuclear system. It's a challenge. But it's possible. So I think that's all positive, but I think the nuclear issue is going to stay there.

I noticed The Economist last week talked about the Russians selling power reactors here in what the magazine calls a violation of this or that aspect of the NPT regime. Things like that are going to be there. The thing that's different now-and I think back to the Catier administration, where there was a lot of goodwill on both sides-is that one issue like that, at the time it was the Tarapur reactors, overwhelmed everything else. I don't think that will happen now. I think the relationship is much broader. And I think the Republicans see India as an emerging great power. Of course, it has been emerging for a long while, but it's a place you have to take seriously. And I think they will continue to do that the way the Clinton administration did. There is no reason not to.

sible resource management. They hardly expected year-old SI to command a 4,000-strong customer base within four years. Their customers are drawn from rural and urban households, shops and small businesses, religious and educational institutions, banks and government offices.

twas a precarious gamble for Winrock International (WI), a private nonprofit organization in the United States, to place $150,000 conditional grant from US AID on the obscure and capital-strapped SELCO India (SI). They took the risk to nurture a commercially viable business of selling household photovoltaic (PV) systems in rural India without relying on government subsidies.

Formed in 1995, SI was the brainchild of Rarish Rande and Neville Williams, chairman of parent Solar Electric Light Company (SELCO-U.S.). The initial funding for SI was provided by the Solar Electric Light Fund, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization, for promoting the use of solar energy in the Third World.

Additional support came from the Rockefeller Foundation and E&Co., an investment arm of the foundation. E&Co., SI's first investor, invested $107,500 which helped the company to cross the initial hurdles of working capital.

Winrock works on long-term productivity, equity and respon-

I

In view of the low-income rural clientele in South India, winning the bet required expanding operations to capture untapped markets, and convincing private investors of the viabi Iity of SI's service model based on consumer finance. Therefore, before awarding the grant, Winrock asked SI to furnish its business plan and evidence of its ability to foresee and mitigate business risks.

SI's business plan, based on long-term and steady expansion, suited WI's fancy. Its financial model focused on building and maintaining long-term relationships. It required 25 percent down payment with monthly installments comparable to the average South Indian family expenditure. The plan centered around on three points-quality energy services, growth strategy (while possibly limiting initial profit potential), and independent monitoring of intermediate results.

Customer satisfaction being the prime objective, and the key to any successful business venture, Sl identified reliable suppliers of high quality equipment with a system components warranty. In addition to a network of well-trained distributors and salespersons, SI custom ized systems to suit user needs and shorten delivery time. SI also offered a one-year product guarantee, in addition to manufacturer waranties, a 90-day money-

Left: Visiting a new installation near Pudubvettu village, Beltangadi taluk, Karnataka, SELCOUs. Chairman Neville Williams (third from left), Kamal Kapadia, Sf's business development manager (fourthji-om left), and Harish Hande, managing directOl; Sf, with members of the client household and other Sf staff. Below: Harish Hande explains the solar water pumping system to journalists and officials in Manipal, Karnataka.

back guarantee and one-year service contracts.

Winrock delivered the grant in three installments-the first in January 1996, and the last in 1998 after an independent audit of progress made by SI toward plan objectives.

Traditional banks wouldn't meet the terms of the SI model, so SI identified micro-credit-oriented financial institutions and agricultural cooperatives lending at the village level with reasonable interest rates. Initially, when Sl found it difficult to convince banks to finance solar projects, Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IRED A) provided two soft loans worth Rs. 1.45 million and Rs. 1.51 million. These loans were used to provide home lighting systems to 200 rural households in South Karnataka. The loans covered 85 percent of the individual project costs.

The SI model was based on the U.S. auto industry whose success was outrightly dependent on the availability of service and third party financing. So several solar service centers were set up in South India to handle sales, coordinate installations and provide panels, lights and other accessories. To persuade bankers, SI first solar-electrified a number of bank branch officies. Once their confidence was won, photovoltaics joined a list of products that they financed. "There is no end to customers if you can make it affordable with low enough monthly payments," says Williams.

"It was a question of long-term sustainability. The subsidy market was a small and counterproductive to market development. In a country like India, it is extremely difficult to channelize subsidy," SI's Managing Director Hande says. Luckily in Karnataka, people lack respect for subsidized goods as they are considered inferior. This helped SI a lot. The subsidy lure was, in

some places, overcome through attractive financing schemes.

Surprisingly the banking sector in Karnataka was more positive than the company's expectations. Banks like Malaprabha Grameen Bank (MGB) in Dhm'wad and Netravati caught on to the idea immediately but cooperative societies like Amasabail and Kota, whose rural reaches are far better, took a little longer to agree. In recent surveys, about three-fourths ofSI's customers have indicated that the availability of financing was a strong factor in their decision to purchase solar home systems (SHS), The impressive evidence of S!'s success came in 1999 when the company started the initial repayment of the conditional grant. It would take three more years to repay US AID money, says Hande, whose company has already paid back 22 percent of the grant. SI broke even last year.

"IT [information technology] people want to reach the unconnected. We want to reach the unelectrified," says Williams.

Seeing is no longer believing. The image you see on the evening news could well be a fake-a fabrication of fast new videomanipulation technology.

L

ast year, Steven Livingston, professor of political communication at George Washington University, astonished attendees at a conference on the geopolitical pros and cons of satellite imagelY. He didn't produce evidence of new military mobilizations or global pandemics. Instead, he showed a video of figure skater Katarina Witt during a 1998 skating competition.

In the clip, Witt gracefully plies the ice for about 20 seconds. Then came what is perhaps one of the most unusual sports replays ever seen. The background was the same, the camera movements were the same. In fact, the image was identical to the original in all ways except for a rather important one: Witt had disappeared, along with all signs of her, such as shadows or plumes of ice flying from her skates. In their place was exactly what you would expect if Witt had never been there to begin with-the ice, the walls of the rink and the crowd.

So what's the big deal, you ask. After

all, Stalin's staff routinely airbrushed persona non grata out of photos more than a half-century ago. And Woody Allen ushered a variation on reality morphing into the movies 17 years ago with Zelig, in which he inserted himself next to Adolf Hitler and Babe Ruth. In films such as Forrest Gump and Wag the Dog, reality twisting has become commonplace.

What sets the Witt demo apart-way apart-is that the technology used to "virtually delete" the skater can now be applied in real time, live, even as a camera records a scene and instantly broadcasts it to viewers. In the fraction of a second between video frames, any person or object moving in the foreground can be edited out, and objects that aren't there can be edited in and made to look reaL "Pixel plasticity," Livingston calls it. The implication for those at the satellite imagery conference was sobering: Pictures from orbit may not necessarily be what the satellite's electronic camera actually recorded.

But the ramifications of this new technology reach beyond satellite imagery. As live electronic manipulation becomes practical, the credibility of all video will become just as suspect as Soviet Cold War photos. The problem stems from the nature of modern video. Live or not, it is made of pixels, and as Livingston says, pixels can be changed.

The best-known examples of real-time video manipulations so far are "vittual insertions" in professional sports broadcasts. On January 30 last year, for instance, nearly one-sixth of humankind in more than 180 countries repeatedly saw an orange first-down line stretched

across the gridiron as they watched the Super Bowl. Princeton Video Imaging (PVI) in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, created that line, stored it in a computer, and inserted it into the live feed of the broadcast. To help determine where to insert the orange pixels, several game cameras were fitted with sensors that tracked the cameras spatial positions and zoom levels. Adding to the illusion of reality was the ability of the PVI system to make sure that players and referees occlude the virtual line when their bodies traverse it.

Last spring and summer, as PVI and rivals such as New York-based Sportvision were airing virtual insertion products, including simulated billboards on walls behind major league batters, a team of engineers from Sarnoff Corp. in Princeton, New Jersey, flew to the Coalition Allied Operations Center of NATO's Operation Allied Force in Vicenza, Italy. Their mission: transform their experimental video processing technology into an operational tool for rapidly locating and targeting Serbian military vehicles in Kosovo. The project was dubbed TIGER, for "targeting by image georegistration." "Our goal was to be able to fire precision-guided munitions at Serbian military vehicles-just dial in the coordinates and the thing goes," explains Michael Hansen, a young, caffeinated Sarnoff gadgeteer who can hardly believe he was helping fight a war last year.

Compared to PV]'s job, the military's technical task was more difficult-and the stakes were much higher. Instead of altering a football broadcast, the TIGER team manipulated a live video feed from

a Predator, an unmanned reconnaissance craft flying some 450 meters above Kosovo battlefields. Rather than superimposing virtual lines or ads into SpOtts settings, the task was to overlay, in real time, "georegistered" images of Kosovo onto the corresponding scenes streaming in live from the Predator's video camera.

The terrain images had been previously captured with aerial photography and digitally stored. The TIGER system, which automatically detected moving objects against the background, could almost instantly feed to the targeting officers the coordinates for any piece of Serbian hardware in the Predator's view. This was quite a technical feat, since the Predator was moving and its angle of view was constantly changing, yet those views had to be electronically aligned and registered with the stored imagery in less than onethirtieth of a second (to match the frame rate of video recording).

In principle, the targeting step could have been hotwired to precision guided weapons. "We weren't actually doing that in Allied Force," Hansen notes. "We were just telling targeting officers exactly where Serbian targets were and then they would vector in planes to go strike the targets." That way the human decision makers could pre-empt flawed machine-made decisions. According to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, TIGER technology was used extensively in the final three weeks of the Kosovo operation, during which "80 to 90 percent of the mobile targets were hit."

So far, real-time video manipulation has been within the grasp only of technologically sophisticated organizations such as TV networks and the military. But developers of the technology say it's becoming simple and cheap enough to spread everywhere. And that has some observers wondering whether real-time video manipulation will erode public confidence in live television images, even when aired by news outlets. "Seeing may no longer be believing," says Norman Winarsky, corporate vice president for information technology at Sarnoff. "You may not know what to trust."

Ads everywhere: The oil company logo that seems plastered behind home plate in this Padres-Dodgers game (right) is a mirage-a product of video insertion technology that gives way to a radar-gun readout.

crude form of video manipulation already is happening in the satellite imagery community.

The weekly publication Space News reported last year that the Indian Government releases imagery from its remote-sensing satellites only after defense facilities have been "processed out." In this case, it's not real-time manipulation and it's up front, like a censor's black marker. But pixels are plastic. It is perfectly possible now to insett sets of pixels into satellite imagery data that interpreters would view as battalions of tanks, or war planes, or burial sites, or lines of refugees, or dead cows

A

that actIVIsts claim are victims of a biotech accident.

A demo tape supplied by PVI bolsters the point in the prosaic setting of a suburban parking lot. The scene appears ordinary except for a disturbing feature: Amidst the SUVs and minivans are several parked tanks and one armored behemoth rolling incongruously along.

Imagine a tape of virtual Pakistani tanks rolling over the border into India pitched to news outlets as authentic, and you get a feel for the kind of trouble that deceptive imagery could stir up.

Commercial suppliers of vittual insertion services are too focused on new marketing opportunities to worry much about

geopolitics. They have their eyes on far more lucrative markets. Suddenly those large stretches of programming between commercials-the actual show, that isbecome available for billions of dollars worth of primetime advettising. PVI's demo tape, for instance, includes a scene in which a Microsoft Windows box appears-virtually, of course-on the shelf of Frasier Crane's studio. This kind of product placement could become more and more impottant as new video recording technologies such as TiVo and RePlayTV give viewers more power to edit out commercials.

Dennis Wilkinson, a Porsche-driving, sports-loving marketing expert who became CEO of 10-year-old PVI a couple of years ago, couldn't be happier about that. Wilkinson's eyes gleam when he describes a (near) future in which virtual insertion technology pushes advertisements to the personalized extreme.

Combined with data-mining services by which browsers' individual likes, dislikes and purchasing patterns can be relentlessly tracked and analyzed, virtual insertion opens up the ability to shunt personally targeted advertisements over phone lines or cables to Web users and TV viewers.

Say you like Pepsi but your neighbor next door likes Coke and your neighbor across the street likes Seven-Up-the kind of data harvestable from supermarket checkout records. It will become possible to tailor the soft-drink image in the broadcast signal to reach each of you with your prefelTed brand.

Just 15 minutes up the road from PVI, Sarnoff's Winarsky is also glowing-not so much about capturing market share as about the transforming power of the technology. Sarnoff has a distinguished history in that regard; the company is the descendant of RCA Laboratories, which started innovating in television technology in the early 1940s and has given bitth to a plethora of media technologies. The color TV picture tube, liquid crystal displays and high-definition TV all came, at least in part, fi'om RCA qua Samoff, which has five technical Emmys in its lobby.

The ability to manipulate video data in

real time, he says, has just as much potential as some of these forerunners. "Now that you can alter video in real time, you have changed the world," he says. That may sound inflated, but after looking at the Katarina Witt demo, Winarsky's talk of "changing the world" loses some of its air of hyperbole.

Deleting people or objects from live video, or inserting prerecorded people or objects into live scenes, is only the beginning of the deceptions becoming possible. Pretty much any piece of video that has ever been recorded is becoming clip art that producers can digitally sculpt into the story they want to tell, according to Eric Haseltine, senior vice president for R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, California.

With additional video manipulation technologies, previously recorded actors can be made to say and do things they have never actually done or said. "You can have dead actors star again in entirely new movies," says Haseltine.

Contemporary shots featuring footage of dead performers have been around for several years. But the Hollywood illusion-craft that, for example, inserted John Wayne into a TV commercial required painstaking, frame-by-frame post-production work by skilled technicians. There's a big difference now, says Haseltine: "What used to take an hour [per video frame], now can be done in a sixtieth of a second." This dramatic speed-up means that manipulation can be done in real time, on the fly, as a camera records or broadcasts. Not only can John Wayne, Fred Astaire or Saddam Hussein be virtually inserted into preproduced ads, they could be inserted into, say, a live broadcast of The Drew Carey Show.

The combination of real-time, virtual insertion with existing and emerging post-production techniques opens up a world of manipulative opportunity.

Consider Video Rewrite technology, which its developers at the Interval Corp. and the University of California, Berkeley, first demonstrated publicly three years ago. With just a few minutes

of video of someone talking, their system captures and stores a set of video snapshots of the way that a person's moutharea looks and moves when saying different sets of sounds. Drawing from the resulting library of "visemes" makes it possible to depict the person seeming to say anything the producers dream upincluding utterances that the subject wouldn't be caught dead saying.

In one test application, computer scientist Tim Bregler, now of Stanford University, and colleagues digitized two minutes of public-domain footage of President John F. Kennedy speaking during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Using the resulting viseme library, the researchers created "animations" of Kennedy's mouth saying things he never said, among them, "1 never met Forrest Gump." With technology like this, nearfuture political activists conceivably will be able to orchestrate webcasts of their opponents saying things that might make Howard Stern sound like a mensch.

Haseltine believes video manipulation techniques will quickly be carried to their logical extreme: "1 can predict with absolute celtainty," he says, "that one person sitting at a computer will be able to write a script, design characters, do the lighting and wardrobe, do all ofthe acting and dialogue, and post production, distribute it on a broadband network, do all of this on a laptop-and viewers won't know the difference."

The End of Authenticity

s

o far, the widely witnessed applications of real-time video manipulation have been in benign arenas like sports and entertainment. Already in 1999, however, the technology began diffusing beyond these venues into applications that raised eyebrows. Last fall, for instance, CBS hired PVI to virtually insert the network's familiar logo all over New York City-on buildings, billboards, fountains and other places-during broadcasts of the network's The Early Show. The New York Times ran a front-

page story last January raising questions about the journalistic ethics of altering the appearance of what is really there.

The combination of real-time virtual insertion, cyber-puppeteering, video rewriting and other video manipulation technologies with a mass-media infi'astructure that instantly delivers news video worldwide has some analysts worried.

"Imagine you are the government of a hypothetical country that wants more international financial assistance," says George Washington University's Livingston. "You might send video of a remote area with people starving to death and it may never have happened," he says.

Haseltine agrees. "I'm amazed that we have not seen phony video," he says, before backpedaling a bit: "Maybe we have. Who would know?"

It's just the S0l1 of scenario played out in the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, in which top presidential aides conspire with a Hollywood producer to televise a virtually crafted war between the United States and Albania to deflect attention from a budding presidential scandal. Haseltine and others wonder when reality will imitate art imitating reality.

The imp0l1ance of the issue will only intensify as technology becomes more accessible. What now typically requires an $80,000 box of electronics the size of a small refrigerator should soon be doable with a palm-sized card (and ultimately a single chip) that fits inside a commercial video recorder, according to Winarsky.

"This will be available to people in Circuit City," he says. Consumer gear for virtual video insertion is likely to require a camcorder with a specialized imageprocessing card or chip. This hardware will take signals from the camera's electronic image sensors and convert them into a form that can be analyzed and manipulated in a computer using appropriate software-much as photo editors at newspapers use Adobe Photoshop and other programs to "clean up" digital image files. A home user might, for instance, insert absent family members into the latest reunion tape or remove strangers they would prefer not to be in

the scene-bringing Soviet-style historical revisions right into the family den.

Combine the potential erosion of faith in video authenticity with the so-called "CNN effect" and the stage is set for deception to move the world in new ways. Livingston describes the CNN effect as the ability of mass media to go beyond merely reporting what is happening to actually influencing decisionmakers as they consider military, international assistance and other national and international issues. "The C effect is real," says James Currie, professor of political science at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. "Every office you go into at the Pentagon has CNN on." And that means, he says, that a government, terrorist or advocacy group could set geopol itical events in motion on the strength of a few hours' worth of credibility achieved by distributing a snippet of well-doctored video.

With experience as an army reservist, as a staffer with a top-secret clearance on the Senate's Intelligence Committee, and as a legislative liaison for the Secretary of the Army, Currie has seen governmental decision-making and politicking up close.

He is convinced that real-time video manipulation will be, or already is, in the hands of the military and intelligence communities. And while he has no evidence yet that any government or nongovernment organization has deployed video manipulation techniques, real-time or not, for political or military purposes, he has no problem conjuring up disinformation scenarios. For example, he says, consider the impact of a fabricated video that seemed to show Saddam Hussein "pouring himself a Scotch and taking a big drink of it. You could run it on Middle Eastern television and it would totally undermine his credibility with Islamic audiences."

For all the heavy breathing, however, some experts remain unconvinced that real-time video manipulation poses a real threat, no matter how good the technology gets. John Pike, an analyst of the intelligence community for the Federation of

American Scientists in Washington, D.C., says the credibility risks are simply too great for governments or serious organizations to get caught attempting to spoof the public. And for the organizations that would be willing to risk it, says Pike, the news folks-knowing just what the technology can do-will become increasingly vigilant.

"If some human rights organization popped up at CNN with some video, particularly an organization they were not familiar with, I would think that [C ] would consider that radioactive," says Pike. Same goes for nongovernmental organizations. "No responsible director of an established organization would authorize such a thing. And they would fire on the spot anyone caught doing it. The stock-in-trade of NGO policy organizations is that 'we tell the truth.' " Even cool heads like Pike, however, concede that the media's fortress of skepticism has an Achilles heel: the Internet. "The issue is not so much your ability to get fake video on CNN, but to get it online," he says. That's because so much )nternet content is unfiltered.

"This could play into the phenomenon in the news production process where you .would not replicate the original report, but you might report that it was reported," says Pike. And that could cascade into a CNN effect. "These are undoubtedly experiments that will be done," Pike says.

The trouble is, says Livingston, it may only take a few such experiments to forever make people question the authenticity of video. That could have enormous repercussions for military, intelligence and news operations. An ironic sociological consequence might emerge: a return to heavier reliance on unmediated faceto-face communication. In the meantime, though, there will undoubtedly be some interesting twists and turns as pixels become ever more plastic.

0 About the Author: Ivan Amato is a ji路eelance science writer based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He contributes articles to MIT Technology Review.

An American-trained engineer, Chawla has run a large family construction business, CTC Geotechnical, in Delhi since 1978. He is also a founding partner in Dehradunbased NGO, People's Science Institute, which educates rural people about safe building construction. Chawla has seen a lot of earthquake sites. He is also well-qualified to assess them. Not only did he take Kanwarjit Chawla his master's degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from NOlthwestern, he practiced for five years in California. He still holds a State of California Professional Engineering Licence. Earthquake-prone California has the strictest building codes of any state when it comes to earthquake preparedness. "You have to show competence in earthquake-safe building," Chawla says. "It is compulsory, and everyone who gets registered has a fair amount of expertise in that area. And once you are practicing in California, nothing happens without the earthquake component." Some of his work in California involved earthquake safety of big dams. The engineering company he worked for redesigned an unsafe dam, which meant interfacing with the local county water department.

"Those guys are sharp. It's the most professional organization I know. You have something, you present it, they are open to it, adapt very quickly ....We had proposed a novel technique ofmaking this dam safe. We had gone through the analysis and found it was unsafe. It should be pulled down, but pulling down a dam is a very complicated process. In fact, at that time it had never been done. It is happening just now, in the Northwest, and only for tiny dams. This was a huge dam."

He returned to India to assist his ailing father in his construction company. After the big Uttarkashi earthquake in 1991, Chawla was asked to come up to investigate. "I went up there and it took me a day in the place to realize all this training was worthless, because it's all engineering. Whereas, all the construction there, none of it is engineered. So we had to go back and redo the whole process, think the whole thing through. So we did." He and his colleagues realized the chief need: "What you want is not make a house earthquake proof, you make it '. at that level should be earthquake safe. earthquake safe. Houslllg You can't make it ealthquake proof," he says, because the cost skyrockets. Rural people living on the margins of poverty can't do it. "We looked at traditional construction. We found a lot of

these old buildings that had been around for 100-150 years didn't get damaged. They survived a whole lot of earthquakes.

They survived the Uttarkashi earthquake and later the Chamoli earthquake. It's a whole style of construction."

Starting from there Chawla and his co-workers evolved a construction method based on indigenous design. "We focused on small openings, lightweight balconies." He produces a blown up photo of a charming Garhwal Hills village saying, "This village survived the earthquake, whereas others nearby were totally wiped out." He points out the areas to fortify: "Reinforcing bands, strengthening corridors, smaller openings, corner bracing, light roof. These are the five or six factors we introduce into these houses." The cost of incorporating such features is not at all prohibitive, he says. "We are looking at an increase of 5 percent in construction cost. It is not particularly the materials, you can do this with any material. One of the arguments was there was a lot more wood available when they did this construction originally.

But what we now do is the same thing in concrete. One house built that way, after our Uttarkashi program, survived the Chamoli earthquake absolutely intact. It's got all these features and it's absolutely intact." Right across the road from it, a big building was totally destroyed, which he said was "really unfit for occupation." It convinced them of the effectiveness of using new mate- Getting down to work. A man rials. "We are not saying cut down surveys the rubble, perhaps the forests to make your houses. looking for more clay tiles like We can adapt new materials. So those already carefully piled up you have these concepts that have for use on a new roof come in to make the houses earth- Salvaging is the first step quake safe. It is not the materials, toward reconstruction. it is how you can figure out how to adapt the new materials."

Faced with the vast destruction in Gujarat, where upwmds of 100,000 homes were reduced to rubble, the first step is education.

"To get across to the people we have to work with organizations.

One of the organizations we work with is SEWA," Chawla says.

They familiarize them with what an earthquake is and how it affects structures. "We explain, yes, it is possible to rebuild safe-

This venerable house in Uttarkashi is about 150 years old and has withstood countless tremors and several major earthquakes. Elements of its traditional design are brilliantly earthquake safe. Below: A new house built after the Uttarkashi earthquake in 1991 uses new materials in the place of traditional ones, such as wood, and incmporates simple features that make it earthquake safe, such as supportive bands, reinforced corners, and a lightweight roof that won't easily cave in. This house survived the Chamoli quake intact, while a large building behind it was razed to the ground.

Iy. People can understand what eaJihquakes are about. We demystifY some of it." Next they hold workshops to train people how to build houses in this style, "and then they go back to their villages and build them." Chawla says they have found it most effective when they can put up some demonstration buildings, a dwelling or a community center. Funds are always limited, so it is on a small scale. He says, "We are looking at one in each village, but it shows people how to do it. If people incorporate some of these things, and we find they do, that's how you get a multiplied effect and get some kind of improvement in housing." He is also an advocate of owner-driven rebuilding, which eliminates some of the inevitable corruption and ensures the owners' needs aJ'e met. If a big contractor goes in to rebuild, the result is often cookie-cutter housing that is unsuitable for the rural milieu and individual needs.

Gujarat is a challenge, he admits. "You have an area that's drought prone, that gets 15-20 inches of rainfall. It's going through a two-year drought. It's cyclone prone. It's a tough terrain." It goes beyond geography, he says. "The whole exercise of house building is not enough. You've got tremendous loss of employment, you have people not knowing what to do, you have a certain amount oftrauma of the earthquake." Of all the earthquakes he has seen, however, Chawla thought the trauma in Gujarat was the least marked, something he attributes to the Kutchhi resiliency: "It consistently shows up in all of Kutch, and is quite heartwarming. They are not sitting around saying 'Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie.'" They want to get statied rebuilding, and they can use the materials to which they are accustomed, too.

"It's not the material that's the culprit, it's how you use it. You can build earthquake safe housing in mud, you can build eatihquake safe housing in stone." He muses that these materials might be safer as he points out how many concrete buildings came down: "All the concrete buildings in Ahmedabad that collapsed," Although if they had been properly built, according to code, and not with substandard concrete, they would still be standing, People's Science Institute networks with about 20 other NGOs. When they go in to rebuild, they work with local people on the design. "We advise them on the structure. We have a little booklet in Hindi, Dharti Hil Jaye

Jaan na Jaaye (Let the Earth Shake, but People Needn't Die). In this we have highlighted some of these things: how to make the foundation, construction, all those engineering features we would advocate for safety."

The pamphlet is abundantly illustrated with easy-to-understand drawings, and a minimum of text. Another book is available for those who wish more in-depth information on safe construction. In Bhuj they use clay tiles, Chawla says, "So we would work to improve the structure that supports the clay tiles."

Noting that much of the destruction was exactly what he had seen at Latur, he adds, "we also like to use as much of the rubble as possible." There was some resistance in Latur because people had died amid the rubble, but "we finally convinced them to use it up to the window sill and above that use brick."

Chawla contends that working with villagers on a long-term basis is essential to build an infrastructure of reliable water and shelter that will work for them in the long term, even through natural disasters. He says time and effort should be taken to build the resources to handle a disaster, "Don't just give a dole and go away. Two-thirds of the dole, to my mind, will disappear in the pipeline." He also feels it is better to build better structures in the same place rather than relocating villages.

A leaf from the handout circulated by the People's Science institute with clear instructions about how to build an earthquake-safe house. The institute conducts workshops, constructs model buildings and gives expert advice to villagers in seismically active regions. it organized five workshops in the weeks after the Gujarat quake.

A successful post-disaster project which has applications in Gujarat is the cyclone shelter construction Chawla helped build in Orissa: "A typical cyclone shelter takes 7 to 10 lakh rupees, and you can manage to collect some funds to build a few. You start the process and other people follow." In Orissa the Prime Minister's Office chipped in. Choosing

the right buildings is important because of a mindset about propelty: "If they are seen as state government property, then they are pillaged. If they are seen as community property, then they are maintained." The solution was to build them as schools. The shelters are off the ground, but all floors of the building may be utilized outside of a crisis. "They are run

as schools, and the cyclone shelter is on the first floor. When the cyclone comes everybody moves upstairs. Because of limited resources, we can't build huge shelters, very basic, but it's to save lives during an emergency."

D For more information about People s Science Institute and quake-safe building, contact Ratna Singh at <psi@nde.vsnl.net.in>.

Kutch Artisans' Relief

hen the. news came that the earthquake was centered in Kutch, people who knew Judy Frater began to make inquiries. 路.Frater has been instrumental in organizing women in Kutch through the NGO Kala Raksha, enabling them to presenre unique traditional textile designs and at the same time earn a decent living. Providentially, Frater's house in Bhuj remained standing and she was all right. "The first thing that we did was gather everyone together. And then we went to all the villages we.work \n to seejf everything was OK and that they had what they needed," she said. Kala Raksha put its jeep and eight people at the disposal of Abhiyan, an NGO that was coordinating relief efforts. It was at times frustratingwhen they were faced with immovable bureaucracy that blocked access to vital materials, or politicians wbo channeled supplies to favorites-but it was also inspiring: <'Most of our people didn't ask for what they didn't need. I'm proud of them for that. One of our villages was less affected, and we went to them with flour

W

and dal and rice and said we have this for you and they said, 'Look, we can't help people, but we don't need to take what we,don't need.' " And the army and local organizations were very effective.

Now Frater is fund raising for her own: the Kala Raksha villages. She came to Delhi recently to pursue that end. "We owe our allegiance to oUr artisans with whom we have built up a relationship for over eight years and we have to show them that we care, and they want to know that we care." Having seen that massive distribution efforts have some serious flaws, she beJieves in smaller, hands-on methods. '~e are going to see our villages get what they need, and it will be the way we've been working all along, small and direct. We bavewell-wishers. There is tlmding flying around ...we need our share to take care of our artisans to get them back on their feet. I don't want them to get into the welfare mental ity," she adds. "It's important for them to feel that they can workand they can have an effect in reconstructing their lives. And the best way they can do it is through their own labor."

Kala Raksha produces exquisite textiles of museum quality, but their sources have been hit. Tamatka village, which supplies much of their raw material, was leveled. It will take time to locate alternative sources.

"We'll have to be creative," Frater says.

Besides fundraising from donors, Kala Raksha plans exhibitions in India and perhaps abroad. Frater was touched by the re~onse in Mumbai, where atiists, without

being asked, initiated an auction of works with proceeds going to Kala Raksha's relief fund. Such generosity is essential because the money required is a lot more than the modest daily take in the aliisans' villages.

She wants people to adopt the seven vil- ." lages. "It is a doable project. People can work with us directly. We've done a village profile for each of those villages-'-how many houses need to be rebuilt, how many can be repaired, and other needs. Some are earthquake-related, some of them have always been there and have been aggravated by the earthquake. But why not take this oPPorhmity to make improvements that need to be made regardless of whether there is an emthquake or not? We need a good drinking water supply, we need an adequate communications system which sometimes just means a phone line. We need better roads, we need our schools to be built up, we need public health facilities." Her fiery spirit and tenacious dedication have kept hednKutch for decades, studying and later nurturing Kala Raksha projects, such as its new textile museum. (It survived the quake.) She retains her positive attitude, and quotes her grandmother: "She said 'Go with a sure thing.' And I think that's a good piece of advice in this situation. What we know we canproduce, whatwe are fatniliar with and what we can succeed at, and that is what we'll focus all."

- L.T. For more information on KdlaRaksha's relief efforts for fhe Ktltch artisans, contact Judy Frater <judyf@adI.vsn1.net.in>_ (Also see "Kala Raksha -Artisans' Oasjs," SPAN. May/June 2000.)

Earthquake Engineering Sharing Knowledge and Expertise he January 26 eatihquake

T

in Kutch region of Gujarat once

again brought into focus eatihquake science and our prepat'edness for such natural disasters. India has had three major quakes during the past decade. This time the situation is particularly

grim because

of the huge loss of life and widespread

destruction in a relatively prosperous region of the country. Not only have urban and rural buildings been razed to the ground, the quake has caused great local and national financial loss.

As is said often-quakes don't kill people, it is the unsafe buildings which do. The Bhuj quake's aftermath is a living example of this. Earthquakes of much greater intensity have been experienced elsewhere in the world, but the death tolls have been much lower than in Bhuj. Buildings can be made quake-resistant, if not quakeproof, by following building codes defined by the seismic history of a particular region. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BlS) has evolved a seismic hazard map of the country, and set building codes for each of the five regions-for both engineered and nonengineered structures. But unfortunately, these codes are not mandatory and hence not adhered to. As a result, even engineered structures in urban areas like Ahmedabad crashed literally like a pack of cards.

On the other hand, consider the case of California which falls in a highly seismic region on the west coast of the U.S. In October 1989, a high magnitude quake rocked the Santa Cruz Mountains in central California. The impact was felt in downtown San Francisco-IOO kilometers away-where occupants of the Transamerica Pyramid were unnerved. The 49-story office building shook for more than a minute. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) instruments, installed years earlier, showed that the top floor swayed more than one foot from side to side! However, no one was seriously injured, and the Transamerica Pyramid was not damaged. This famous San Francisco landmark had been designed to withstand even greater eat路thquake stresses, and that design worked as planned during the quake.

"No building is earthquake-proof. But a properly engineered tall building should be able to withstand the maximum credible ealihquake for its area without collapse, and lesser seismic events without major structural damage," says R. Shankar Nair, chairman of Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Chicago. "Of course, mistakes do happen, even in the U.S. But if American standat'ds of design and construction had prevailed in the Bhuj area (an economic impossibility, of course), there would have been casualties from the collapse of a few small buildings and from falling objects, but no large, recentlybuilt multistory building should have collapsed."

"California offers many good models which can be adapted to Indian conditions with the objective of better earthquake safety. But what we need most is enforcement ofIndian standards on earthquake Though the top floor of the 49-stOlY Transamerica Pyramid swayed more than onefootfi'om side to side in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, no one was injured nor the building damaged. Casualties were comparatively few in that quake.

Most houses that collapsed were built on unstable ground.

By

DINESH

C. SHARMA

design. Most often, these are not being followed," observed Sudhir K. Jain, professor and head at the department of civil engineering, Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (llTK), who was co-leader of a joint Indo-U.S. team to the Bhuj region soon after the January 26 quake. William Lettis, a geologist, from the Lettis & Associates, Walnut Creek, California, was also a co-leader of the team. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the team was a pati of "Learning from Eatihquakes" program of the Eat1hquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), Oakland, California.

The nine U.S. team members spent ten days in the field with their Indian counterparts in an investigation of the impact of the earthquake on the built environment, lifelines, port facilities, emergency response, shelter and interim housing. The team began its reconnaissance investigation in the city of Ahmedabad, and then moved to the more severely damaged epicentral areas.

Members of the team included several Indian-American engineers. The U.S. experts included Donald Ballantyne (EQE International, Inc., Seattle), Rakesh Goel (Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo Civil & Environmental Engineering), James Hengesh (URS Corporation, San Francisco), Praveen Malhotra (Factory Mutual Research Corp, Boston), Chandan K. Saiki a (URS Corporation), Mahendra Pal Singh (Virginia Tech) and Krishna Vats a (George Washington University).

The team not only surveyed the damage caused to structures and installations, but also performed initial aerial and field reconnaissance of the Kutch region including the epicentral area of the Bhuj earthquake. "The tectonic setting of the Kutch region is not well understood. The region has characteristics of both intraplate and plate margin environments. The presence of an active fold and thrust belt suggests that this region is pari of the diffuse Indian/Asian plate boundary, or at least a transition zone between the stable portion of

peninsular India and the plate boundary," noted Lettis and Hengesh in a field repOl1 filed from Gujarat. "However, some propel1ies of the region, such as crustal thickness, rigidity and attenuation may be similar to more stable continental environments. FUl1her research is required to document the style and rate of deformation in the Kutch region prior to using the Bhuj eatihquake as an example of a classic intraplate event."

In fact, EERl has been studying Indian quakes as paJi of its "Learning from Earthquakes" program with the objective oflearning lessons from quakes so as to reduce quake risk in future. In the past, after the Uttarkashi (1991), Killari/Latur (1993), Jabalpur (1997), and Chamoli (1999) quak'es, EERI supported the lITK team for postearthquake reconnaissance. In a report after the Jabalpur quake, the IITK team made impOliant observations on buildings with open first story or "soft story." Open first story is a typical feature in modern multistory constructions in urban India. Such features are highly undesirable in buildings built in seismically active areas. This has been verified in numerous experiences of strong shaking during past eal1hquakes.

"Many eaJihquakes in the past, like San Fernando (1971) and Northridge (1994) have demonstrated the potential. hazard associated with such buildings. Major damage to critical hospital facilities in the San Fernando earthquake was attributed to the soft first story, Alarming amount of damage to the buildings with open basements for parking has been repolied during the orthridge eat1hquake. The Jabalpur earthquake also illustrated the handicap oflndian buildings with soft first story," the IITK team observed, The Jabalpm earthquake, the first one in an urban neighborhood in India, provided an opportunity to assess the performance of engineered buildings in the country during ground shaking, In the Bhuj quake also, a lot of buildings with soft stories have collapsed.

The EERI-lTTK collaboration has been fW1her strengthened with the setting up of the National Information Centre for Earthquake Engineering (NICEE)-the first of its kind in India. "Objectives of NICEE are rather simple. Collect and disseminate earthquake engineering infOlmation, literature, etc., to any interested person in the countly. We felt that it will go a long way in capacity building within the country to be able to reduce eaJihquake disasters in the future," says Jain, who is NICEE coordinator. The United States too has similar set-ups for eaJihquake engineering (at the University of California, Berkeley; the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and the State University of New York, Buffalo) since individual institutions cannot afford to purchase all the information. For NICEE, IITK has adopted the SUNY Buffalo model in which the publications acquired by the center aJ'e housed in the main library itself.

EERI has been providing its reports and publications to NICEE free. Others who are contributing to the center include the Multidisciplinary Center for EaJihquake Engineering Research at Buffalo (MCEER) and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, California. George Housner of Caltech-considered father of Ealihquake Engineering by many-also has been providing encouragement and contributing a lot of books.

The engineering of earthquake-resistant constructions is rather a new discipline, and rapid developments are taking place in this area.

But the gap between the state-of-the-ali and that in India has been widening with time. One of the contributing factors to this widening gap is the non-availability of latest books, journals, repOlis, and other materials emanating from other countries to the Indian

researchers and professionals. NICEE is trying to compensate. "It appears to me that the most pressing need today is toward institution building and manpower development. To implement any ideas or concepts you will first need people," says Jain.

Indian scientists have been collaborating with American scientists in another vital area-study of crustal deformations in India using satellite technology. They have been using high precision Global Positioning System (GPS) surveys to study the crustal deformations, using a constellation of GPS satellites owned and operated by the U.S. government.

As the Indian plate moves in a northeastward direction with a certain velocity, it collides with the Eurasian plate. For the past 25 million years, India has been colliding with Asia. The collision has consumed an entire ocean, several islaJ1d arcs and an Ullknown fi'agment of the continent of India, resulting in the elevation of the Tibetan plateau to an average height of five kilometers. The instantaneous rate of collision holds the clue both to the stability of the Tibetan plateau and to the recurrence intervals of great eaJ1hquakes in the Himalayas.

Hitherto, the collision rate has been poorly known. QuantifYing the resulting strain is extremely useful for earthquake hazard studies.

In order to determine the collision rate, a group led by Roger Bilham at the University of Colorado began GPS measurements in Nepal and Tibet in 1991. The group conducted measurements in 1992 and 1994, and remeasured all points in November 1995 collaborating with French scientists and the Nepalese Survey Department. It collected GPS data throughout India, collaborating with scientists at the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation (C-MMACS), Bangalore, led by Vinod K. Gaur. An eminent geophysicist, Gaur has been selected for the 2001 Edward A. Flinn III Award of the American Geophysical Union, in recognition of his "unselfish, cooperation in research through facilitating, coordinating, and implementing activities that have greatly strengthened the infrastructme for geophysical research."

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) also plans to strengthen its GPS network by setting up more stations across the country. The Depal1ment of Science and Technology is funding a string of permanent, semi-permanent and field GPS stations at various scientific institutions. One field station was moved to the Bhuj area soon after the January 26 quake for local area studies. The instrumentation like GPS receivers and monitoring equipment for some of the stations is being supplied by a U.S.-based firm Trimble.

DST officials say GPS data collection in India has received a boost with the U.S. Department of Defense lifting cel1ain restrictions on collection of high resolution data in May last year.

The USGS and IMD have been in talks for sometime with regard to IMD joining USGS' Global Seismographic Network (GSN). But there has been no agreement on sharing of data. GSN has replaced an earlier 40-year-old network called World Wide Standard Seismographic Network (WWSSN). "We have closed virtually all stations of this network, including those in India, and overlaid the world with the GSN. While some of these GSN stations were sited at old WWSSN sites, and the proposed GSN stations in India would have been at old WWSS sites. But there has been no agreement on exchange of data with IMD," says John S. DelT, GSN chief.

0 About the Author: Dinesh C Sharma is a New Delhi-based ji-eelance journalist and columnist on science & technology and information technology issues,

A killer earthquake struck the state of Gujarat at 08:46 on Friday, January 26, within hours, an II-member Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) of the U.S. Agency for Intemational Development (USATO) was packing its bags for India. After USAlD's 24hour operations center in Washington, D.C., received an official cable from u.S. Ambassador Richard Celeste in New Delhi declaring the earthquake a disaster, the team was in the air. The Ambassador's declaration, a prerequisite to mobilizing a DART, outlined the extent of the quake's damage and the type of response needed. In the next few days, working with the Goverrullent of India, the team mobilized over $12 million of USG humanitarian contributions.

USATO, the U.S. government agency responsible for implementing development and humanitarian programs around the globe on behalf of the USG, receives on average 50 to 80 disaster-related calls evety year from American ambassadors posted all over world.

Not all crises require the fiIlI-fledged deployment of a DART. Sometimes a small assessment team or one of US AID's overseas-based regional advisors trom its Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) can manage the necessaIy response. Other times, the USAID country missions define and manage the response activities on their own. But, in extreme calamities, such as the Gujarat quake, USAlD/OFDA quickly mobilizes a comprehensive DART to assess the relief work and coordinate operations.

In the case of the earthquake in Gujarat, USAlD/OFDA Regional Advisor Bill Berger, based in Kathmandu, was designated the DART team leader. On January 28, he hit the ground in Bhuj, one of the worst-hit areas. Berger recognized that he needed to set up a combined operation with dependable and frequent access to local authorities and nongovernmental partners like CARE and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) working with communities affected by the quake.

Thanks to excellent cooperation from one of CRS' major local partners, Berger was able to immediately set up operations at an NGO base-camp just 9 kilometers outside of Bhuj.

This enabled Berger to immediately launch into the challenging job of assessing the emergency needs of those affected by the quake. Other members of the DART arrived

Truckloads of relief and rehabilitation material for the victims of Gujarat earthquake sent by the US Government.

in Delhi and Bhuj soon after.

In Bhuj alone, thousands of people died or were injured, and hundreds of children were orphaned. The actual loss to both human lives and property due to the earthquake may take several months to determine. As of this writing, the Government of India figures place the total death toll at 17,549, the number injured at 166,836, with 600,000 now homeless and 15.9 million people affected.

Ongoing pro petty surveys estimate that more than one million homes and 23,000 schools were either destroyed or damaged, as were hospitals and numerous health care centers.

This staggering damage complicated relief efforts during the initial days following the quake. Rescue teams attempted to set up operations without the benefit of communication lines or electricity. The harsh realities on the ground after a quake are familiar terrain to DART members. It is "a very chaotic situation. Those who smvived the disaster may have lost some of their family members. In this situation, they may be traumatized and effective community cooperation is hard to come by. Rescue operations cannot be immediately swift and comprehensive under such circumstances," notes Greg Garbinsky, deputy teanl leader of the DART, who supervised operations from New Delhi.

The first priority of any rescue team is to provide immediate medical help to the injured and to look for survivors trapped under the rubble caused by collapsed buildings. The next priority is providing water, food, and shelter. Cremating the dead is impOltant. "All these operations must run simultaneously, not waiting for one operation to be over before switching to the next," says Garbinsky. These are tremendously urgent tasks. Tons of mud and rubble have to be

removed to look for survivors, requiring cutting machines, forklifts and cranes, which often need to be acquired from distant places.

Unfortunately, it was not feasible for teams from the United States to alTive in India soon enough to be of assistance in search and rescue operations. Other countries closer to India were able to provide search and rescue teams early enough to be of help in some cases. "One needs to pool resources from different agencies across the country and coordinate the operations," he adds. Within hours of reaching Gujarat, DART team leader Berger sent first-hand reports back to Washington and New Delhi that outlined the immediate relief requirements.

The U.S. Mission countty team members including the Embassy, USATD and the Defense Attache's Office (DAO), with the SUppOlt of DART members then coordinated relief efforts with NGOs and various depattments of the Indian Government. "We did want to make sure that vulnerable people were served immediately. We received the fullest cooperation from every agency involved in the operation," says Garbinsky.

According to DART information officer Amy Tohill-Stull, who was in Gujarat for several days to repOlt on the relief work, "A lot of logistics are involved in the distribution of essential items. This requires the involvement

USAID and the US MilitGlY were among the first to begin relief operations in quake-ravaged Gujarat. Tents, blankets, and plastic sheeting helped meet immediate needs.

oflocal commwlities and NGOs. The cooperation and coordination we received from the Indian Army and local community has been outstanding."

DART members kept staff in New Delhi, as well as in Washington on full aleli as to ongoing and changing needs. An operations center set up in Delhi coordinated the relief work in Gujarat with various officers, including USAID and DAO, who in turn monitored closely the flow of relief material and logistics relating to distribution.

USAID/OFDA has modeled its DART teams after the system used by the U.S, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which handles disaster management within the United States. FEMA draws on the resources of different agencies across the country, such as the U.S. Public Health Service, U.S. Fire Service, and U.S, Geological Survey, Depaliment of Agriculture, or federal, state and local governments, according to the specific type of disaster.

USAlD/OFDA has evolved its own well-

The international responseio the'JGujarat earihguake has been swift an~ comprehensive. Thousands of American o!'ganizatious, citizens, and Indian groups have made substantiaLcontributious in theform of money, food and medical supplies.

USAID and other U.S. government agencies are contributing $12:2 milliou in humanitar路iau.assistance. The packagt} includes technical equipment, emergency food, water purification systems, tents, blankets, medical aid, and disease surveillance.

USAlD provided an initial $100,000 through U.S. Ambassador Richard F. Celeste to the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund for immediate assistance to those affected by the earihquake.

USAID's Office of Food for Peace provided $800,000 in emergency food assistance. CARE and Catholic Relief Services, USAlD partners in relief operations, have distributed more than 100,000 daily rations ofiood.

USAID/OFDA-funded airlifts provided relief materials valued at $2.4 million with transpoli costs. Commodities, including technical equipment, shelter materials, blankets, sleeping bags, water and sanitation equipment, have all been consigned through USAID's implementing partners and the Indian military.

A U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) aim'aft arrived in Gujarat on February 3 with 92 lar'ge tents (capable of accommodating about 50 people each) and 9,300 blankets, 1,500 sleeping bags, two rough terrain forklifts, two water trailers and one 2.5-ton truck. A second DOD airlift containing 1,LOO ]'olls of plastic sheeting, two water purification units, nine water tanks of 3,000-gallon capacity, and 830 tents arTivedthe next day.

The U.S. Pacific Command sent a six-person miJitary assessment team to assist the U.S. Embassy in New Dellii in evaluating the potential suppoli to continue relief efforts. The team is composed of experts in communications, logistics and medical support.

honed system to respond to disasters. Still, each disaster provides its own learning experiences. "Unfortunately it is often events such as this that provide the impetus. Obviously the more you do something the better you are at identifYing the problem," notes Garbinsky, Moreover, each disaster requires different expertise. A team rushed to an earthquake site is different from those sent to a cyclone or fire-affected area. "The DART team handles the immediate, short-term needs whereas the longer-term requirements, like the rehabilitation work, are handled by other paris of USAID." A DART is by nature a temporary team within USAID. Responding to a question about the utility of setting up an agency on the lines ofFEMA in India, Garbinsky said, "Keeping in mind the size of the country like India and its disaster vulnerability, an effective nodal agency is probably useful for tackling natural disasters. A few regional centers may also need to D be set up for calamities."

CARE received $1.8 million from USAID/OFDA to implement emergency food distribution and com!1"lunityinfrastructure programs, benefiting 50,000 people in Kutch district alone. CARE has been providing survival, kits, shelter and repairing wells.

USAlD/OFDA provided $1.5 million to Catholic Rel ief Services (CRS) for the implementation of emergency water and shelter programs in Gujarat to benefit 250,000 affected persons in Bhuj, Anjar and Bachao. Apart fi'om meeting the emergency requirements of affected people, CRS will provide trauma counseling.

USAID/OFDA provided $852,400 to WorldVision to carry out an emergency aid program to tbe worst affected population of Gujar路at.World Vision will provide basic food and bousehold supplies to 15,000 families in Bhuj, Anjar and Bachao. It will also deliver potable water for 75,000 people in 50 villages.

USAlD!OFDA provided $400,000 to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for immediate distribution offood, water, shelter material, and essential household items to eartbquake victims in Patan and Surendranagar. UNDP will coordinate relief effOlis in Bhuj and Ahmedabad.

The World tIealth Organization (WHO) received $232,000 from USAlD/OFDA to implement a six.-montb watel~ sanitation, environmental health, and disease surveillance program in the earthquake affected area.

Prior to the Gujarat quake, USAID provided funding.in support of the Program for the Enhancement of Emergency Response, a regional training initiative designed to promote, develop and strengthen capabilities in earthquake-prone countries of Asia. The first training course focused on medical response and was held in India in December. A second course on collapsed structure search and rescue training is scheduled to take place in March 2001.

D

the stuff is an eye-popping wonder to behold. It does magic with light. Some versions are the most brilliant mirrors ever made. Others are semitransparent but explode in dazzling color.

"Sometimes we just sit and look at it," said Andrew Ouderkirk, the leader of the engineering team that came up with the film under 3M's" 15 percent rule" that lets its inventors spend that portion of their time on almost anything they want.

One member of the team fashioned a sheet of the new film into a small sack.

"One of our favorite things about this bag of light is that it almost seems to glow ...to be illuminated from within," Ouderkirk says. Gazing inside is like staring into a sci-fi-film special effect, with saturated, prismatic colors shifting across the spectrum as the bag crinkles and moves.

But 3M's marketers don't plan to sit and stare at bags of Iight. The fi 1m's first commercial uses, now reaching the market, are as backing for flatpanel displays-it makes the screens on laptop computers and personal organizers 30 percent brighter. And when futuristic "photonic computers" become available-these use different colored streams of light rather than electrons to carry information-the new film can be used as a precise, efficient color filter to separate frequencies cleanly as they carom through the processor.

Another mutation likely to find plenty of buyers is a "cold mirror," which reflects visible light at nearly 100 percent efficiency but lets heat-carrying infrared radiation go right through. That's useful to the building trade. Light pipes-large tubes lined with cold mirror film-could deliver bright sunshine from skylights into a room without overheating the room. Alternatively, Ouderkirk says, a film that reflects infrared radiation but lets the sun shine through could keep greenhouses bright but cool.

The new film could mark the end, however, of the cardboard windshield barriers that block light in shadeless parking lots. Transparent car windows with a coating of light-management film could keep interiors from baking when an auto is parked in the sun for a couple of hours. And there's more car talk

"Sometimes we just sit and look at it," said Andrew Ouderkirk, the leader of the engineering team that came up with the film.

from Kevin Kuck, one of 3M's general managers, who figures shatterproof reflectors, such as on auto rearview mirrors, could catch on.

B

utterfly wings. Part of the inspiration for the film's optical qualities came from nature. The iridescent colors in many butterflies, the brilliant hues from an oil sheen floating on water, and the colors emerging from inside an abalone shell all come from the refraction oflight as it passes through and reflects between thin layers of transparent material. About as thick as typing paper, a sheet of the film contains hundreds of alternating layers of flexible polymers or plastics with slightly different optical qualities. By themselves the layers are each transparent, but stacked up they trap, refract, and reflect light in ways never seen before.

Depending on the exact specs, a sheet may reflect more than 99 percent of the light that hits it rather than the 95 percent that bounces off a common metal-coated glass mirror like the one on your medicine cabinet. Or, with slightly different thicknesses and chemistry to the layers, vibrant colors emerge from it as light of various wavelengths rattles around among its many internal interfaces. The material was featured on the cover of America's leading research journal last year when Science recounted how the 3M team found a loophole in a 200-year-old canon of optical physi~s called Brewster's Law, named for the 19th-century Scot who discovered it. Brewster said that Iight reflects at varying efficiencies depending on the angle at which, after crossing through one material, it reaches the surface of another. The new film, thanks to the way its molecules are oriented, can be tailored to reflect selective wavelengths almost perfectly no matter which direction they come from.

An advanced degree in science isn't required, however, to use the stuff. The colorful, flexible film makes sensational ribbon and wrapping paper bursting with shifting color. The company also plans to cut it up finely as glitter (because it doesn't oxidize, it stays shiny longer than standard metal glitter) and may put tiny motes of it in cosmetics. 3M won't say exactly what it costs to make, only that it's cheap.

"We can turn it out by the mile," said one company rep. No comment from the company, either, on whether it makes a suitable party dress.

0 About the AuthOlO: Charles W Petit is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Rep011.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE II

E

"1 can t marry you, Dave, howevel; 1 would be interested in a strategic alliance."

Copyright

© 1998 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 1999 The Conference Board.

All rights reserved.

The Nation as Brand ew things in marketing are harder to define than the personality of a brand, and seldom is this task more complex than when the brand is sold in many different markets. What is it, exactly, about the Coke brand that makes consumers around the world prefer to be associated with it than with a dozen nearly identical products in different cans?

A brand is a complex mixture of attributes: Its visible face is its packaging and visual identity, its voice is its advertising ...but its actual personality is something that really exists only in the mind of the consumer.

One attribute particularly important to international brands is the influence that

F

the brand's country of origin-or the country that people believe it comes from-has on the consumer's perception of the brand.

The fact that Coke and Levi's and Nike and Pepsi are known to come from America is a fundamental part of their success, and the reason why their advertising messages have always stressed their sheer Americanness.

In a similar way, car brands are often strongly linked in the consumer's mind to their country of origin-it's hard to think of BMW or Mercedes except in the context of their being German; a Rover or a Jaguar is linked with Britishness (despite the fact that both brands are now under overseas ownership); and Ferrari is a

brand that is Italian before it's anything else at all. Provenance is such a powerful element of a brand's equity that it's common for a company to imply a false provenance if it creates better, more natural associations than the true country of origin. For example, Brooklyn, Italy's leading brand of chewing gum, is manufactured near Milan by a company called Perfetti and, in its long history, has never been anywhere near the United States.

In fact, a brand's native country behaves exactly like the parent company of any product: At best, it can act as an umbrella of quality that reassures consumers that they're buying from a trusted source; at worst, an inappropriate or negative image

Ever consider how much of a brand's appeal comes from its native land?

can make it extremely difficult to export anything from that country unless its provenance is disguised.

Just like corporate brands, country brands evoke certain values, qualifications, and emotional triggers in consumers' minds about the likely values of any product that comes from that country.

In the United Kingdom, consumers are happy to buy banking services from Sainsbury's-a grocery chain-because there is a healthy and attractive match between the values, qualifications, and emotional triggers they already associate with the Sainsbury's corporate brand, and the attributes that they demand from people who handle their money. Likewise,

we're happy to buy outdoor clothing from Australia because the country that produced Crocodile Dundee is surely well qualified to protect us from weather and wild animals, and there's a good emotional match with the perceived Australian qualities of humorous, rough-and-ready, unselfconscious masculinity.

Look around, and there are many powerful parent brands that haven't yet explored the rich potential of unexpected yet compelling brand extensions: Boeing suitcases? Greyhound sunglasses? Swatch skis? NATO computers? It's a game almost as amusing to playas the converse-trying to mismatch parent brands and brand extensions as horren-

dously as possible: Boeing toilet paper?

Greyhound air freshener? Swatch cough syrup? NATO pizza? (This is more than a game-it's an exercise I often use to help companies get their own heads around what their brand is, what it could be, and what it definitely shouldn't be).

In exactly the same way, when you try to match provenance with product, there are some pairings that clearly make brand sense, others that just don't. People might well purchase Indian accountancy software or a stylish Lithuanian raincoat, and although I'm tempted to say that they probably wouldn't buy Peruvian modems or Dutch perfume, attitudes can and do change awfully quickly. A decade ago,

who would have believed that we'd be happily consuming Japanese beer, Malaysian cars, and Danish mozzarella?

These changes in purchasing habits often come about because nations can enhance their own brand values, just as manufacturers can enhance the brand equity of their commercial brands. Japan is perhaps the most striking example of a country that has succeeded in completely altering its values as a provenance brand in a short space of time. Thilty years ago, "Made in Japan" was a decidedly negative concept; most Western consumers based their perception of "brand Japan" on their experience of shoddy products flooding the marketplace. The products were cheap, celtainly, but basically wOlthless. In many respects, the perception of Japan was much as China's is today.

Yet Japan has now become enviably synonymous with advanced technology, manufacturing quality, competitive pricing, even style and status. Japan, indeed, passes the best branding test of all: whether consumers are prepared to pay more money for functionally identical products, simply because of where they come from. In the 1950s and '60s, most Emopeans and Americans would opt for Japanese products only because they were significantly cheaper than a Western alternative; now, in celtain valuable market segments, such as consumer electronics, musical instruments, and motor vehicles, Westelll consumers will consistently pay more for products manufactured by previously unknown brands, purely because they are perceived to be Japanese. And this kind of worldwide consumer preference is of almost incalculable value to the country's economy as a whole; no wonder so many nations are working hard on their branding strategies.

Korea, too, has undergone a similar and even more rapid transformation in its brand image, thanks to the efforts of such corporations as Hyundai, Daewoo, Samsung, and LG, and perhaps the Japanese example unconsciously aided consumers in their

acceptance of the brand.

Needless to say, country brands can decline as well as prosper, and the familiar, depressing marketing tenet holds as true for countries as it does for companies: It can take decades of excellent products before consumers stalt to equate a company with quality, but one single bad product to damage this perception (anyone remember the Yugo?).

Having said this, the most robust brands are invari~bly the biggest, most complex, and oldest ones, and their overall image tends to suffer relatively little as a result of occasional slip-ups. Consumers appear to need, and want to believe in, the basic validity of powerful brands, and will forgive them their mistakes more readily than they will with newer, simpler, or more superficial brands. And because a countly'S brand is usually highly complex and highly robust, and built up over centuries,

turies of possibly negative associations.

A country like Scotland, on the other hand, which people around the world feel they already know, has a high profile, ready appeal, robust equities, and powerful associations. But to update or modifY these qualities-and reposition Scotland as a country with commercial, economic, and technological relevance in the modern world-is con路espondingly harder. In other words, this is a supertanker that has been gathering speed for centmies, so steering it is proportionally slower and harder.

Many other countries could capitalize on the success of their high-profile brands: for example, Finland and Nokia. (fFinland intends to make itself into a valuable nation-brand, the country must capitalize quickly on the significance of Nokia's origin. Through a combination of high product quality, speed to market, excellent marketing (including placement in films such

Strong brands tend to be rich and complex, successfl:llly combining many different character traits within their personalities. it is relatively hard to alter or damage it except through major political, economic, or social upheaval. Like a supeltanker, a countly's brand image takes miles to pick up speed, but equally, it takes miles to slow down again, change direction, or stop.

Some countries, of course, are "launch brands," and don't have centmies of history, tradition, and foreign interaction upon which to build their reputations. For a COuntly like Slovenia to enhance its image abroad is a very different matter than for Scotland or China. Slovenia needs to be launched--eonsumers around the world first must be taught where it is, what it makes, what it has to offer, and what it stands for, and this in itself represents a powerful oPPOltunity: the chance to build a modern countly brand, untainted by cen-

as The Matrix), and distribution, Nokia has transformed itself from a moderately successful domestic producer of rubber boots into one of the world's most successful high-tech brands. In doing this, it has also managed to create an entirely new set of associations of "brand Finland" in many consumers' minds-no longerjust a quaint failyland perched on the fringe of Europe, this is a country that can do technology, can do marketing, and can become worldbeating.

And there's a good deal of that mysterious, associative consumer logic that makes this shift believable. Who knows-perhaps it's something to do with the fact that cold-climate countries are believed to be precise and efficient, and therefore good locations to design and manufacture high-

tech products. If other Finnish companies-and Finland itself-don't move quickly to build on and leverage this climate of global consumer acceptance, they are missing a great opportunity. Sadly, Nokia itself seems at pains to diminish its own origins in the way it markets its products, perhaps in an effort to appear "global," which means that this valuable proFinnish opportunity may be going to waste.

When you look in detail at the issue of provenance, it becomes clear why certain countries behave like brands. Just like commercial brands, "country brands" are well understood by consumers around the world, have long-established identities, and can work just as effectively as an indicator of product quality, a definer of image and target market, as the manufacturer's name on the package.

1have already mentioned Coke, Levi's, Nike, and Pepsi, and the importance of their American origins to their brand values, and there's little doubt that the United States is the world's most powerful country brand. This may well be connected with the fact that Brand USA has the world's best advertising agency, Hollywood, which has been busily pumping out two-hour commercials for Brand USA for nearly a century, and which consumers around the world have enthusiastically paid to watch.

Brand USA also has a dynamic salespromotion agency called NASA, which periodically sends a rocket into space (primarily, it often seems, to demonstrate the superiority of American technology).

American brands can simply hitch themselves to this powerful national brand and a cultural and commercial trail is instantly blazed for them around the world.

Only a few other countries have clear, consistent, and universally understood brand images, and most of them are European: for example, England (heritage and class), France (quality living and chic), Italy (style and sexiness), Germany (quality and reliability), Switzerland (methodical

preCIsIon and trustwOlthiness), Sweden (cleanliness and efficiency), Japan (miniaturization and advanced functionality).

As might be expected, all of these countries produce successful international brands, which are in turn strongly associated with the brand qualities of their provenance. In fact, it's hard to find any international brands that don't come from strongly branded countries: Brand-neutral countries such as Belgium, Portugal, Austria, Chile, or Canada have produced remarkably few international market leaders.

There are, however, several strongly branded countries that produce no international brands of their own. Brazil is a fine example of this phenomenon, which is surprising because the brand personality of Brazil is a strong and highly consistent one.

No matter who you ask, no matter where, the same list of associations come outsamba, football, carnival, music, dancing, happiness, ecology, sex, beaches, and adventure-a list that could form the brand print of almost any successful youth product on the market today.

Of course, the average Brazilian may find these cliches depressing and even insulting, but they are undeniably an excellent platform on which to build a believable global brand. One of the more impOltant tasks of advertising and marketing is to weave these commonplaces of provenance into something more creative, more substantial, more fair, more true.

The fact that there may be negative associations-pollution, overpopulation, poverty, drugs, crime-within Brazil's brand print isn't necessarily a problem.

Strong brands tend to be rich and complex, successfully combining many different character traits within their personality. The United States' brand equity is at least half negative, but this doesn't appear to spoil it in any way. For younger consumers in palticular, the suggestion of risk is irresistible-remember, these are consumers who want to challenge and to be challenged.

Many "emerging" markets in the past have exported their products around the world in the form of unprocessed or partly processed commodities, but almost

none have ever managed to produce a successful international brand. The real profit margins have been enjoyed by the companies in the developed nations that have finished, packaged, branded, and retailed these goods to the end user.

Such an alTangement works well to keep Third World countries finnly in the Third World, and First World cow1tries in the First. This problem is made only more serious by the fact that the emerging markets are, by and large, able to continue expOlting in quantities large enough to sustain their fragile economies only by depleting their natural resources and allowing the exploitation of their workforce.

Brands, however, unlike commodities, are made of air, and are thus infinitely sustainable, so long as the investment in marketing is maintained, which makes them the ultimate ecological export. In the long term, they can also contribute to a positive perception of the country, which in turn favors tourism and inward investment. Young Asian consumers, for example, might well be tempted to visit Brazil if that was where their favorite brands came from, just as Disney and Coke and Nike are part of the reason why they want to visit the United States now.

It's not just Brazil that could benefit from expOlting brands rather than produce. Of course, few emerging countries have Brazil's natural advantages: a strong nation-brand, an increasingly vigorous economy, a government that actively encourages expOlt, long experience in building successful domestic brands, and one of the world's most active and creative advertising industries. Even so, it doesn't take much imagination to see how certain other nations-perhaps Russia, China, India and some African countries-eould quickly develop the potential to become strong "nation brands."

For much of this century, global brands have been the exclusive province of European and American producers. But much has changed during this time: Consumers in many parts of the world are

becoming wealthier, better informed, and able to exercise more power over manufacturers than ever before. As the basic requirements of product quality and affordability are catered to and choice becomes the norm, consumers become, by degrees, more and more sensitive to brand values: how the product is presented, how it speaks to the consumer, how it addresses her needs.

As consumers begin to look for a more sophisticated combination of import-style quality and domestic-style relevance in their imported brands, we may well begin to see a consumer backlash against the insufficiently sensitive marketing techniques traditionally practiced by some foreign brand-owners.

The simplicity and robustness of an approach like "buy this, it's American" won't work anymore. Sensitivity to culture could well become one of the defining characteristics of the new century's successful global brands. In the past, the brands that shouted loudest were the ones that grew fastest; in the 21 st century, the ones that listen first could be the ones that last longest.

It may also turn out that Brazilian and other Third World brands have an innate advantage over American and European brands when it comes to making friends among consumers in the world's growth markets-the Far East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Central Asia, and South Asia-because of their humbler provenance. Unlike the old European powers, these countries don't need to undo the damage done to their brand images by centuries of military and political colonization: They start with a clean slate, with basically benign commercial colonization. Brazil and other emerging nations enjoy the privilege of being "colleague countries," and may well find that their provenance is not merely an important characteristic of their brand personality but, rather, a fundamental preliminary to consumer acceptance.

For rich nations looking for innovative and effective ways to help developing countries become self-sufficient rather than aid-dependent, this approach is the

perfect combination of capital investment and intellectual SUppOlt: venture capital for building expolt businesses, and professional expeltise for helping those businesses to build global brands.

Launching global brands requires flair, confidence, and courage as well as money (although, thanks to the way that the Internet has put global viral marketing within the reach of everybody with a brain and a computer, the level of investment in media need no longer be as colossal as it once was). It requires objectivity to an unusual degree-the ability to see yourself as others see you, and to accept that this is, at least in commercial terms, more important than the way you see yourself. It requires government support.

It requires reduced trade barriers. It requires competent and internationally minded marketing people and a strong advertising resource.

It also requires a basic readiness on the part of the target consumer to believe that the country of origin possesses the necessary ski lis and resources to manufacture a "world-class" product.

Many would claim that this factor is the biggest single obstacle standing in the way of poorer countries producing global brands. Interestingly, however, it's a barrier that appears to be diminishing, and this is partly through the experience of seeing countries Iike Japan and Korea develop, in an amazingly short time, from negati ve-equity nation brands to almost "compulsory-source" countries for certain products.

Wealth Redistribution Through Branding But there's a more subtle reason for this change in attitudes, for which we must thank some of the world's biggest brands. For decades, companies such as Nike, IBM, Disney, MatteI, and Sony have been unwittingly promoting their supplier nations as sub-brands, simply by putting Iittle stickers on their products saying "Made in Malaysia," "Made in Vietnam," "Made in Thailand," and so forth. This low-pressure trickle cam-

paign has effectively communicated to hundreds of mill ions of consumers the simple fact that most of the world's best products are now manufactured in the Third World, thus neatly paving the way for manufacturers in those countries to start developing their own brands.

Simpl istic, maybe, but undeniably attractive: Simply add the right branding expertise to a country living on sweatshop labor and break-even trading, and you have the beginning of a fast-growth manufacturing economy instead of a submerging service state.

There is much simple justice in this, and a simple formula is irresistible: If a company in a rich country sells brands to rich consumers in the same or other rich countries, nothing really happens-money simply circulates within a more or less closed system, and there's little to criticize on moral grounds.

If a company in a rich country sells brands to poor consumers in the same or other rich countries, there is a risk of exploitation and a further widening of the wealth gap.

If a company in a rich country sells brands to consumers in a poor country, the risk of exploitation is far higher, partly because the cultural vulnerability of the consumers is greater: They haven't yet been "inoculated" against brands by repeated exposure to sophisticated marketing techniques.

But if a company in a poor country sells brands to consumers in a rich country, the overall balance begins to be redressed, and justice begins to be done.

Global brands as the ultimate distributor of wealth? It's an intriguing thought. After all, marketing did much to increase the unequal distribution of wealth during the last century, so why shouldn't marketing be used to reverse the trend-and balance things out a little better during the next? D About the Author: Simon Anhalt is chairman andfounder of World Writers, a London-based international brand strategy and advertising consultancy. He is author of Another One Bites the Grass: Making Sense oflntemational Advel1ising (Wiley).

AS AMERICAN AS CRICKET Thanks to infotech whizzes from the Indian subcontinent, a movement has been growing to bring what was once the most English of sports into the American mainstream. It just might succeed. he American cricket and as baffling as wallseason had entered paper on the ceiling and its penultimate week "spotted dick" on dessert last fall, and Manish menus. But cricket is no Prabhu, Microsoft Cricket longer particularly English.

Club's most gifted player, For one thing, the English was praying that his team are no longer so very good would win the NOlihwest at it: they cmrently rank a Cricket League champiwretched eighth out of nine onship. For that to happen, among the major cricketlndo-Pak Cricket Club had playing nations. Cricket's to upset Seattle Cricket epicenter has shifted deciClub, Microsoft's main The Micros0.!Jk'fricket Club. sively from England to South Asia. Now enterprising South Asian immigrants rival, in a game then in progress at Fort Dent Park, in Seattle. A cricket fan ever since [ was a child in South 'I\.~ are eager to make the United States a force in world Africa, I watched the game with Prabhu from the side'I~ cricket. lines. Mid-conversation he broke into applause as a II," il\ ' As we sat beneath the wind-tousled willows, Manish burly Indian software engineer thumped a ball over our / Prabhu described the new energy that the Indian diaspoheads. It bounced off a Jeep Cherokee and disappeared __ _ ra has brought to the game. Microsoft's Redmond caminto the parking lot beyond.

I'''''''' pus has about 15,000 employees. Some 2,000 of them The scene around us seemed airlifted straight out of are South Asian immigrants. Most of the immigrants, like Prabhu, are software-development engineers.

England: blackberry bushes lined a leafY lane, a humpbacked stone bridge spanned a stream, cricketers clad Together with a smattering of Australians, South in pristine white dotted the willow-edged park. Even the weathAfricans, and Englishmen at Microsoft, the South Asian engineers er felt right. Rain had been forecast, but the sun had sheared constitute a serious cricket subculture. Microsoft evidently underthrough the clouds to deliver an immaculate blue day, as rare in stands that cricket makes them happy: it pays the league fees for Seattle as in Yorkshire. its employees' teams.

Fort Dent, five minutes from Sea- Tac Airport, is the hub of Prabhu joined Microsoft-the corporation and the cricket American cricket's renaissance. Every weekend from April team-in 1996. ow 29, he is at the peak of his cricketing through September engineers, chefs, postdoctoral fellows, taxi prowess-and of his dedication. When he can't find bowlers to drivers, and paper-pulp moguls gather at Fort Dent to play and practice with, he improvises with a baseball pitching machine. talk cricket. Their conversations, as often as not, turn to the But it's a frustrating compromise. In cricket the ball is supposed prospect of converting cricket into an American game. to bounce off the ground before reaching the batter. It's supMost Americans view cricket as quintessentially, unfathposed to swing and spin unpredictably, with variable speed, not omably English-less a sport than an eccentric kind of picnic, just through the air but off the grass as well. A pitch from a base-

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ball machine is lackluster, offering only movement through the air, and is consequently too easy for a cricketer to hit.

It is only natural to compare cricket with its domestic rival.

After work Prabhu and his colleagues practice cricket on a field that adjoins a baseball diamond. When night descends, Prabhu finds himself gazing enviously at the baseball players' expensive floodlights, their batting cage, the perfectly level green.

"Someday that could be us," he said to me. "I've told my wife that when I make money, the first thing I'll do is build an excellent cricket field. The thing is, if 1 keep playing this much cricket, I'll never make that much money."

What would make the biggest difference to cricket in America? His response was instant: "Seeing cricket, lots of it, on TV. Not just pay-per-view, like now." Prabhu recalled journeying as a boy from Bombay to his grandmother's village, a place that electricity hadn't yet reached. He would try to play cricket with the village children, but they weren't interested. When he returned to that village recently, electricity and TV had made a difference. "The kids were playing the game evelY minute, everywhere," he said. "Now they can see cricket wherever it is being played in the world, nonstop on television. But you know the best thing for cricket in America?" he added, his eyes twinkling. "Get Bill Gates' kids involved."

Prabhu grimaced and fell silent: an Indo-Pak fielder had dropped a straightforward catch near the boundary. Seattle Cricket Club was headed for certain victory. Together we watched Microsoft's hope of taking the championship go into hibernation until the spring.

"Serious spol1," George Orwell once wrote, is "war minus the shooting." This is nowhere truer than in the cricket stadiums of South Asia, where the line between the region's militaly conflicts and the passions stirred by cricket victories and defeats can be razor-thin. Tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and nuclear testing have spilled over into cricket, resulting in riots, fans' deaths, and the ravaging of cricket fields. Such volatility has forced the two nations' teams to stage most of their contests in distant, neutral venues such as Toronto and Saudi Arabia.

When India defeated Pakistan in 1996, traumatized Pakistan supporters accused their team's captain, Wasim Akram, who had withdrawn because of an injury shortly before the game, of folding under pressure from a betting syndicate.

Vengeful fans kidnapped Akram's father and held him hostage for several days. (In light of such a incident, Seattle's "Indo-Pak Cricket Club" sounds like a magic-realist joke in a Salman Rushdie novel. It's as if a Cold War-era hockey team had called itself the SovietAmericans.)

In the four cricket-besotted nations of South Asia-Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh-the sport knows no equal as a repositOly of virulent patriotism. When the

Bangladeshi team pulled off a shock upset of Pakistan two years ago in the Cricket World Cup, in England, millions of Bangladeshis took to the streets to celebrate. Some waved banners declaring PAKISTAN'S SECOND DEFEAT: 1971 & 1999-a reference to the war between East and West Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh. When Sri Lanka played South Afi路ica during the Cricket World Cup, Tamil secessionists hired a plane to fly over the cricket stadium trailing the words, SOUTH AFRICA, WE TAMILS SUPPORT YOU. To Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority, such an act was tantamount to treason.

011Dent Park is quite a distance from South Asia's impassioned geopolitics. Yet in the past few years some of that energy, stripped of its bitter factionalism, has unquestionably begun to invigorate the American game. One early-fall day T returned to Fort Dent to talk to U.S. cricket's most erudite, indefatigable campaigner, Deb K. Das. Das emigrated from Delhi by way of Cambridge University, arriving in Seattle in 1962. He holds a master's in economics and works as a long-range energy forecaster for the city of Seattle. But cricket remains his first love. Das is the U.S. coordinator of cricinfo.com, the world's largest cricket Website.

Along with the predictable match schedules and repol1s, the site offers a treasure trove of arcana: a summary of cricket's thousand-year-old ancestry, the composition of the 1930s Hollywood team that toured Canada (it included Errol Flynn, Boris Karioff, and Nigel Bruce), and an exhaustive cricket-to-baseball dictionary-a magisterial work Qf translation.

Together Das and T watched the seemingly invincible Seattle pulverize P0l1land. I asked Das how big he thought cricket could get in America.

"You must understand," he said, "this is not something new.

Cricket has been played in Seattle for over a hundred years, and in places like Boston and Philadelphia for far longer than that. In the 1850s cricket was the most popular team sport in America.

At Bloomingdale Park, in New York, 10,000 spectators would spend a $150,000-a fortune back then-gambling on the outcome of a cricket match."

American cricket's finest hour to date came on January 5, 1888, when c.L. Bixby, of Boston's Longwood Cricket Club, led the United States to victory over the fabled West Indies cricket team. But as cricket went professional in England and Australia in the 1880s, it remained on an amateur footing in America. By the 1920s it had been eclipsed by the secessionist sport of baseball.

Deb Das is hopeful that the sport can reclaim some of its fonner glory in this country. "We may never have a cricket Big Ten in America," he told me.

"But if you're thinking soccer, even tennis, yes, we can get to that level. Twenty years ago soccer was

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introduced it as an alternate sport in elementary school. This is our challenge: to get it on TV and into schools. And have cricket camps for American kids."

Das recounted how in the past 18 months Mike Miller, a former club cricketer from London, had launched a pilot program to take the sport into California schools. The kids' enthusiasm has persuaded the United States of America Cricket Association (USACA) that it can generate for cricket a grassroots culture comparable to soccer's, lifting the sport beyond its immigrant base.

Das' friend Jack Surendranath joined us on our park bench.

The two have known each other since the early 1960s, when Surendranath, recently arrived from India, bowled for the U.S. national cricket team.

"This is a global age, and cricket has gone global," Das said.

Indeed, the populations of all the cricket-obsessed countries add up to more than 1.5 billion people, roughly six times the population of the United States. "In India you breathe cricket," Surendranath said. "There are one billion Indians. Is there anyone in r ndia who hasn't seen cricket? r sincerely believe such a person does not exist. But cricket still has an image problem in America. What did Robin Williams call it?

'Baseball played on Valium.'" I said 1 had once mentioned to an American friend that Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett were both ardent cricket fans. "Of course," the friend responded. "All that organized futility."

Das nodded. "But the One Day Revolution has given us the chance to change all that." He recapped the history of that revolution, which began in the late 1970s, when a maverick Australian entrepreneur invented a condensed one-day cricket game to rival the three- and five-day games that gave cricket its reputation in America for geological-scale tedium. Although the long version is still widely played, "one-day cricket," in which each team faces a single inning of 300 balls, has sparked the spOli's international resurgence. The shotier, less arcane, more dramatic game can draw 90,000 spectators to stadiums from Calcutta to Melbourne.

Excitement surrounding the 1999 Cricket World Cup, in which one-day cricket was played, accounted for some 35 percent of all TVs sold in India that year. As cricket has gone populist, so the spoti's coffers have begun to fill. urist deferiders of the game dismiss quick cricket as the Disneyfication of their hallowed pastime. Their metaphor may actually be prophetic. Representatives from the Disney Corporation attended the World Cup in 1999 and were evidently impressed: they have had discussion with the USACA about the possibility of constructing a stadium in Orlando and perhaps even hosting the World Cup there.

Max Shaukat, a New Yorker born in Pakistan, believes that cricket will prove lucrative enough to enter the American mainstream and that enthusiasts here will soon be able to watch the game on open TV channels. Shaukat presides over the World Cricket League, an organization concerned less with American

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cricket players than with the needs of cricket fans. He estimates that one million to 1.5 million people in America follow cricket on a regular basis. But they're still mostly South Asian and Caribbean immigrants residing in ew York, ew Jersey, Florida, California, and the Pacific Northwest.

"The challenge is to get cricket into the American mental software," Shaukat told me. "At the moment, we're still under different operating systems." Last year Shaukat's organization pulled off a triumph, winning suppOli from New York City for a new cricket stadium. The stadium is to be erected in Brooklyn with $30 million from private investors. As Ken Podziba, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's sports commissioner, puts it, "We don't want people to think of just basketball, baseball, and hockey-they should think of cricket, too. We want a cricket field that will ~ttract the world's best players for a New York audience."

Wandering my favorite cricket haunt-Van COIiland Park, in the Bronx-one sultry afternoon last summer, I was spoiled for choice: five games were in progress. I decided to watch Big Apple Cricket Club take on East Canje Cricket Club. Big Apple was a here-comes-everybody sort of team, with players from at least five different countries. East Canje, I learned, is a tiny coastal village in the Caribbean nation of Guyana. All the players on the East Canje team were Guyanese expatriates; they knew one another from high school. The captain explained to me, "When anyone arrives in New York fr0111East Canje, the next week he gets recruited."

Before me, competing ,fiercely, were two very different visions of American cricket: the one expansive, a global SPOli's embrace of cosmopolitan possibility; the other an act of immigrant nostalgia, an .attempt to re-create within the chaos of America the ancestral village, through cricket and ethnic selfenclosure.

Even if American cricket chooses the cosmopolitan road, it has a long way to travel before it can recover the popularity it possessed a century ago. Despite the game's resurgence in America, India still boasts more blind cricketers-three mill ion of themthan there are sighted cricketers in the United States. (In blind cricket a rattle is placed inside the ball, enabling play by ear.) .

Cricket's advocates take heart from the way soccer has been grafted onto the American sporting scene. Even in the early '80s soccer was viewed as alien. But today there are some 18 million U.S. soccer players, a professional league with growing popularity, and a ubiquitous presence in the schools. Can cricket hope to emulate that success? Or, for that matter, even hope for the kind of modest fan base that "American" football has built in Europe? Perhaps. But even in Seattle not all the auguries are good. Despite Microsoft's support for the cricketing devotions of its software engineers, my Microsoft Word spell checker still underlines "cricketer" in red as a nonexistent word.

0 About the Author: Rob Nixon is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Long before Harry Potter, another wizard n August 1, 1900, a clerk in the Librarian of Congress' copyright office opened a letter that read, "Enclosed please find check for $2.20 for which please enter for copyright and send certificates of same of the two following books." The first of the two was the long-since-forgotten The Navy Alphabet, by L. Frank Baum, in whose hand the letter was written. The second was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A little more than a month later, on September 8, 1900, the now copyrighted Wizard was the subject of an enthusiastic piece in The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art. "The book has a bright and joyous atmosphere, and does not dwell upon killing and deeds of violence," the unsigned article concluded. "Enough stirring adventure enters into it, however, to flavor it with zest, and it will indeed be strange if there be a normal child who will not enjoy the story."

Thus was the Wizard given to the world. Now, a century later, Dorothy, Toto, and all the gang were back at the Library of Congress, which threw them a birthday party of sorts, by means of an exhibition (the last of four marking the Library's two centuries of existence). The show, held in April last year, contained

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~ a wide variety of books, artifacts, illustrations, motion pictures, and commercial gimcracks related to the land ofOz~ not to mention the Cowardly Lion's wig and, possibly, a pair of :5 Dorothy's ruby shoes from the 1939 Judy Garland movie. This ~ .~ last item will cause a mild case of hives in true amateurs d'Oz; as

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Some Oz lovers may find this homage to Baum quite out of <3 character for a library; many of them believe that librarians have long taken a dim view of Dorothy and her friends. Indeed, the books were difficult to find in libraries during the first part of this century. Some librarians seemed to find them silly and insubstantial, while others took issue with their tales of witchcraft-shades of the Harry Potter controversy. Even today, say Oz scholars, libraries often choose not to stock the books. (Not so the Library of Congress, whose collection includes copies in Spanish, Russian, German, Romanian, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic.)

In the 1950s, Gore Vidal wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books that revealed him to be an unreconstructed Ozophile; on the question of librarian antipathy to the Wizard, he noted that librarians "have made the practical point that if you buy one volume of a popular series you will have to get the whole lot and there are, after all, 40 Oz books." Only 14 were written by Baum, although the books in the series written by Ruth Plumly Thompson meet with the approval of many Ozmatics, including Vidal, who said the books were a major element in his growing up. "Like most Americans my age (with access to books) I spent a good deal of my youth in Baum's Land ofOz," he wrote. "I have a precise, tactile memory of the first Oz book that came into my hands. It was the original 19ro edition of The Emerald City of Oz.

Above: A rare first edition of Oz, illustrated by W W Denslow, from the collection of the Library of Congress. Left: Off to see the Wizard, Young Judy Garland romps with her fantastic companions, (from left to right) the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), the Tin Woodsman (Jack Haley), and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), as they journey to find The Wizard of Oz. This 1939 film launched a series of great movie musicals produced by MGM Studios and has became a perennial holiday classic.

Far left: The title page of the first edition of Oz.

Oz is a peculiarly American fairyland, a mechanic's fantasy where the workings of the miraculous are often explained.

I still remember the look and the feel of those dark blue covers, the evocative smell of dust and old ink. I also remember that I could not stop reading and rereading the book. But 'reading' is not the right word. In some mysterious way, I was translating myself to Oz, a place which I was to inhabit for many years ...With The Emerald City, T became addicted to reading."

Vidal is by no means alone in his special nostalgia for an Oz-filled childhood. Michele Slung, the anthologist and literary critic, has similarly happy recollections. "I first began to get the Oz books when I was about nine or ten in Louisville, Kentucky, where I was born and grew up," she says. "I believe they are what helped me stop biting my fingernails. For every fingernail that T sucessfully grew, I would get a new Oz book ....By the time I was a grown-up, I think I had all but three or four."

Without taking up the cudgels for librarians who have disparaged the stories, I-an adult lately come to Oz-do sense something comic-booky about the books' characters. They remind me, if only slightly, of the inane action heroes today's children are taught by the fast-food chains to venerate. I can see how some librarians of the past might find the constructions of the Baum imagination to be somewhat down-market.

Maybe this impression arises from comparing Dorothy of Kansas and Oz with Alice of England and Wonderland. "Alice is cerebral. Oz is visceral," Slung has written. "Wordplay, political satire, picaresque structure-these are a few ofthe ...elements Oz and Wonderland share. Where they differ has to do with the background and milieu of their authors. Yet, little Anglophile that I was, I never wanted to visit down-the-rabbit-hole or meet any of Carroll's characters. The lilt and the language and the nonsense, plus the innate snobbery, were enough to intrigue me, but at a distance. Oz, on the other hand, was a place I've never stopped wanting to be."

The various supporters of Dorothy and Alice may be like the people who prefer Dickens to Thackeray or vice versa: The two writers may be only just similar enough so that those who like one are probably going to find the other boring or repellent.

Dickens and Thackeray, however, were both of the same nationality; Carroll and Baum were not, and their respective fantasy lands reflect this fact. Frank 1. Evina, the Library's resident Ozologist and the specialist who is curating the exhibit, calls Oz "an American icon" and says that Baum is "America's Hans Christian Andersen. Really, there is no doubt about it."

Although 8aum maintained that Oz was a fairy tale written

for modern kids, some have seen deeper meanings in it. The spring 1964 volume of American Quarterly carried an aliicle

by Henry M. Littlefield entitled "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism." As Littlefield would have it, the yellow brick road is the gold standard; Dorothy's silver slippers are free coinage of the selfsame precious metal; the Cowardly Lion represents William Jennings Bryan; and the Wizard himself stands for "everyman" presidents such as Benjamin Harrison. This invisible-ink interpretation is clever and endures to this day, although students of Oz, to a man and to a woman, dismiss it-pointing out that Baum seems to have had very little interest in politics, despite having lived through the politically tumultuous 1890s.

Baum, says Evina, "wrote a classic tale, which has had an incredible effect on the American psyche. T just went to the credit union, and they're adveliising a loan special using the ruby slippers and the yellow brick road. It's just amazing, no matter where you turn." Of course, some credit for the tale's endurance must also go to the minds behind the 1939 movie adaptation.

Were it not for Judy Garland and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, many of us would know about Kansas and its cyclones, but not about Toto and the Tin Man. Still, many Oz fanciers believe it is the story's distinctly American character that has won it a place in the national consciousness. Baum's world is a peculiarly American fairyland, characterized not by enigmatic magic but by the products of a tinker's or inventor's imagination. Oz is a mechanic's fantasy in which the workings of the miraculous are often revealed and explained-as exemplified in the Wizard's showing Dorothy and her friends exactly how he was able to flimflam the local witches and pull off his humbug. When the gang discovers that the Wizard is not a terrifying disembodied head, but a harmless con man, Baum shows the reader how the trick was done: He led the way to a small chamber in the rear of the Throne Room, and they all followed him. He pointed to one corner, in which lay the Great Head, made out of many thicknesses of paper, and with a carefully painted face. "This T hung from the ceiling by a wire," said Oz. "T stood behind the screen and pulled a thread, to make the eyes move and the mouth open."

In such scenes one can imagine the Wizard as a stand-in for the author himself, whom Slung calls "one of those great American types who just kept inventing himself and having entrepreneurial ideas."

Born in upstate New York in 1856, Frank Baum was one of the many wandering Americans of his generation. The late 1880s found him in Aberdeen, South Dakota, first opening a department store and then working on a newspaper. A few years later he popped up in Chicago; he eventually settled in

Star cast of the 1939 movie: Jack Haley, Ray Bolgel; Judy Garland, Frank Morgan. and Bert La/1Ie

California. Along the way, Baum failed in the axle-grease business, managed an opera house and a baseball team, and was a traveling salesman and buyer for a department store before becoming the editor of The Show Window for the National Association of Window Trimmers. What could be more American in its way than a periodical teaching small retailers how to decorate their shop windows?

Ifhe was typically American, there also is a sweetly daft quality to SaUln's adventures. One might think of him as an Oz-

American.

When he moved to Pasadena, he erected in his garden a huge bridcage stocked with songbirds where-evidently oblivious to the potential of overhead bombardment-he wrote his books.

His output was prodigious. He covered topics both fantastical and practical, such as The Book of the Hamburgs, A Brief Treatise Upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.

(For you city people who think eggs come from the supermarket: Hamburgs are a flashy looking variety of chicken with a reputation of producing eggs with satisfYing regularity.) Baum's pen also scratched out chi Idren's stories, articles, plays, musicals, and adult novels published under his own name as well as an impressive variety of noms de plume: Louis F. Baum, Schuyler Staunton, Floyd Akers, Laura Bancroft, John Estes Cooke, Captain Hugh Fitzgerald, Suzanne Metcalf, and Edith Van Dyne, the name he used for the highly successful Aunt Jane:' Nieces . series.

All this work paled in comparison to The Wonderfitl Wizard of Oz, however, and most of it is long forgotten.

The story was so popular from the first that Frank Baum was never able to elude his own success. Not that he tried too hard, when the nation's children were imploring him for more and more Oz. After the publication of his first children's book, Mother Goose in Prose, the 39-year-old author inscribed a copy to his sister; it may well reveal the true disposition of Lyman Frank Saum's heart. "My dear Maty," the inscription reads.

"When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For, aside from my evident inability to do anything 'great,' I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp, which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heatt and brings its own reward."

0 About the Author: Nicholas von Hoffman is a contributing editor of Civilization.

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Hang- p e have, it seems, reached a new pitch of alarm over the state of the nation's youth. Still agonizing over the dangers of too much television and too many hours online, of filthy comic books and filthier song lyrics? Now it appears we must struggle against yet another agent of ruin in disguise-the ever-present cell phones and diti-cheap phone rates that have made it possible for college kids and their parents to stay in touch to a degree undreamt of by previous generations.

"Prior to the revolution in technology," pronounced one of a handful of child development expelis recently interviewed by The New York Times, "if a child went away, they [sic] went away. Now the norm is to communicate at will." At a time when students should be engaged in constructing independent lives, all this phoning back and forth, argues the expert-a professor of psychology-only "promotes immaturity and dependence."

Communicating at will. Why does the phrase sound so much like thumb sucking or self-abuse, or worse? This is what it has come to, thanks to phone deregulation and the five-cents-aminute rate: a regressive outbreak of friendly chatter between "co-dependent" generations who ought to know better.

All across the land, model American adults are clutching their cell phones to their ears like so many preschoolers hugging blankies, insisting on their right to uninterrupted cyborgian communion with their workmates, significant others, childcare providers, masseuses-sometimes on the street corner, or with a sandwich in the other hand, frequently at high speed, while changing lanes, late to work, balancing a hot cup of coffee, or maybe a can of beer.

God forbid they should be caught doing any of these things with a far-from-home child on the other end of the line.

Wasn't it just months ago that the nation was shaking its collective head over what the Columbine High School assasins' parents failed to hear or were never told? How, then, did voluntary conversation between parents and children come to be the latest proof of family pathology?

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Does an epidemic of phoning home reveal a new national neurosisor expose an old one for what it is?

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I sometimes suspect that the American habit of sounding psychological alarms over ordinary behavior is simply an attempt to ward off the evil eye-to fool the gods into believing we don't have it as easy as they think we do. In this case, though, it seems to me that the alarm reflects equally confused American attitudes toward growing up and leaving home-attitudes that have somehow conflated into the idea that one cannot grow up unless one leaves home.

Some of this excessive emphasis on self-sufficiency can no doubt be blamed on the English, who managed to elevate to a general good the idea of shipping eight-year-olds off to boarding school. If the Mayflower had been launched by Mediterranean forebears instead of Puritans, not only would the food have been better-no one would ever have been hoodwinked into believing that children must benefit from being raised like orphans.

In other cultures, including much of Western Europe, very few children leave home to go to school, even as young adults.

It is taken for granted that time and experience will do their job, and that children living under the same roof as their parents will, without too much stalling, grow up.

Even here, at least half of all 18- to 24-year-olds still live at home, according to the Census Bureau-and presumably pretty much all of them have proved themselves equal to the challenges of adulthood despite being forced to share the bathroom and kitchen with people old enough to be their parents.

So why is there such tremendous emphasis on breaking the parent-child bond?

The question of separation and how to achieve it seems a peculiarly American obsession-one that starts right at birth, when parents have to choose between having their newborn "room in" or tended to in the hospital nursery; then comes the fraught debate over co-sleeping, and yet another over the right way to say good-bye on the first day of kindergalten-all the ordinary passages of a child's life reimagined as a series of indelible traumas.

I remember with some misery reading about the crucial importance of a child learning to put herself to sleep as an infant-to "soothe" herself, as opposed to being comfOited. If this was not learned in infancy, the experts warned, she would be chasing after surrogate comforts all her life-parents, stuffed animals, rock and roll, boyfriends, husbands, a stiff drink, a shot of heroin: a whole domino theory of human attachment, with mother's p1ilk the ultimate "gateway" drug.

Perhaps in a society obsessed with "making it," force-feeding independence and self-sufficiency makes a certain sense. Future Big Deals-whose careers are likely to require firing a series of old friends and trading in a series of aging spouses-are probably well advised to learn to strangle the attachment thing in its crib. But what of the rest of us? Might it not be in our own best interest to relax our fierce insistence on autonomy just a bit?

My own daughter has been spending her junior year of high school abroad, with a French family in Brittany. She phones home a couple of times a week, usually from a pay phone near

her school while waiting for the bus; I call her on Sundays to hear a random account of whatever she's been up to. Only once or twice, early in her sojourn, have any of the calls been tearful.

Mostly, they remind me of how she has always wandered into my room in the middle of doing her homework while]'m in the middle of doing mine.

This is the same child who, at age two, used to stand on the other side of her bedroom door, pounding, laughing, or screaming-whatever she thought might work best to release her from captivity so we could "talk." (I was the one on the other side, pulling the knob tight, hoping it didn't come off in my hand, hoping the neighbors weren't debating calling a child abuse hotline.) Her attachment to us was so fierce that her father used to joke that she'd be the only kid applying to college who would request not a roommate, but a bed for her mother.

As it turned out, all she wanted was exactly what she said she wanted-to talk and, through that, to be close-and it turned out not to bind her but to free her.

Still, old habits die hard. We are, as ever, a nation of orphans, a people forged by slipping old ties, our principal cultural hero a runaway. What could be more natural than to see flight as the proper endpoint of adolescence? But then, no one ever seriously believed that Huck Finn was lighting out for the territory to become a man, did they?

0 About the Author: Martha Fay is a freelance writer and editor of New York City.

Branded Knowledge

COPYRIGHTS Intellectual property rights in the info economy

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opyright law, which keeps the children of struggling writers from going naked, has lately attracted an impressive range of antagonists.

Consider the online world alone. At one extreme, you have the Internet prophets of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who argue that in a digital world overflowing with "content"-the new-media buzzword for written, visual, and musical work-royalties may be hard to justify and harder to collect. The Foundation suggests that, like Sophists and troubadors, authors and aliists will be relegated to attracting wealthy patrons and passing the hat.

At the other extreme-beside that perennial would-be monopolist, the deserving author, who begs to differ with the freebie faction-loom the media behemoths that hope by their lobbying effolis to secure stronger legal and technological means of extracting every last drop of revenue from even the most trivial use of the content they buy and distribute.

Our nation's founders, themselves authors and inventors, did not envision such opposition when they assigned Congress, in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, the power to secure for legitimate claimants "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." But they were familiar with royal monopolies, and they likewise knew piracy.

The Copyright Act of 1790 sought to avoid the demerits of both extremes-free, uncompensated distribution and monopoly-by giving authors

and

WRONGS and publishers an economic incentive just strong enough to encourage the circulation of speech and other forms of expression. This incentive amounted to the obligation to pay for the right to make or have a copy.

Put the other way around, copyright is an author's legal right toforbid copying-a constitutionally authorized encroachment on free speech, like laws forbidding obscenity or libel. Copyright law balances this favor by granting something like a First-Amendment exception for "fair use" that will neither enrich the bOlTower nor degrade the value of the protected work.

In the economic sphere as well, copyright goes its own ",:,ay.A stock of tangible goods-a petroleum reserve, for example-diminishes in value as it is sold off. The original store of value of a copyrighted work, by contrast, waxes as the number of copies of it in circulation climbs. The author (or the publisher to whom he has assigned his copyright) collects royalties for each copy, while retaining ownership of the wellspring from which this bounty flows. Being more numerous and therefore cheaper than an original, copies wind up in the hands of large numbers of people.

Through this grant of a monopoly, then, a public is educated and a culture of artists, thinkers, and scholars forged and fed.

The Copyright Act of 1870 assured that the Library of Congress would become the world's largest physical repository of knowledge by requiring those who wished to obtain copyright protection to deposit therein two copies of the work in question. But the protection extended by copyright's cousin, patent law, to technologies of information reproduction has in time aided the rise of a far vaster viliual repository of knowledgethe Internet's global web of digitalized databases, which encompasses thousands of other libraries as well as countless more casual collections.

The Library of Congress still accepts books, films, and recordings, but since 1978 their creators have received copyright protection even before depositing them (though they must still do so in order to legally defend their rights). Your e-mail messages, your most distracted doodles are protected.

Today our telephone lines and cable lines are getting longer and fatter and are crying to be filled up with news and movies and songs-this is what made Time Warner's content so irresistible to America Online. Felix Rohatyn, the former investment banker and current U.S. Ambassador to France, recently declared that "intellectual property ... is what 21st century is going to be all about." By 1997, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, copyright industries contributed some $350 billion to America's gross domestic product; since then, moreover, companies with a capital base of copyrighted material have grown roughly twice as fast as the overall U.S. economy.

In the new infol111ation economy, intellectual property has a crucial economic advantage. While its research and development costs-the months a film crew spends on location, the years of testing a software design-are steep, the marginal costs of each videotape or software download are relatively small.

Once enough units are sold to cover initial costs, the price delivers almost pure profit. Hence the logic of continually reaching new markets-in a word, globalization.

But copyrights and trademarks-content and brands-also have an advantage that other forms of intellectual property do not: They can generally be reduced to digital form with no loss of identity, while enjoying a quantum gain in distributability.

The use of personal computers or other interactive devices to transmit copyrighted material at almost no cost is still far from a bonanza for the copyright owner. Perhaps taking heaJ1 fi路om cases holding that the taping of a television program, for example, for some noncommercial purpose is a fair use, Intemet users have evolved an ethos of fi'ee content on the Internet.

Shrewd commercial content providers, meanwhile-in the hallowed manner of the cosmetic counter-are busy trying to determine how much product they need to give away as an enticement to purchase.

At the moment, the advantage seems to lie with the consumer.

It is probably against the economic interest of copyright owners to further circumscribe fair use-assuming they had the technological means to do so-since distribution inflames desire. But they continue to shore up another boundary of copyright: its term of coverage. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 grants authors lifetime coverage plus 70 years and works for hire-those, like a Faulkner screenplay, that a company owns because the author prepared it while in that company's employ-a term of fully 95 years from publication. The late House member knew better than anyone else in Congress the value of a term of that length: He composed two possibly immo11al pop-music songs in the 1960s-"Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" and "I Got You, Babe"-and co-wrote

"Needles and Pins," a hit for both the Searchers and Jackie DeShannon.

Lobbyists for the bill used the familiar argument that economic incentives of this magnitude are needed to encourage authorship (in reality, the pain to publishing companies oflosing lucrative copyrights was a greater motivation).

The living refutation of this public-policy rationale for copyright is Linus Torvalds. This young Finn developed the kernel of a computer operating system, dubbed Linux in his honor, to rival Microsoft's Windows NT software, using an approach that is radically incompatible with comprehensive copyright protection. He and other Internet adepts around the world prefer what they call "copy Ieft," in which each user gains free access to the

Author at his desk (/6/17 cen/ury).

source code that others have contributed to-on condition that his or her own contributions are similarly available for testing, use, and refinement.

It was partly in response to a like threat posted by Sun Microsystems' Java software to Microsoft's Windows software monopoly, according to Harvard Law School lecturer Jonathan Zittrain, that Microsoft famously forced computer manufacturers installing Windows 95 in their machines to include Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser software. Zittrain advocates rolling back software copyright protection from 95 years to five, so that a monopoly like Microsoft's cannot exploit a monopoly like copyright to stifle innovation.

But such a rollback won't be enacted into law aJ1ytime soon.

After U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that the company had abused its monopoly power, some observers bayed for breakup; others argued a mere fine would do. The cleverest halfway measure would place the Windows operating system's source code in the public domain-a wild irony, indeed, for the most valuable copyright the world has ever seen.

D About the Author: Ben Gerson is a member of the board of editors of The McKinsey Quarterly.

ll)II~III(~ll'S IN'TISIIII~I~ I~XI)()ll'l' Authoritarianism and exploitation are out.

To do business today, the reformed global corporation builds a civil society-wherever it happens to be.

路

any Americans, in this age of globalization, are troubled by the thought that our country does no real good for the globe in question.

After all, America was a noble idea before it was a nation: We were to be champions of civil society, rightsbased individualism-the pursuit of happiness. Now we hear that our government is fronting for corporations that are cavalier about the cultural effects of their power.

Hollywood blockbusters flicker on Middle Eastern screens, hamburgers fill out Chinese diets, Latin teenagers toil in laptop factories.

America is enriching some, debasing most. Not good at all.

The apprehension is understandable, but wrong. It fails to grasp how knowledge actually gets into the knowledge economy. In developing countries, most of them with strong authoritarian traditions and rigidly hierarchical social structures, American companies often provide workers, at least those who are rea-

II 1

sonably educated and somewhat skilled, their first experience of civil society in microcosm-their first chance to cultivate the skills needed to make the most of democracy, free markets, and the rule of law.

Companies do so not because they have a mission other than competitive success, but because they can't help it. They build the skills of civil society because of the way they work.

Several years ago, T interviewed Chi Sun Lai, Motorola's first country manager for China. "People speak of the problems of dealing with the Chinese bureaucracy," Lai recalled, "but 90 percent of my problem was in Motorola. My team and I st3lted to develop a comprehensive marketing and manufacturing plan that would include a range of obvious products-cell phones, and so on. I would be committing myself to Chinese officials-and then I would have to coordinate with as many as 45 Motorola executives and functional teams, negotiating with all of them to get the consensus I needed to close the deal with the government. Finally, I was blocked. I would go to the CEO and ask him to make the call. The CEO would say, 'Work it out.' I would say, 'If! could work it out, I wouldn't be here.' " Think about the challenges confronting Lai: innovation, negotiation, coordination, commitment.

Business knowledge is mostly improvised in settings like his, by people like him, in the course of dealing with problems like these. A company's "intellectual capital," its knowledge, is not embodied primarily in intellectual propelty, formulas, designs, or bytes of software, snapped smartly into a product development process; nor is it in researcha gene map, or a new approach to quantum tunneling-that may be acquired and commercialized.

Rather, it is a process: a continuously rewoven web of ideas and transactions that are contextual, dialectical, dynamic, personal. Managing knowledge does not mean taking custody of "institutional memory" or "what Tom knows in case Tom gets hit by a truck." As if a company can know the past any better than, say, a country can-or Tom can, for that matter. As if all pasts can be reduced to some workable algorithm. Ultimately, managing knowledge means nurturing the process.

Companies are sW3lms of problem-solving teams whose task it is to "sense and respond," to borrow a phrase from IBM's director of strategic studies, Stephan Haeckel. Too many teams have to make too many decisions for the CEO to call the shots.

Motorola's CEO couldn't tell Chi Sun Lai what to do because he couldn't possibly know. "The velocity of

change requires people who can think quickly," says John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, "but speed without direction or strategy or access to good information is worthless. Empowerment only works if you get access to the information that you need to make the decision. Instead of the CEO and CFO making a hundred key decisions a quatter, if you're really lucky you have a million made by your employees and you have a whole different productivity scenario."

That is, top managers know that their companies grow, and often lurch, from change to change, and that there will be no innovation where repOlting managers feel unable to experiment, to enjoy the privileges of responsibility, or to trust the integrity of their conversations. Teams are custodians of a changing roster of complex projects, each with its own need for relevant knowledge, each with ongoing contracts to be filled and deadlines to be met.

And what holds companies together is negotiation. Employees are continuously negotiating commitments to each other, individuals to teams, and teams to one another. There are teams that ascertain customer reactions, procure new sources of supply, secure financing-teams that conceive better ways to manage teams.

What, then, is left for senior management to do?

Managing a COf!1panytoday is more like leading a school of thought than commanding a disciplined bureaucracy. Top managers, in Haeckel's view, need to explai路n the context around and the strategy behind a project, to map domains of common knowledge, to enforce agreed-upon principles, and to place bets on new projects. People say that all kinds of enterprises today, even universities and museums, are being run like corporations; the obverse is also true. The challenge of a business executive-not unlike that of a university dean or a hospital administrator-is to make transactions between mentors and newcomers more informed, make future commitments more achievable, and accelerate the circulation of valuable ideas. nformationteclmology is a catalyst of global learning. Internet technologies enable the sharing not only of, say, an MBA's marketing methods, but also some presentation made in Toronto that may be of use in Berlin, or news about a client's product development program. Corporate "intranets" accompany employees to all parts of the globe-they're the nerves of globalization. To make the most of them, companies must commit to what they loosely call "values"-standards for corporate

I

glasnost. At KPMG, where I work, every employee reviews professional goals three times a year; we explain (among other things) how we have enhanced "open and honest communication," "boundarylessness," "universal involvement." Some of this may be lip service, but bonuses are at least formally tied to knowledge sharing. Companies not only emphasize values in recruiting, cultivating, and retaining talent; they also boast about them to Wall Street to defend their share price. Today, a Conference Board study suggests, some 80 percent of global companies are developing a knowledge strategy, and some 25 percent have a chief knowledge officer in place.

"1

hat does all this have to do with America's way in the world? Where advanced corporate structures once sucked the life out of civil society or buttressed an authoritarian "corporate state," now global companies prepare the ground for civil society. Forget the pyramid. Corporate cultures are built on mini-social contracts; they have become mini-social contracts. In a company like Motorola, most workers are organized flexibly and in protean fashion into problem-solving teams. Their negotiations are for mutual benefit, and the only authority they must submit to is one that guides, monitors, and enforces their mutual obligations.

They assume technological progress and continuous change, so they work together in a spirit of skepticism and tolerance. They assume basic skills-the capacity to read, write, listen-that grow in sophistication over time. Most important, they assume access to accumulated experience, information, and social oppoltunity. They assume the freedom to operate and exercise it to move on when they feel thwarted. (In Silicon Valley, the average job tenure is about three years.)

All this is new. We grew up, after all, with clear distinctionsbetween management and labor, business and school, scientific research and product development, and, for that matter, corporate interests and the public good. Behind all of this was a chilling perception that, in spite of the ways markets and industry tended to engender liberty and wealth, the ordinary experiences of working people-factory workers and office workers both-contradicted their humanity. Once a factory system became embedded, it was fixed for a generation; it favored speed-ups and greater simplicity of human motions; competition intensified not by means of innovation, but by cheaper wages or sources of supply.

Adam Smith himself laid out the tragedy in The Wealth of Nations: "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ...naturally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become."

But class divisions of this kind have blurred greatly. The real social divide in the global economy is not between haves and have-nots, but knows and know-nots. Thus, the challenge for developing countries is not to keep global companies from exploiting young labor, but to induce them to expand young minds. Their first challenge, like that in the inner cities of America, is to invest enough in education and infrastructure to

prepare their communities for work.

The effect of global businesses like Motorola on countries like China is more akin to Stanford University's effect on Silicon Valley than the United Fruit Company's on Guatemala. Such companies typically invest 2 to 3 percent of their income on training. But they can't make employees trainable; that is the responsibility of governments. Businesses are more like graduate schools than elementary schools; they need public schools to prepare young people to report to work ready to learn marketing, design, and production strategies, primed to learn high technologies and quality systems. Even if (especially it) the focus of public education is democratic citizenship, children will be qualified for such a workforce-not because functioning in corporations is the goal of citizenship, but because, like political democracies, corporations need people to cultivate a scientific attitude and an empathic nature.

And when governments do make these investments, the payoff can be handsome. It is often forgotten now that more than half of Israel's population was barely literate in the 1960s, and half of its economy was in public-sector manufacturing. Since the 1960s, the government has responded with massive investments in public education and, since the early 1980s, tax holidays for high-tech companies. Today, the size ofTsrael's economy has grown to around $ I 00 billion, and its 50 largest technology and dot-com businesses earn more than $20 billion, directly employing more than 100,000 people.

American companies helped. Intel, Motorola, IBM, and others were critical to launching some 3,000 start-ups in Israel between 1990 and I998-a greater absolute number than anywhere else outside the U.S. Meanwhile, a new generation of entrepreneurs, many just out of the Israel Defense Forces, have adapted their military training-and imaging and telecom software-to serve demanding global markets. They are leading a cultural revolution, creating the wealth and social comity on which any stable peace will depend. They do not just want a peace process. They are a peace process.

There are parallel stories everywhere. Global companies come with the same information systems, management training, and values that have enabled them to succeed in the U.S. and Europe. Tn 1996, I sat in on Motorola University classes in Tianjin that were specifically devised to loosen up the public reticence instilled in many older Chinese employees by their experiences in the Cultural Revolution. There could be, they learned, no continual quality improvements and product releases without, in effect, a "democracy wall" in every factory and office. Indeed, nearby, in the entry to Motorola's immaculate cell phone facility, hung a huge banner. It said, roughly translated, "Speak up. We need your ideas." Could Thomas Paine have said it better?

D About the Author: Bernard Avishai is international director of international capital at KPMG, a global accounting and consultancy firm. His most recent book is A New Israel.

SELCO welcomed its IO,OOOthcustomer last December through its subsidiaries SELCO India, SELCO Vietnam and RESCO Asia Ltd. in Sri Lanka.

Williams says most of the Indian Government's efforts to promote use of solar energy failed, which prompted SELCO to enter the Indian market. "Often government and donor programs fail, and many have in India. But we saw the huge market potential in India. We have been proved right as our subsidiary reached profitability in 2000," he says.

"SELCO's main strengths were that it was close to the customer, was committed to quality, had a reduced system cost by becoming a system integrator, provided good after-sales service and worked on a commercial level," says Indresh Batra, senior program officer of Winrock International India based in New Delhi. A very strong team with a dynamic leader has contributed in a major way to Sl's success in a very short time. Sl has progressed well in all fronts-marketing, quality, after-sales service and financing, Batra says.

According to the World Bank, 24 percent of the urban population and 67 percent of the rural population in developing countries are without electricity. About three-fifths of India's population has no access to electricity, according to International Association for Energy Efficient Lighting, a Stockholm-based global contact network and information resource body. With 7 percent annual economic growth, planners say India needs an annual boost in electrical capacity of 10 to 12 percent. But the country is adding only half the amount annually.

Millions of unelectrified households in South India currently spend Rs. 400 or more a month on kerosene, candles, dry cells and recharged car batteries to meet their minimum lighting and power needs. For the same investment, they can opt for a SELCO solar system on installment, that will run compact fluorescent lamps, a radio, cassette player, TV, fans and other small appliances. The four southern states have an estimated 400,000 farms, shops, banks, cooperatives, restaurants and other small enterprises for whom low-cost solar PV systems can be a better option economically, according to Hande.

SELCO's target is not the urban centers, where most households are connected to the grid. In spite of frequent power cuts, an invertor is a cheaper alternative there. While the electric power grid has reached about 85 percent of villages, the distribution network is yet to reach the rural folk living outside village centers. The four southern states are home to about 10 million families without access to grid electricity. Chronic power shortages add to the problem. Daily load shedding of four to five hours is common in urban areas in South India. Rural areas face even higher frequencies. In most rural areas, the grid provides a low voltage (due to long low-tension lines and subsequent losses) which is only enough to dimly light the bulb.

Solar lighting also brings a lot of social advantages. Education is one-in each solar-lighted house there is at least one person studying; people receive news and entertainment through radio and TV; and the most crucial benefit is respite from darkness.

Solar energy is healthier as fwnes from kerosene lamps in poorly ventilated rooms are a health hazard, and students are spared eyesight defects resulting fi'om poor light. Families can extend their workday to eveni'ng hours. Liquid fuel stored for lamps and

Harish Hande and Umesh Pai, regional manager of Sf's Puttur branch, near a billboard, Karnataka.

generators are potential fire hazards, so solar energy reduces the risk of fire.

SHS are 12-volt direct current (DC) stand alone systems which use PV to electrify small rural homes. Each SHS typically comprises a PV module, a battery, a charge controller, wiring, fluorescent lights and outlets for other applications. "System size" (20, 30 or 50 watt peak) is what determines the number of "light hours" or "TV hours" available. An SHS takes less than a day to install and run, and when connected to a battery to store electricity for sunless periods, operates as a self-sufficient unit.

PV modules used by SI confOlm to the national standard recom-

been the most forthcoming and dynamic, Hande says.

On the company's activities in Andhra Pradesh, he says some work was started in Nizamabad district in 1996, which could not proceed further due to lack of working capital. The company plans to restart business operations in Andhra Pradesh in 2003 and the following year in Tamil Nadu. "In five years, we plan to have 200 branches and franchaises in the four southern states. We are also looking at Gujarat and Maharashtra for developing the SELCO model," says Hande. Sf is the largest and oldest ofSELCO's three subsidiaries and sells the maximum SHS annually.

SI's partners include Syndicate Bank, MGB, Vijaya Bank,

mended by ISPRA (Institut fUr Statistik, Politikforschwny und Raumanalysen), Italy, which rates solar panels internationally.

Suppliers include Tata BP Solar, a joint venture of the House of Tatas and BP Solar, U.K., and Siemens and Steca, Germany.

Electricity hom the module charges the storage battery during the day and in the evening, the battery is discharged to power lights and other applications. A charge controller is utilized to control the flow of electricity between the module, battery and the loads. It also prevents battery damage by ensuring that the battery is operating within its normal charge levels. SELCO installs DC compact fluorescent lights manufactured by Anand Electronics, Mangalore. The cables are designed to minimize voltage losses between the PV modules, charge regulator, battery, and loads to achieve the maximum current conditions.

Headquartered in Bangalore, SI has 13 branch offices in Mangalore, Puttur, Udupi, Manipal, Sirsi, Shimoga, Belgaum, Dharwad, Hubli, Sindhanoor, Hospet and Belthangadi, all in Karnataka. With a staff strength of 69, it sells SHS with price ranging between Rs. 23,000 and Rs. 32,000. SI has installed about 7,800 home lighting systems to date, 95 percent of which are in Karnataka and the rest in Kerala. Sri Lanka and Vietnam have together installed 3,000 systems in the same period. While last year's installation figure of 3,210 had exceeded the projection of 2,900, this year SI has a target of 4,200 installations.

Eighteen solar service centers are also functioning in these two states. The maximum clientele is in the districts of south and nOlth Karnataka, as financial institutions in these areas have

Canara Bank, Manipal Finance Corporation, Bharatiya Vikas Trust, a Manipal-based nongovernmental organization, and Tata BP Solar. MGB charges 15.5 percent to the end-user. The end-user only pays 10 percent while the rest 5.5 percent interest is paid to the bank by SI on behalf ofthe user as a marketing incentive.

MGB's solar loan scheme is covered under priority sector advances and the loan limit is fixed depending on the number of connections-Rs. 5,800 for a single light, Rs. 11,750 for two lights, and Rs. 18,500 for four lights, says K.J. Ganiga, chairman of the bank. The installation charge is borne by the party as margin money. The scheme was started in 1995 and was reintroduced in 1999. Loans are repayable in 60 equal monthly

Above: A family in Mandarti village in Udupi district, Karnataka, enjoys lighting from a SELCO SHS, which was purchased ji-om their group savings fund.

Left: Oboji Rao, a farmer in Padyathadka village, Kerala, stands on the roof of his house near a PV module.

Right: A farmer reads under solar light in Manipal, Karnataka.

installments. About 200 households availed of the loan facility within a year of introduction, Ganiga said.

Loan facilities of all the banks are similar, with the annual interest rates varying between 12.5 percent and 15.5 percent and terms ranging from three to five years. "In future we might convince some cooperatives to take loans from IREDA as SELCO India itself would not get into the business of collecting money from end-users," Hande says.

In SELCO's service territory, customers already ask for a SELCO~a sign of strong brand building efforts.

Marketing features high market identification, starting from discernable locations for its solar service centers to distinctive

advertising and standard color schemes for bui ldings, vehicles, and uniforms.

"The power bills in our institutions came down after we opted to install SELCO units. We have lower electricity bills and better and reliable lighting," says Fr. George Arimpoor, secretary of Bangalore Salesian Society and person-in-charge of Don Bosco Seminary in Bangalore. Don Bosco has converted its irrigation sets into SPY pumps and has installed SELCO systems at its centers in Padivayal, Tumkur, Goa, Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) and Bhadravati. With help from WI's Renewable Energy Project Support Office (REPSO) in New Delhi, Don Bosco and SI have installed SHS in about 100 tribal households in Pavur. Don Bosco plans to start another such project with the fisher folks in Kollam and some poor families inKGF. Although SELCO systems are a bit costly compared to other nonconventional energy units, Abhyudaya Tutorials in Malamaddi in Dharwad district, which experiences three hours of load shedding daily, joined SELCO customers' club because of easy maintenance, reliability and nonpolluting nature of the systems and reduced electricity bills, says Shyam R. Banare, who runs the institute.

"In the field of solar, SELCO has been a good venture and it has triggered off similar such ventures in South India," says D. Majumdar, director (technical) of IREDA. "Solar sells if it goes hand in hand with service. And SELCO is doing well in that front."

In September 1999, SELCO signed an agreement with Solar Energy Trust, funded with $500,000 from the Klamath Cogeneration Project, a joint venture of PacifiCorp Power Marketing, Inc., and the city of Klamath Falls, Oregon, in the U.S. The agreement allows funding of SELCO projects to offset carbon gases emitted into the atmosphere from a 500-megawatt natural gas-fired power plant under construction to supply the emerging California and Pacific Northwest merchant power markets.

Use of solar energy will also reduce consumption of fossil fuels, that comprise about 80 percent of annual CO2 emission into the atmosphere, triggering global warming and environment changes. CO2 emissions are now about one ton per person each year, according to World Resources Institute in Washington.

With SELCO India proving the business model, it was easier for the parent company to raise additional working capital in Europe and the United States for expansion. SELCO-U.S. plans to go public in three to four years to raise more capital. "We want to plow local profits back into the growth oflocal operations. We plan to open 200 solar service centers in the four South Indian states and aim to install 50,000 SHS annually in India by 2005," Williams says.

Whether it is Bharatiya Vikas Trust, or a church-cum-school in Pavur or farm houses in Puttur, SELCO serves all. The solar revolution is in its infancy in India, and SELCO, among the avant-garde, still has more lamps to light.

0

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.

Photos by Ian Lockwood

is an American who currently teaches environmental science and photography at the American International School in Dhaka, but his interests range across South Asia. His photo exhibition entitled "The Westem Ghats: Portrait & Panorama" opens at tlle India International Centre Gallel)!in New Delhi in March. The goal of this project, he says, is "to highlight conservation issues on tlle Western Ghats through the use of finely produced black and white silver prints. " He adds, "The Westem Ghats are now recognized as one of two critical 'biodi\fersity hotspot' areas in India [the other being the Eastern Himalayas]. " These extensive mountains, stretching fi-om abo\fe Mumbai down to Kanyakumari, are a rich renlge for flora and fauna, and playa critical role in regulating and storing monsoon rains that give India precious water. Yet tlle region is threatened by unregulated development. Lockwood strives to underscore the importance of conser\fing a LUliqueand vital repository of India's resources which, once lost, cannot be regained.

Ian Lockwood

P

hotography has long served duel purposes for me. It is primarily an artistic expression in which I take what I see around me, interpret it and present it in the form of published works or final prints in an exhibition. Equally important is the effectiveness of the photographs in communicating a message of ecological or architectural conservation. In my images I hope to present a message of conservation and ecological awakening.

My photographic interests and choice of subjects are the products of personal experiences in Bangladesh's forests and India's Western Ghats mountains. It is the experience of personally witnessing incredible beauty and then destruction of natural habitats that has motivated me to document remnants of ecosystems and their unfolding tragedies. Documentation of this destruction as well as scenes of natural beauty are two key aspects of my work. In showing them to an audience, I hope to educate others so that the message of conserving natural habitats and historic monuments is spread further.

The central goal of my photography is education and awareness achieved through aesthetically pleasing images. As a full time teacher of environmental science and photography, I work with students to help broaden their understanding of the world around them. In my classes, and through interactive field trips, I hope to heighten their awareness and appreciation for the natural world. Working in Bangladesh my classes focus on local issues and habitats. Thus my goals as an educator and an artist are closely aligned. With regards to my photography, my goal is to expose these images to a wider audience both inside and outside of South Asia.

I specifically work in black and whi.te and on a narrow selection of subjects. I use the black and white medium because I prefer it to color as an expressive art form. I am also interested in personally being a pal1 of as much of the photographic process as possible. I take the film from exposure through to development, printing and final presentation. Subject-wise, I strongly believe that there must be a connection between the photographer and the subject. In my experience, my most effective images are the products of an intimate experience within an environment that] have a deep connection to. Having grown up in the Western Ghats and Bangladesh's forests, there is a clear connection that] am building upon. With the goal of education in mind, J frequently write articles to accompany my work, depending on how it is presented.

Thanks to my father, an avid photographer and camera designer, 1 was exposed to the work of Ansel Adams at a young age. Both of us have shared a desire to present the breathtaking, but unknown South Indian landscape in a similar manner to Adams' monumental work on the American West. The fact that these images were used to awaken Americans to the cause of conservation is of particular value to me.

As a student in college I had the opportunity to take several photography classes while pursuing my degree in development economics. Mary Ellen Mark's work on social issues, both domestic and global, has been inspirational. I especially appreciate her intimate portraits of people. I have also been inspired by Sabastiao Salgado, an economist turned creator of exquisite black and white images depicting Third World problems. All three of these photographers have been, or were, intimately connected to their subjects and used their work to highlight a larger cause. In my work on India's Western Ghats and Bangladesh's forests and monuments I strive for a similar goal.

-Ian

Lockwood

Kalakad Tree, Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu.

This picture illustrates the dramatic scenery and the vegetation of the Western Ghats. It also shows some of the first mountains to rise from the plains near the tip of the Indian peninsula at Kanyakumari.

Kolkulmalai View, Tamil Nadu.

One of the last remaining examples of the grasslands/shola ecosystem left in Palni Hills. Much of this kind of habitat has been converted into monoculture plantations of exotic (non-native) trees.

Lower Falls, Courtallam, Tamil Nadu. Women bathe at the popular site ofCourtal/am at the onset of the southwestern monsoon.

Cascades like these illustrate the enormous importance that the Western Ghats play in providing water to the drier plains. Their worth has been long recognized and Courtal/am is also a major tourist destination.

Deforestation and habitat loss in the mountains reduces the supply of water to the plains.

Devil's Kitchen Silo/a, Palui Hills, Tamil Nadu. Sholaforests are montane evergreen topical forests that are unique to the high altitude regions of the Western Ghats.

Stunted by fierce wind, sholas contain a wealth of plant and animal species. Together with native grasslands, this ecosystem plays a key role in absorbing monsoon rains and supplying the thirsty plains with a perennial source of water.

Ma Renu The life of this Chicago artist-turned-yogin, who died last November, was a blend of art, compassion and care for the orphaned in India.

R

uth Johnson Horsting, or Ma Renu as she was affectionately known to friends and fellow yoga students around the world, died peacefully at home in Bonny Doon, California, on November 26 last year at the age of 81. She was a social worker who quietly went about her work of helping people, particularly children, in India.

Ma Renu was founder and president of Sri Rama Foundation, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to supporting orphaned children in India.

She traveled tirelessly to India eventually establishing a children's home and school, as well as a free medical clinic in rural India. The home currently houses 50 destitute children. The school educates over 250 village students who otherwise would have received no opportunity for education, and the medical clinic, which provides preventative care and medical treatment to all in need, is the only such facility available in a 50-kilometer radius. The children at the orphan. age she founded are raised as permanent members of a large family and were always in her thoughts and prayers. She was always concerned about children and has said, ''It is our responsibility to deal with each child positively, with love and care and concern. It is our duty to fulfill their needs and provide them with good food, good clothes, good health care, and a good education. Individually, each is unique; collectively they make up the same whole, the Sri Rama Family."

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 18, 1919, she was educated at Northwestern University earning her BA (Phi Beta Kappa) in English literature in 1940.

After studying art at the Chicago Art Institute she became a professional artist, and later returned to Northwestern' University where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1958. Before leaving Chicago, she won the Pauline Palmer award for her work in sculpture.

Ruth moved to California and joined the faculty at the University of California at Davis (UCD) in 1959. She was an accomplished artist, both a sculptor and printmaker, who helped build the internationally renowned UCD art department.

Ruth, along with Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud, Roy de Forest, Dan Shapiro, Roland Petersen, Silliam Wiley, Manuel Neri, and many great visiting artists focused the art world's attention on Northern California. She exhibited in both group and one-woman shows in leading art museums. She co-authored History of Fashions published by John Wiley and Sons in 1970. In the '60s, while teaching in Rome, she met and spent several hours talking with Indira

Gandhi, who was visiting the fashion institute where she taught.

After the sudden death of her eldest son William in 1971 she took early retirement from the University to devote herself fully to the study of Ashtanga Yoga She became the American sponsor of silent yoga master Baba Hari Dass, and the editor of several of his books including Silence Speaks, Fire Without Fuel, and The Yoga SUO'as of Patanjali. The Sri Rama Foundation of America was first created by Baba Hari Dass when he requested that all the proceeds of his published works go to the SUppOltof needy children in India. Babaji's gift also inspired the generosity of many of his devotees in America, as well as other sincere people in the West who wished to help the children of India. Baba Hari Dass, a yoga practitioner, is revered for his wisdom and his living example of Karma Yoga (selfless service). In 1971, Babaji was invited to teach yoga in America. With the help of Ma Renu, who served as the President of the Sri Rama Foundation, a charitable trust was founded in India, called Anath Shishu Palan Trust.

Ma Renu shared her study and understanding of Ashtanga Yoga with students allover the world and was a major inspiration to the development of Mount Madonna Center in Watsonville, California. Her life was an example of service, kindness, generosity and calmness. Ma Renu's son, Walter Horsting, made a special trip to India from California to immerse her ashes in the Ganga on March I.

Engaged

D8IIlocracies

continued ji-om page /3

How much do you think China has to do with fixing the mortar between India and the U.S., whether it is mutually shared fears or desire to promote good ties or whatever?

I think that the U.S. views on China and Indian views on China are somewhat similar, in the sense that there is a broad spectrum of people who see them as the foe, and others who have quite a different view, that this is a country that is focusing on development, and wants to develop rapidly, and wants calm around its borders. And I think Powell put this out in his view that it's not a strategic partner. The Clinton administration, I think, was too loose with words. India was a strategic partner.

What did they mean? You couldn't get a definition of that. I think China was the same way. They are a competitor in some ways, but we don't want to make them an enemy. And I think that's the Indian Government's view. They've been working to settle their border problems with China, to get a more normal relationship with the Chinese, and they seem to be making some progress. Some people, however, like the right wing of the Republican Party and some people here, see a convergence against China. But I don't think India wants that.

The infotech revolution has turned India into a different kind of strategic partner altogether, hasn't it? And India is no longer primarily a recipient of u.s. aid, the Gujarat earthquake aside.

No, the aid program is peanuts. They get aid now out of the stock market. No, that's all gone. It's entirely different. You have an economic partnership here. The other thing that is so different is that they are so much more open about their own shortcomings and what the problems are: the infrastructure, the banking system, the fact that they need to get their exports up.

They are focused on development. Often in India, there are a lot of good intentions but implementation is a problem. 1 find, coming back to India after earlier years, there is much less covering up and sensitivity about shortcomings. They are very frank about what they have to do. Doing it is tough. It's tough for a democracy. We have many of the same problems. Our education is a disgrace in the big cities. We know it. We

haven't done anything about it. Why not? So they have similar problems.

In Estranged Democracies you mentioned that America needed to become more aware of the poverty and other problems that India has. Is America, in a meaningful way, aware oftlwt now?

I think I put it in terms of showing more respect for the challenges they face as a democracy, and their ability to cope with and develop as a democracy despite all their problems. I think there is more awareness of that. I think the India Caucus is a manifestation of that. That's what it does, it talks India up. So I think there is more awareness.

To sum up, how do you see the future? Do you see America and India as very solid partners, clasping hands across the seas?

Twenty-five years ago when I was in charge of India in the State Department, Pat Moynihan was the ambassador here. And he was very good at catchy phrases, and the catchy phrase at that time was "mature relationship." Well, he was 25 years too soon.

They weren't ready for it, we weren't ready for it. Now we are.

I think the goal should be stated a little more modestly than some people do-just a good, normal relationship, between two big countries, in different parts of the world. It's true that we have global interests in India, and regional and going beyond the region, we don't have clashes of interests. There are so many positive things in common. Before it was only democracy. Now you have a whole hosfofthings. Out of that can develop, what I would hope, could be a mature, normal, friendly relationship.

I'm not sure ab9ut the people who push strategic partnerships. I don't think the Indians want it. They still do not want to be tied to anybody. There are too many bad memories there. We have to be very careful about Pakistan, because that is still the third rail here. It can be handled, but we have to talk to each other so that there are no surprises, so that they get their points of view across privately. Because we could misread things, and that would set back this progress some years.

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Scientists :are now contemplating the mysteries of "ghost crater" depressions visible in images sent back.

The space shuttle At/antis (STS-98) landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on February 20, 200 I, after circling earth for two days due to cloudy weather. During its I3-day mission the crew delivered the U.S. laboratory module to the International Space Station. Installation of the lab and other sophisticated gear required three spacewalks.

A dramatic image of space shuttle Atlantis over a desert backdrop was photographed by the threeman Expedition One crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with a digital still camera, FebruQlY 16, 2001.

The shuttle crew bid farewell to their colleagues in the International Space Station as they prepare to leave. Cosmonauts Sergei K. Krikalev, Expedition One flight enginee/; and Yuri P Gidzenko, Soyuz commander (center), along with Expedition One commander astronaut Bill Shepherd (not pictured), will stay in the ISS until the next shuttle arrives, scheduledfor sometime in March. Departing astronauts are Mark L. Polansky, STS-98 pilot, Robet L. Curbeam (top) and Thomas D. Jones (right), shuttle mission specialists.

The southern hemisphere of the asteroid Eros in a photo taken by the approaching NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft in November 2000. The length of the asteroid is 33 kilometers.

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