SPAN: March/April 2003

SPAN

Bollywood

Publisher Michael H. Anderson

Badger Goes to Hollywood

By Lea Terhune

Editor-in-Chief David Kennedy

Manhattan

Editor Lea Terhune Associate

Meets Hollywood

By Mahesh Bhatt

Mayhem

By Fergus M. Bordewich

Picturing the Century

Editor

A. Venkata Narayana

Enter the Ford

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

By James Agee

The Khadi

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Hemant Bharnagar Deputy Art Director Sharad Sovani

Art of David Schorr

By Lea Terhune

The Media and the Message Media

& Democracy

By George M Krimsky Production/Circulation

Manager

Rakesh Agrawal Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Notes from Indian Country

Is "Indigenous on the Menu?

Fried Bread"

By Tim Giago

Investigative Journalism Front cover: Bollywood meets Hollywood in this still fi路om The Guru, a Universal Studios film directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer and starring Heather Graham, Jimi Mistry and Marisa Tomei. Photograph 漏 2002 Universal Studios.

By Silvio Waisbord

:

The Hoot: Sharp Eyes on Media Issues

By Lea Terhune

j8

The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act, 1867, and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, ] 956.

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

4. Publisher's Name Nationality Address 5. Editor's

Name Nationality Address

6. Name and address of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one percent of the total capital

Public Affairs Section American Embassy American Center 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001 Bimonthly G. P. Todi Indian Ajanta Offset & Pac~1ging Ltd. 95-8, Wazirpur Indllwial Area Delhi] 10052 Michael H. Anderson American 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 11000 I. Lea Terhune American 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 11000 I. The Government or the United States of America

South Asian Journalists Association

Dr. Franklin's

Plan

By Stephan A. Schwartz

Lost at Sea

By Michael Parfit

Globalization

Gaining

Points in the Match

An Interview with John Echeverri-Gent

by A. Venkata Narayana Spotlight

South India Beckons Peter Schmitthenner

By Dipesh Satapathy (Signed) Michael H. Anderson Signature or Publisher

SAJA

Stars Light the Way

A LETTER

S

FROM

pring always brings new life, and that is especially true this year for SPAN, which welcomes two new editions, Hindi and Urdu, into the family. The Hindi and Urdu editions of SPAN will offer the same high quality fare from American magazines and Indian authors that has enriched English SPAN and Indo-US. relations over the past 43 years. It is very exciting for us to launch these editions that will reach new and wider audiences in two important local languages. US. Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill officially released the new editions at a February 20 launch ceremony in New Delhi, where Attorney General Soli Sorabjee, a longtime SPAN contributor and jazz fan, also spoke.

The cover story, which is also the cover for our first Hindi and Urdu issues, is "Bollywood Meets Hollywood," a package of stories which includes an article by Hindi film director Mahesh Bhatt.

"Badger Goes to Hollywood" focuses on Rajshree Ojha, a young Indian film director recently graduated from the American Film Institute, and her award-winning film. "Manhattan Mayhem," by Fergus M. Bordewich, gives fascinating historical background on the 19th-century immigrant gangs that dominated the teeming Lower East Side of New York and inspired Martin Scorsese's latest film, Gangs of New YOrk. Still with media, but moving from entertainment to news, several articles examine where the information highway is taking journalism, and if the old values still hold true. The first article, "Media & Democracy," by former Associated Press World Services news chief George Krimsky, reviews the history of the US. media and outlines the challenges it faces in the electronic age: ''A self-governing society, by definition, needs to make its own decisions. It cannot do that without hard information, leavened with an open exchange of views," he says. "Notes fronl Indian Country: 'Is Indigenous Fried Bread' on the Menu?" by Tim Giago, is a humorous look at a political correctness taken to extremes. In "Investigative Journalism," Silvio Waisbord maintains that investigative journalism is still a strong force in America despite today's business pressures on media.

"The Hoot: Sharp Eyes on Media Issues" highlights India's only online media watch Web site. It survived its first two years and is growing stronger all the time.

THE

PUBLISHER

Columnist Sevanti Ninan, who runs the site, is interviewed by Lea Terhune.

Dipping into American history we find Benjamin Franklin, a great advocate of free press and a printer himself. Stephan A. Schwartz, in "Dr. Franklin's Plan," tells us that as early as age 16 Franklin envisioned the free society to which he would dedicate his life. About a hundred years after Franklin died, photography was a fledgling phenomenon that quickly developed into a vehicle of expression for news, for art and for social change. "PictUling the Century," an exhibition from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, nc., which is on tour in India, provides ample material for our photo essay. Photographers range from unknowns to Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. The mid-century spirit is also reflected in an excerpt from writer James Agee's recently discovered notes.

American artist and Fulbright grantee David Schorr enlivens this issue with works from his exhibition "Khadi," which was in Delhi and soon opens in Mumbai.

How to win on the playing fields of globalization?

A. Venkata Narayana interviewed economist John Echeverri-Gent to find out. See "Globalization: Gaining Points in the Match." The Spotlight this month is on Peter Schmitthenner, India-born professor of history and culture and old Kodaikanal International School alumnus whose research led him back to India. His story is told by Dipesh Satapathy.

Depletion of fish in the seas is at a crisis stage globally. People in regions where fish ran in abundance and fishing was the economic mainstay for generations have had to find other means of livelihood because fish have disappeared. "Lost at Sea," by Michael Parfit, focuses on one dwindling population, the Atlantic salmon, to determine what are the causes and what is being done to stop the decline of an important species.

Finally, we remember India-born Kalpana Chawla and the other brave astronauts on the NASA space shuttle Columbia, who gave their lives so the rest of us could know more about the universe.

BollY'Yoo meets Hollywood e live in an age of relentless progress.

And, yet we cannot pull ourselves away from the enchantment of what once was. The hold that an abandoned building can exert on us, the spell that an unplanned visit to our childhood home can cast upon us has been the topic of writers since time immemorial.

Even today I become mesmerized by the sight of a dilapidated cinema hall that I often pass on my way to my shoots. On many dreary mornings, the sight suddenly transports me back in time, giving me that magical whiff of childhood with all its newness and excitement. There in the womb-like cocoon of the dark auditorium we would sit and drink from streams of black and white and technicolor. The images and sound are to this day soaked deep into my bones. These were the images that came from Hollywood, a dreamworld in a distant land called the United States of America.

It wouldn't be entirely untrue to confess that my success wouldn't have been possible without the hours I spent in the cinema halls of Bombay, which exclusively screened those Hollywood films. These were the classrooms where I learnt the ABCs of story telling through

sound and pictures ...the "language of cinema." It was here in the hush ofthese theaters that I discovered that cinema has more to do with sound and emotions and less to do with words and logic.

Week after week great filmmakers like William Wyler, who made Ben-Hur, Cecil B. DeMille, who made The Ten Commandments, Alfred Hitchcock, who made films like Psycho and North by Northwest, and many others, would, through their cinematic brilliance, unwittingly lay the foundations of my entire career as a film maker. Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton made one laugh till one cried; Robin Hood and Sinbad the Sailor defined what heroes were all about; John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Kirk Douglas in those Westerns ignited in us a thirst for adventure. Who can forget Elvis the Pelvis, Frank Sinatra, and Cliff Richards, whose songs still resonate in our hearts today? It was here in the darkness that the window to the United States opened for people like me and my generation. It was through this big screen that one got a glimpse of what the American Dream was all about.

Hollywood created a thirst in millions of Indians, some of whom later became part of Bollywood, and today are entertaining millions of

FiCmmalicr Mahesh Bhatt recaCfs the Cure of that dreamwor~ HoUywood

Below: Dorm mates Jagjit, Ajay and Salim played by Ronobir Lahiri, Kal Penn and Rizwan Manji respectively, in a scene Fom American Desi, written and directed

by Piyush Dinkel' Pandya. The desi cast, including stars Deep Katdare and Purva Bedi (not pictured) have strong Hollywood credentials, with roles in TV,jilm and theater.

Bottom: Nasiruddin Shah does the bhangra in Mira Nair:S low budget smash hit Monsoon Wedding. Nair blazed a trail that ushered more Indian cultural themes into Hollywoodjilms.

Right: Heather Graham dances with Bollywood chorines in this scene Fom The Guru, a Universal Studios production directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayel~

Indians. Hollywood also shaped our way of life and our way of thinking. It bled into our day-to-day life, our clothes, our speech patterns, our very dreams. No wonder, when I first visited the United States, I got this feeling of deja vu, of having been there before. And of course] had. ] had lived there for years, of course, through the movies from Hollywood that I was so fond of.

Most filmmakers in Bollywood will concede that they owe their craft and the idiom that they flaunt as their own to Hollywood. Then came a breed of filmmakers that wanted to stand apart from Hollywood. They did everything they could not to imitate Hollywood. This was

the birth of what was called parallel cinema. These filmmakers were still influenced by Hollywood, as their movement away was a result of being affected by it.

Like it or not, Hollywood is there in all of us, whether you accept it or you resist it.

Art is an image-using system. In order to create we draw from our inner well.

This inner well, an artistic reservoir, is ideally like a well-stocked trout pond. We have big fish, little fish, fat fish, skinny fish, an abundance of artistic fish to fry.

As filmmakers, we in Bollywood realize that we have to maintain this artistic ecosystem. If we don't give some attention to its upkeep, our wells are bound to become depleted, stagnant or blocked.

And overproducing draws heavily on that artistic well. Ovel1apping these wells is like overfishing, and leaves us with diminished resources. Our work dries up, and we stat1 re-cycling. Then comes the time to replenish and restock our creative resources and fill the water afresh. Filling this well involves the active pursuit of images to refresh our artistic reservoirs, and for this we have always turned to Hollywood.

When we were kids, we often used to find great filmmakers like Chetan Anand, Manmohan Desai and Vijay Anand visiting our cinema halls. No prizes for guessing why they were there! When [ joined the fi 1m ind ustry at the age of 21, the very

Like it or not} HOCCywood is there

in af( of us. first film of mine, Manzilein Aur Bhi Hain, was a miserable rehash of the Hollywood film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In the early 1970s, it was a known secret that the more affluent filmmakers went to England to see the latest American releases so that they had a head start over their poorer rivals here since in those days American films took more than a year to come to India!

I remember once when I was struggling to put an "original" script together, the legendary I.S. lohar, a renowned comedian, filmmaker and Bollywood's first intellectual, laughingly advised me, "Son, why don't you ask your rich producer to buy you a ticket to London, see an American film, and come back and remake it with Indian actors? It is cheaper, less bothersome and guarantees success!" At the time I was horrified. Little did I know that in later years I would take that advice of his too seriously.

The bulk of Bollywood filmmakers today leans on the easily available pirated VCDs and DVDs to nourish their craft.

The trade contemptuously refers to this

generation as the "DVD directors." One of the biggest hits of last year, Raaz, whose Hindi script I wrote, was sourced from an American film, What Lies Beneath, though we took care to "Indianize" it completely. Kaante, which is one of the top budget films released recently, is believed to be a remake of a Hollywood film Reservoir Dogs. In spite of Bollywood telling itself that it has a unique idiom, distinct from Hollywood, the truth is that Hollywood exists in its

Monsoon Wedding, a celebration of love and the importance of family, have already become big hits in America.

Indian movies with their violence, vamp, songs and dances have always been big crowdpullers in several Asian countries.

Now not just Indian movies, but even Indian music, fashion, dance in aerobic classes and a typical sense of humor have gradually become part of mainstream culture in the West. Bollywood has begun to knock at many doors where dwellers

fundamental nature. Take away Hollywood and there's no Bollywood. To fantasize about originality is one thing. To be completely original is a utopian dream, at least in Bollywood. I always held that Bollywood is perpetually and symbiotically connected with Hollywood. If you cut this umbilical cord, it will collapse, whither and die.

It came to me as a major surprise when recently I heard someone on a top American TV channel exclaiming "Goodbye Hollywood, Hello Bollywood!"

Really! Is that true? I wondered. Yes, if you believe NBC TV, which portrayed the musical Bombay Dreams as an entertainment craze in London and hinted that it may soon cross the Atlantic and come to Broadway this fall.

Indian movies (as NBC put it) like

A publicity still from Kaante. This jilm was entirely shot in the United States with a Hollywood production team that incuded production designer Peter Jamieson of Robocop and Point Breakfarne.

previously had no familiarity with it.

Till not very long ago, if you were to ask an average American "What do you think of Bolly wood?" with a strange look he might have shot back: "You are mispronouncing Hollywood."

Gone are the days when Bollywood was a stranger to the entertainment industry of the world. The "spicy curry of Indian films" is now as much in demand as Indian chicken tikka, masala dosa and chhole bhature!

Though Bollywood is yet to win its first Oscar, to me it's not just because Indian films are substandard, it's also because the

people who decide the winners lack the capacity to understand the psyche of the people who watch films in cinema halls in India. And, it's for this reason--eall me a pessimist if you like-I don't see a typical Bollywood masala ever winning an Oscar.

In these slump-hit times, a week-long houseful across the country is considered to be far more gratifYing in India than the aspiration to win an Oscar. eedless to say the taste and maturity of audiences that the two entertainment industries cater to are poles apart, even though Indian cinema, along with much of world cinema, evolved concurrently with Hollywood. The indelible impact of Hollywood on Indian movies and filmmakers like me notwithstanding, Indian films continue to retain their typical Indian identity and have influenced the cinema of the developed world.

Indian philosophy inspired Conrad Rooks so much that he produced Siddhartha in the 1970s with an allIndian cast. Kabir Bedi, Shabana Azmi, Roshan Seth and Om Puri established themselves long ago and now Anupam Kher has made a new mark for himself with a brilliant performance in Bend It Like Beckham. Much before her Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair carved out a distinct niche for herself with some remarkable films like Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra. Pondicherryborn director Manoj "Night" Shyamalan with his films like The Sixth Sense and Signs has proved to be a new sensation and has already been compared with none other than Steven Spielberg.

Hollywood's main success has been due to its ability to assimilate and broaden the film style of other countries. Be it the Italian "Spaghetti Western" or the typical violence of Hong Kong thrillers, the U.S. film industry has had an uncanny knack for taking the world's cinematic styles and molding them. With the increasing influence of Bollywood, can the day be too far off when people around the world see a song-and-dance love story coming from Hollywood! It may take a while but the coming together of Hollywood and Bollywood has never been closer than it is now.

D

Dol A well-known short story by author and columnist Jug Suraiya has inspired a film by a young and talented director from the American Film Institute middle-aged schoolteacher disciplines a refractory prankster, hitting him during class. The act leads the teacher to an examination of his life, values, and his place in the changing world. It ultimately challenges him to uphold or compromise his principles. It is a tale familiar to young scholars in India, because it is the plot of "The Badger," a short story by Jug Suraiya, and it is on their English reading list. Rajshree Ojha, one such schoolgirl, grew up, went to America, became a film director, took this modern Everyman tale and turned it into a delectable short film, Badger.

The film is her thesis for her Master of Fine Arts degree at the American Film Institute (AFI), located in Los Angeles, California-Hollywood, in fact. Badger premiered at the venerable Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, with two other short AFI thesis films, in October 2002 and won the institute's Spirit of Excellence Award for Best Director for a short film.

When Ojha was in Delhi for the India premiere of her film recently, she spoke of her reasons for selecting the story. "When I pitched this story I never pitched it as an Indian story, I pitched it as universal. Every human in the world sometimes has to compromise," she said. "I knew this character so well. I was taught this in high school. And I see it, every day in my life, when I come to Calcutta. The older generation is like that. You see how they are struggling. The story is so relevant now, just as when he wrote it."

She had some high-powered encouragement. David Lynch, former AFI fellow and director of such films as Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks series and the weird cult film, Eraserhead, also liked the story, Ojha recalled. "He said he himself is a badger.

He said, 'Go with the story. It's a good story. Just do it.' "

A

Stills from Badger. Top: Dhritiman Chaterji, who plays Badger and Don Ganguly, as his colleague Basu, chat between classes. Above: A scene at a disco where Badger confronts his sense that the world is passing him by. Looks like Calcutta? The film was shot in Los Angeles.

Clockwise from left: Director Rajshree Ojha on set: Badger (Dhritiman Chaterji) takes tea on his small veranda; the Badger crew with Chaterji and schoolkids during filming.

The big creative challenge in turning stories into films is successful adaptation. Ojha at first "shied away" from setting the film in India because she had to shoot it in America. She at first thought to set the film in an English school in London: "It's easier to create that. Then there was a teacher of mine, George Walczak. He read the story and he loved it. He said, 'Raji, don't lose the essence of India. That is what the story is about. It is not so much about what happens or not, it's about him being an Indian and he's struggling. Don't lose that.' I said it's a challenge. He said 'Take that challenge.

You can do it.' I said OK." With the exception of some stock footage she used, Ojha re-created Calcutta in Downtown L.A. The next step was teasing out the protagonist's character traits and conveying these visually and through dialogue. "In filmmaking, that's what I learned in America, you can't just say 'this is how it is.' You have to go deeper.. ..Why does a character do what he does?" She described sessions with her colleagues at AFI in which she discussed her story line, "And they'd say, 'Why? Why would he hit him? It's just a little prank, every boy and girl does it, so why would he

hit him?' Something more has triggered him to hit the child. To make sense, what is it?"

It led her to take some liberties, a very few, to dramatize this, while preserving the spirit ofthe text. A waft of sexuality, understated, drifts through the film. Feminine feet,

The American Film Institute Conservatory was founded 32 years ago in Los Angeles, California, and has graduated more than 3,000 film professionals. In that time it has gained a reputation as one of the finest American film schools. The Conservatory offers courses in all aspects of filmmaking: directing, cinematography, film editing, producing, and screenwriting. In addition, AFI promotes quality films and film professionals by recognizing them with annual awards. API organizes film festivals around the U.S. Its National Center for Film and Video Preservation (NCFVP) continues to acquire films for its collections at the Library of Congress and at other American archives. Restoration and construction is almost complete on the API Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland. This three-screen complex that incorporates the historic 1938 Silver Theater is scheduled to open this year, and will screen the best in American and international cinema, host festivals, premieres, educational programs and other special events year round. For more information see <www.afi.com>

nicely turned, swishing sari, the neighbor's wife takes her washing off the clothesline as Badger watches intently from his dingy flat in the staff quarters. An old recording of Rabindra Sangeet wails in the background.

The influence of Satyajit Ray is clear in the film, and certainly Ray would be proud of his votary. Ojha cast the impeccable Dhritiman Chaterji-who was once one of Ray's actors-as Badger. He is perfect, conveying through look and gesture the essence of his conflicted character. The black and white chiaroscuro of the film creates a potent supportive atmosphere.

Jug Suraiya, when asked about his reaction to seeing his brainchild onscreen, replied honestly, "When we got the video cassette I couldn't steel myself to watch it for about three weeks." His wife Bunny saw it, liked it, and told him it maintained the integrity of the story but, he said, "I was literally bashful to see someone else's interpretation of my thoughts." He couldn't imagine how it could be done on film, since much of the story had to do with Badger's internal dialogue. "When I eventually did see it, I agreed with Bunny, it was a finely made film. I liked the way it was scripted." Suraiya didn't watch the film until its formal New Delhi screening.

Now Badger will do the rounds of film festivals, where young and promising directors are discovered and where they hope to attract all-important funding for new projects.

Rajshree Ojha brims with enthusiasm about directing, and is already making plans for a feature film, which, if she gets

backing, she will shoot in Delhi. "I think there are a lot of good writers in India and I want to adapt again, another set of stories," she says. "Once I get the rights, then I want to shoot it here and I want to go back and do my post production in America, because that is the best place to do it. My team is also there." Teamwork is a key, she says, a valuable ethic instilled at AFI. Ojha praised the opportunities America offers: "I learned a lot, I really learned to be on my own, independent, working.

There's a different kind of freedom." She values "working on my own tenns. I have that freedom. Americans respect you as an individual." A big advantage, she feels, is that "the education system is so good. You know what you want to do, just go for it."

She studied computer graphics and theater at New York University, but she "always wanted to be a filmmaker," so when she completed her B.S., she enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and did a short film there. It won an award. On the strength of that she applied to four top U.S. film schools: University of Southern California, University of California, Los Angeles, NYU and AFI. AFI was her first choice because it was a two-year, highly focused program. "I wanted to go to AFlit is director-specific, it is a conservatory.

You know you are going there to direct films." She did not regret it. "AFI is not a theory-based school. It is all hands-on and you just keep working." She adds, "What was really interesting was working with different people and learning teamwork, because it's all about teamwork."

D

hen he was growing up on Lower Manhattan's Elizabeth Street in the 1950s, Martin Scorsese noticed tantalizing vestiges of a New York City that simply didn't fit into the Little Italy neighborhood he otherwise knew so well. There were the tombstones dating to the 1810s in the graveyard at nearby St. Patrick's church, cobblestone pavements that hinted at horse-drawn traffic, and the "very tiny, very ancient" basements he discovered beneath late-19th-century tenements. "T gradually realized that the Italian Americans weren't the first ones there, that other people had preceded us," says Scorsese. "This fascinated me. I kept wondering, how did New York look? What were the people like?

How did they walk, eat, work, dress?"

That childhood obsession with a vanished past propels the Gangs of New York, Scorsese's epic evocation of the city's brutal, colorful underworld in the first half of the 19th century. But the director says the movie had its genesis in a "chance encounter" more than 30 years ago. In January 1970, Scorsese, by then an aspiring filmmaker, stumbled across a volume in a friend's library that changed everything he thought he knew about his old neighborhood. Suddenly, the nameless ghosts that had flitted through those mysterious basements sprang to life.

The book was The Gangs of New York, an account of the city's 19th-century underworld published in 1927 by journalist Herbert Asbury. "It was a revelation," Scorsese says. "There were so many gangs!"

In Asbury's vivid chronicle, Scorsese discovered a deadly subculture of hoodlums with names like the Bowery Boys, the Plug Uglies, the Short Tails and the Dead Rabbits, the latter so called, it was said, because they carried a dead rabbit on a pike as their battle standard. In these pages, he was introduced to legions of once-notorious gangsters, among them Bill "the Butcher" Poole, Red Rocks Farrell, Slobbery Jim, Sow Madden, Piggy Noles, Suds Merrick, Cowlegged Sam McCarthy, Eat 'Em Up Jack McManus. Not all the thugs, he discovered, were male. Hell-Cat Maggie, legend has it, filed her front teeth to points and wore artificial brass fingernails, the better to lacerate her adversaries.

Behind much of the violence lay a clash that involved, on the one hand, a population of largely protestant Americans, some of them with 18th-century English and Dutch roots in the New World, some of them more recent arrivals. This group collectively came to be known as nativists, for their perceived entitlement to native American soil. They squared off against Catholic Irish immigrants who arrived in the millions during the 19th century. Nativists "looked at the Irish coming off the boats," Scorsese adds, "and said, 'What are you doing here?' It was chaos, tribal chaos."

In Asbury's book, Scorsese recognized something larger than a portrait of the city's bygone lowlife. As the descendant of immigrants himself (his grandparents arrived from Sicily at the turn of the century), he saw in the bloody street fighting of the mid-19th century a battle for nothing less than democracy itself.

"The country was up for grabs, and New York was a powder

W

keg," says Scorsese. "This was the America not of the West with its wide open spaces, but of claustrophobia, where everyone was crushed together. If democracy didn't happen in ew York, it wasn't going to happen anywhere."

As a fledgling director, Scorsese could only dream of taking Asbury's characters to the screen. But two years after his hardedged portrayal of his old neighborhood in 1977's Mean Streets, which brought him critical acclaim, Scorsese acquired the screen rights to the book. It would take him three decades to bring his vision to fruition.

Beginning with a bloody gang war in 1846, Gangs of New York culminates amid the Gotterdammerung of the 1863 draft riots, in which perhaps as many as 70,000 men and women, aroused by the introduction of mandatory conscription during the third year of the Civil War, rampaged through the streets of New York, setting houses afire, battling police and lynching African Americans. Federal troops had to be brought in to quell the disturbance.

As early as 1800, immigrants, nativists and others had confronted one another in the streets of New York. Here, competing groups vied for living space and economic survival in a cramped district near the tip of Manhattan. Though Scorsese's film does not claim to transcribe events of long ago with documentary precision, its fictional plots of vengeance, romance and political intrigue evoke an all-but-forgotten urban past, as if Scorsese had pried loose one of Lower Manhattan's ancient cobblestones, and the teeming world of the 1850s had risen emphatically from the depths.

Re-creating this lost world was a daunting exercise. Very little of 1860s ew York City-in particular, two- and three-story wood frame buildings, which began disappearing in the 1830ssurvives today. Ultimately, Scorsese's solution was, in effect, to transport 19th-century New York to the vast Cinecitta Studio in Rome, where most of the film was shot. Scores of buildings (laid end to end, the structures would extend for more than 1.5 kilometers) were constructed to replicate entire sections of the city.

Production designer Dante Ferretti's army of carpenters built a five-block area of Lower Manhattan, including the notorious Five Points slum (so named because of the angular convergence of streets there, a few hundred meters east of today's criminal courts and a short walk from Ground Zero) and a section of the East River waterfront replete with two full-scale ships. They also built a mansion, replicas of Tammany Hall, a church, a saloon, a Chinese theater and a gambling casino.

Says the amiable Ferretti, a protege of the late legend Federico Fellini: "When I make a movie, my goal is not just to re-create the past but to imagine it as if! were a person living in that world. Fellini always told me, 'Don't just copy. Don't be afraid to use your imagination.' " Costume designer Sandy Powell faced the challenge of dressing actors who, for the most pati, pOliray an impoverished and largely unwashed underclass who were often too poor to own more than a single suit of clothes. "They wore what they had, and what they had was often filthy," says Powell. "The clothing

The jilm:S designers relied on actual images of the saloonand brothel-filled Lower Manhattan neighborhood c. 1867 (left), and as re-created (above), where new 1rish immigrants faced off against better-established nativists.

In 1873, a reporter wrote of Five Points: "The very letters of the two words seem to redden with the bloodstains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Misery and Pestilence .... " Below: Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio star in the jilm.

was often found, or stolen."

Thieves. Beneath the basement's earthen floor, the dead, too destitute even for a proper burial, were sometimes interred.

Equal concern for authenticity was expended on the speech of Everywhere in the neighborhood, lanes ran thick with a soup of characters, whose loyalties were often revealed by their accents. rotting garbage and human waste; pigs and other animals forIn search of lost speech patterns, dialect coach Tim Monich studaged in the fetid byways. "Saturate your handkerchief with camied old poems, ballads and newspaper articles (which sometimes phor, so that you can endure the horrid stench," visitors were reproduced spoken dialect as a form of humor). He also conadvised by one 19th-century temperance worker. sulted The Rogue s Lexicon, a book of underworld idioms comFor Charles Dickens, who visited New York in 1842, the Five piled in 1859 by a former New York City police chief who was Points was a real-life hell, where human beings with "coarse and fascinated by the inner life ofthe gangs. A key piece of evidence bloated faces" were barely distinguishable from animals. "From was a rare 1892 wax recording of Walt Whitman reciting four every corner as you glance about you in these dark retreats," he lines from Leaves of Grass. On it, the poet pronounces "world" wrote in American Notes, "some figure crawls half-awakened, as "woild," and the "a" of "an" nasal and flat, like "ayan." as if the judgement-hour were near at hand, and every obscure Monich concluded that native 19th-century New Yorkers soundgrave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, ed something like Brooklyn cabbies of the mid-20th. Actors women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the diswere allowed to employ 19th-century slang (for example, lodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings." "chump," meaning dolt, was already in use). They were told, however, to replace "dope fiend" with "hop fiend" and to subUntil the early 1800s, New York City had been a comparastitute "lime juicers" for "limeys" when insulting Americans of tively staid and conservative town, whose northern limits barely extended beyond modern Wall Street. (As late as the 1810s, British heritage. When Liam Neeson, who plays a gang leader, mocked his rivals as "Nancy Boys," or sissies, a term still used cows grazed where New York's City Hall now stands.) But by in Ballymena, Neeson's Northern Ireland hometown, Monich the 1830s, the city had expanded north to Greenwich Village. As informed him that New York hooligans would have called them wave after wave of mostly Irish immigrants poured into the area, "Miss ancies." two- and three-story dormered town houses, until then the residences of merchants and middle-class craftsmen, were convertMost of the film's action takes place around the seething Five ed into tenements. There was no public sewage system, little Points slum, then a paramount symbol of anarchy, violence police protection and no restriction and urban hopelessness. About on the number of people who 1830, the ew York Mirror In 1863, federal troops had to put down anti-consoiption riots that raged aovss Manhattan and ended one chapter in the gang conflict. could be packed into a single described the area as a "loathsome As many as 100 people werE killed; 12Ajhcan Americans WerE lynched dwelling. In only 25 years, from den of murderers, thieves, aban1830 to 1855, the population of the doned women, ruined children, Five Points area nearly doubled. filth, drunkenness, and broils By then, first-generation immi[brawls]." Around the same time, grants accounted for 72 percent George Catlin, the artist best of the area's population. One outknown for his portraits of Indians come of this new, cruelly congeston the Great Plains, painted the ed kind of city was the first Five Points district, depicting a American slum. Another was the riotous scene of brawling drunks, street gang. leering prostitutes and interminIn Low Life, a 1991 study of gled races. To most Americans, New York's many overlapping the very name itself suggested 19th-century underworlds journalunspeakable wickedness and sin. ist Luc Sante reports, "The basic Individual tenements acquired unit of social life among young monikers like the Gates of Hell or males in New York in the nineBrickbat Mansion.

The most teenth century was (as it perhaps is notorious hellhole of all, and a still and ever more shall be) the key setting for the film, was a cavgang." For "the Manhattan of the ernous abandoned brewery turned immigrants," he says, the gang tenement. Here, a population of served as "an important marker, a several hundred, the poorest of sort of social stake driven in," Irish immigrants and African which allowed various ethnic Americans, lived under unspeakgroups to control a few blocks of a able conditions. Prostitutes plied city in which they wielded very littheir trade openly in a single vast tle real power.

"They engaged in cham ber, known as the Den of

At a studio in Italy, production designer Dante Ferretti painstakingly re-created the look of 19th-centwy New York City for director Scorsese (center, in white shirt). "Nothing is fantasy, " insists Ferretti, who replicated a 30-block stretch of Lower Manhattan. "Everything is built to look precisely as it did. "

violence," writes Sante, "but violence was a normal part of life in their always-contested environment; turf war was a condition of the neighborhood."

Gangs specialized in everything from waterborne piracy to picking pockets, burglary and election fraud. Even more commonly they tried their hands at indiscriminate mayhem. One gang, for example, worked the Hudson River in rowboats, robbing ships at anchor. They were commanded by a fearsome Valkyrie known as Sadie the Goat, who at the height of a barroom brawl had an ear bitten off by the equally ferocious Gallus Mag, who earned her stripes as a bouncer at the Hole-in-theWall, a notorious bar. Thereafter, Sadie is said to have worn the

missing anatomical feature in a locket around her neck. Harddrinking sailors were especially popular targets. "Crimps" (meaning kidnappers) operated boardinghouses where seamen were regularly drugged, robbed and often murdered; in the 1860s, it was estimated that 15,000 sailors were mugged each year on Cherry Street alone. It was said that no well-dressed man, and certainly no woman, could venture safely off Broadway, even in the daylight. "Ifthe gangsters could not lure a prospective victim into a dive, they followed him until he passed beneath an appointed window, from which a woman dumped a bucket of ashes on his head," wrote Asbury. "As he gasped and choked, the thugs rushed him into a cellar, where they killed him and stripped the clothing from his back, afterward casting his naked body upon the sidewalk."

For all their ferocity, some gangs had a well-developed sense of public relations. After a prolonged and bloody outbreak of fighting in 1857, the New York Times printed a notice that read: "We are requested by the Dead Rabbits to state that the Dead Rabbit

Poole managed to seize a carving knife club members are not thieves, that they and lurch for his assailant before he did not participate in the riot with the died. Baker fled on a ship bound for the Bowery Boys, and that the fight in Canary Islands, but was intercepted by Mulberry street was between the Roach a private yacht, dispatched by one of Guards of Mulberry street and the Poole's wealthy cronies, and carried Atlantic Guards of the Bowery. The back to New York. Tried for murder Dead Rabbits are sensitive on points of along with Morrissey, he ultimately honor, we are assured, and wouldn't went free after three separate juries allow a thief to live on their beat, much failed to reach a consensus, despite less be a member of their club." several eyewitnesses to Poole's assassiAs interpreted by actor Daniel Daynation-proof of how firmly the city Lewis, Bill "the Butcher" Cutting, a was in the grip of Tammany's minions. violent character Scorsese based on ~ Melodramas celebrating Poole as a Bill "the Butcher" Poole, a gang leader ~ local folk hero soon appeared. The prowith nativist sympathies, remains a ~ ductions invariably ended with an actor fundamentally ethical man. Cutting ~ draped in an American flag, gasping possesses a sense of dignity and of his- Ii'~ out Poole's alleged farewell to his tory. In the script, Cutting's father had ~ cronies: "Goodbye, boys, I die a true been killed fighting the English in the ~ American!"

War of 1812. The son fancies his hatred ~ Although Scorsese's film conof foreigners to be a kind of patriotism ~ cludes with the 1863 draft riots, and his combat with immigrants a which marked an end to one phase of defense of the values for which he Muckraker Jacob Riis, who photographed these violent conflict in the city's streets, believes his father died. "Judged by young criminals in custody c. 1890, helped bring today's standards, he would be a psy- poverty:S costs to public attention. Children, he gangs continued to flourish long after the Civil War. The gangsters of chotic," says Day-Lewis. "But I don't reported., were "thrown upon the street, " where think that he was a rare species. "Day- homeless boys fell in with thieves and muggers. the later 1800s reflected America's changed society. George Leonidas Lewis grew up in south London, where he remembers rival mobs of soccer supporters scheming to murLeslie, believed to have masterminded 80 percent of the der one another. "Cutting had learned how to live in the streets bank robberies committed in New York from 1874 to 1885, was a college graduate, while 120-kilogram Marm Mandelof his place and time," he adds. "He represents a very common baum lived comfortably in her Lower East Side apartment, experience, of a native-born man whose parents somehow managed to claw their way up to a position of self-respect. He has from which she ran a school for pickpockets.

In comparison with the tribal mayhem of the mid-19th centugot a code of ethics, and he sees himself as continuing the good ry, the Italian American mafia, as it rose to power in the 1890s, work that his father began. But people like him are under siege. was positively corporate in its structure, built on complex hierEvery time a boat unloads another load of 'savages,' if you are archies and entrepreneurial sophistication. But mafiosi were not Bill Cutting, you feel you're going to lose another rung in the pecking order." the only outlaws demonstrating a head for business. When a In real life, Bill Poole led a gang based around Christopher bruiser named Piker Ryan, a member of the fearsome Whyos Street, in the heart of present-day Greenwich Village. Standing gang, was arrested by the police in the late 1800s, he was found to be carrying a presumably market-tested price list of crimesover six feet tall and weighing more than 90 kilograms, Poole for-hire, including: was, in Asbury's words, a "champion brawler and eye-gouger."

One of his sidelines was providing muscle to nativist-leaning $2 Punching ... candidates during local elections. Poole developed a rivalry with Both eyes blacked. .. $4 Ear chawed off. .. $15 an Irish American prizefighter and gambler, John Morrissey, $25 Stab ... who would go on, through the patronage of the corrupt $100 and up Doing the big job ...

Democratic Party machine known as Tammany Hall, to become a state legislator and a Democratic member of the United States By the 1890s, Manhattan's meanest streets had been so tamed Congress. Morrissey, who was savagely beaten by Poole when that middle-class tourists were taking midnight tours of Bowery the boxer and his henchmen attacked a nativist clubhouse, dives. The old underworld had become, in part, a caricature of itself. Some Bowery haunts remade themselves into tourist vowed revenge.

The feud continued until 1855, when Poole met his end in a traps, morphing into a kind of low-life Disneyland, designed to Broadway barroom. One of Morrissey's hoodlums, Lew Baker, titillate with staged scenes of opium smoking and tableaux shot him with a long-barreled Colt. Though fatally wounded, depicting "white slavery" in the "depths" of Chinatown. One

!

Riis photographed the Short Tail Gang (c. J 890). These "dock rats, " as he called them, preyed along the waterji'ont, robbing and murdering. Virtually every day, Riis reported during an illustrated lecture, "a body floats ashore with pockets turned inside out. "

celebrated barkeep, Steve Brodie, paid his regulars to impersonate the lowlifes whom "slummers" yearned to glimpse. For a time, Brodie actually played himself onstage as the quintessential Bowery denizen. It was one more reflection of the entertainment industry's love affair with New York's underworld, a fascination that would continue through the hard-boiled gangster films of Jimmy Cagney to the blood-soaked realism of Scorsese's latest endeavor.

Although nearly every trace of the world that Scorsese has recreated has long since been obliterated, there are a few exceptions. At 42 Bowery, an address claimed by some to be the for-

mer clubhouse of the Bowery Boy's, a Chinese restaurant now stands. Several blocks of Bayard Street, where the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits brawled in the 1850s, remain much the same. [n Five Points, which includes a section of modern Chinatown, small children clamber over jungle gyms in a public park. If the ghosts of the thugs and mayhem artists, the murderers and pickpockets, the embattled nativists and desperate immigrants still linger, their murmurings are lost among the voices of today's ew Yorkers, chattering to each other in half a dozen dialects of Chinese, in Haitian French, Spanish, and even the slurry tones of the durable old ew Yorkese that Bill the Butcher would have recognized.

D About the Author: Fergus M Bordewich is based in Hudson Valley, New York, and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Conde Nast Traveler, and Reader's Digest. His greatgrandfather was a gang member on the streets of J 9th-century New York.

Left: Power house mechanic working on steam pump. By Lewis Hine, 1920.

Right: Some of the doffers and the Superintendent. Ten small boys and girls about this size out of a force of 40 employees. Catawba Cotton Mill, Newton, North Carolina.

By Lewis Hine, December 21, 1908.

Far right: Immigrants landing at Ellis Island.

By Brown Brothers, New York, ca. 1900.

PICTURING THE

CENTURY

he 20th century was one of unprecedented change, a century in which the movement of history was accelerated by developments in all fields of human endeavor.

It was a century punctuated by struggles with economic depression, disasters, and wars. The National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., has one of the largest photographic archives in the world. Picturing the Century is a compilation of 157 photographs from these archi yes depicting the events,

T

momentous and ordinary, in the daily lives of the American people.

Some of America's most revered photographers worked for the U.S. government at one time or another: Ansel Adams, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Yoichi Okamoto among others. The book, with text by Bruce 1. Bustard, was published in association with the University of Washington Press. Photos from the book are part of a traveling exhibition that has visited a number of Indian cities in the past few months.

D

Right. 2603 Company Civilian Conservation Corps, Camp Vermillion, Danville. lllinois. Boxing team. M,: TaylOl; traine,: By an unknown photographel; 1936-39.

Far right: Girl Ushers for Chicago baseball games. Beatrice Solomon and Violet Flatow, the first baseball girl ushers, watching a game. By Underwood and Underwood, Chicago, lllinois, July 1918.

Right: Between Weedpatch and Lamont, Kern County, California.

Children living in camp. By Dorothea Lange, April 20, 1940.

Above: Farmer reading his farm paper. By George W Ackerman, Coryell County, Texas, September 1931.

Right: Postman delivering mail, rural mail route, York County, Maine. By George W Ackerman, August 26, 1930.

Left: Much tattooed sailor aboard the USS New Jersey (BB 62). By Lt. Comdr. Charles Fenno Jacobs, December 1944.

Right: Church, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, 1942. By Ansel Adams.

Below: Vienna, VA. James S. Thomas and family viewing television in the living room of their home. From the pamphlet and Television-Promise Problem. By Everet F Bumgardner, ca. 1958.

Left. USS Shaw (DD-373) exploding during the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. By an unknown photographer, December 7, 1941.

Right: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. President Lyndon Johnson can be seen in the background.

By Yoichi Okamoto, the White House, Washington, D. c., March 18, 1966.

Cpl. Carlton Chapman ... is a machine-gunner in an M-4 tank, attached to a Motor Transport unit near Nancy, France.

By Ryan, November 5, 1944.

Close-up view of an astronaut's leg and foot and footprint in the lunar soil, photographed with a 70mm lunar surface camera during the Apollo 11 lunar surface extravehicular activity.

Astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained with the Command Service Modules in lunar orbit while astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, commander, and Edwin E. Aldrin, JI~, lunar module pilot, explored the moon.

By Neil Armstrong, July 20, 1969.

Afemale demonstrator offers a flower to militmy police on guard at the Pentagon during an antiVietnam demonstration.

By S. Sgt. Albert R. Simpson, Arlington, Virginia, October 21, 1967.

Alma and James Agee with Delmore Schwartz.

A box of papers from a North Carolina dealer specializing in literary materials made its way to the University of Tennessee's Knoxville campus in 1992. In it was written material by James Agee that had come into the hands of Agee's editor, David McDowelL McDowell edited and published Agee's fictionalized memoir, A Death in the Family, from material left by Agee at the time of his death in 1955.

The box contained two episodes that might well have become chapters in A Death in the Family.

One episode has come to be referred to as "Enter the Ford," and tells the story of Jay Follet's purchase of a new automobile and his comic eagerness to take every available member of his immediate family out for a "joyride"-much to his wife Laura's distress. (In this piece Agee has the mother named Laura, after his own mother.) Jay Follet then goes out for one last ride of the night with his son, Rufus (James Agee's middle name). Father and son narrowly escape a fatal accident. The episode prefigures Jay Follet's death in an automobile later in the book.

Agee's own father was killed in an automobile accident; Agee himself died at the age of 45 on May 16, 1955, like his father, in an automobile-albeit the back seat of a New York City taxicab, of a heart attack. To compound the irony, Agee died on the exact month and day on which his father had died decades before. Three years later, in 1958, James Agee was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Death in the Family.

Written in Agee's difficult-to-read, miniscule handwriting, "Enter the Ford" is a mere nine journal pages long. Typed out, however, this translates into approximately 6,500 words, or 26 pages of text. We are grateful to Michael Lofaro, a professor of English at the University ofTennessee-K.noxville, and to Hugh Davis, a doctoral student in the English department, for their expertise and generous help in deciphering this excerpt. What follows, then, is a moment from "Enter the Ford."

0 About the Author: Randy Testa is a New York-based writer who coedited a literary anthology titled A Life in Medicine.

Enter the Ford hen they got home that night his father came around pretending to be a chauffeur and opened the door and bowed before he helped Laura and her sleeping child out of the back seat.

"Thank you, James," she said.

"The pleasure's all mine ma'am," he said: "No, that's not what they say is it?

Very good ma'am."

He bowed again.

"Well," he said, "Reckon Rufus and me better put the machine to bed."

"All right, Jay, take him along but don't go whirling off on your own."

"Course not. Hop back in son. Be back before you get her to bed," he said, and without wasting any more time they started up the street. The minute they were over the little hump and couldn't see the house anymore, he began gradually to speed up so that the houses no longer just floated by, they streaked, and when they came to the quirk he didn't turn downhill to Fourth Avenue but just slowed up enough to take the wriggling turn smoothly, and then pulled down on the little thing under the steering wheel as far as it could go and really tore up the empty street, so fast that the dark stretches of pavement which raced between the round pools of light at the corners seemed very short and it seemed as if they moved from pool to pool almost fast as you could walk step by step. He leaned forward over the wheel and glanced at his son, smiling.

"Scared?" he asked.

"Huh, uh," Rufus said.

"How about it," his father asked, eyes on the road again.

"0 yes!"

He saw his father smile.

"Just wanted to open her up and see what she'll really do," he said, and they both watched the sleeping pavement stream towards them and under them in their yellow light while the air made a beautiful fluffing roar past both edges of the windshield and the branches of trees sailed swishing overhead like whips. All of the sudden a high weedy bank soared into the light and his father said "Gahd darn" under his breath and plunged his foot down hard on one brake and grabbed up hard on the other, and they careened, making a terrible noise, and stopped like hitting a stone wall, with the

W

bank up high and glaring right in front of them and a tremendous noise from the engine until he remembered the engine and shut it down quiet.

"You all right?" he asked with terrible anxiousness.

"Mm, lun," Rufus said, very much excited.

"Didn't bump your head, scare yourself?"

"Huh, uh."

His father just sat for a minute, breathing hard.

"Wow," he said finally. "That was a close call sure enough." He shook his head back and forth. "Lucky thing we got new brakes," he said.

He got out of the car and walked slowly around to the front and Rufus could see him in the swathed light, examining very seriously. He shook his head again.

"Boy!" he exclaimed, "come on out and looky here," he called quietly, and Rufus slid under the wheel and came to his side.

"Look at that."

A big sharp rock jutted out bluish among burdocks, not two inches from the left headlight.

"Golly," his father said.

"Golly," Rufus said.

"That's the last time I'll play like I'm Barney Oldfield," his father said. "Less I got me a good clear piece of pike."

Rufus did not understand the reference, so he said Golly again and shook his head slowly. Just to keep in touch. He felt a hand wad up his shoulder and looked up; his father's eyes were very blue and his face was ashamed and worried.

He looked as if he wanted help and Rufus loved him and felt very proud to be looked at like that.

"Sure you're all right?" his father asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"That's good," his father said solemnly. He kept looking at him. "Don't say a word about this, son," he said and one hand gestured uneasily towards the auto. "Scare mama to death. She asks where we were all this time, we'll just tell her we took a little longer'n we aimed to, but we didn't go fast. All right?"

"Sure," he said, using the manliest word he could think of.

"But don't tell her about this. Or going so fast. Huh?" "Huh, uh," he replied proudly.

"Hate to tell a lie," his father said. "But we don't want to skear her, do we."

"Huh, uh."

0

JAMES

AGEE

IN 1936

ight was his time. In Albama he worked 1 don't know how late. Some parts of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men read as though they were written on the spot at night. Later, in a small house in Frenchtown, New Jersey, the work, 1 think, was largely night-written. Literally the result shows this; some of the sections read best at night, far in the night. The first passage of A Country Letter is particularly night-permeated.

Agee worked in what looked like a rush and a rage. In Alabama he was possessed with the business, jamming it all into the days and the nights. He must not have slept. He was driven to see all he could of the families' day, starting, of course, at dawn. In one way, conditions there were ideal.

He could live inside the subject; with no distractions.

Backcountry poor life wasn't really far from him, actually.

He had some of it in his blood, through relatives in Tennessee. Anyway, he was in flight from New York maga-

N

zine editorial offices, from Greenwich Village social-intellectual evenings, and especially from the whole world of high-minded, well-bred, money-hued culture, whether authoritarian on libertarian. In Alabama he sweated and scratched with submerged glee. The families understood what he was down there to do. He'd explained it, in such a way that they were interested in his work. He wasn't playing. That is why in the end he left out certain completed passages that were entertaining, in an acid way. One of these was a long, gradually hilarious aside on the subject of hens.

It was a virtuoso piece heightened with allegory and bemused with the pathetic fallacy ....

Agee's rebellion was unquenchable, self-damaging, deeply principled, infinitely costly, and ultimately priceless.

-WALKER EVANS, 1960 From the introduction o/Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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The K

di Art

of

David Schorr

PRIMO DHOTI (study), 70 em X 50 em, silve/point, gesso, gouache, watercolor on Fabriano rosapina pape/; 1998.

JABATI SAREE TWO, 35 em X 56 em, silverpoint, tinted gesso, gouache, acrylic on khadi silk, 2000

avid Schorr's latest work on khadi and paper is, in a sense, the artist's homage to a culture that enthralls him with its dignity, grace and swatches of vibrant, handloom color. Evidence of this adorned the walls at "Khadi," his January exhibition in New Delhi, which opens in April at the Jehangir Art Gallety in Mumbai.

Seven years ago David Schorr wrote to National Institute of Design (NID) director Vikas Satwalekar offering to teach in Ahmedabad for a few months in exchange for room and board.

Schorr is a professor of art at Wesleyan University. His offer was enthusiastically accepted, and so began his relationship with MD and with India. "I went immediately to MD, which is an exceptional place," he says. "It is a world class design school, and I encountered some of the best students I've ever taught anywhere.

And it's still that way." His observant, painter's eye was alive to the natural elegance of the people and vivid shades around him from the moment he set foot on the sandy soil of Gujarat. "Ahmedabad is khadi, and I started to look at khadi and learn about it," Schorr says. He went around to khadi shops with Aditi Ranjan, who heads the textile depatiment at MD and who taught him about khadi.

Schorr was inspired, also, by the proud Kutchis in their white, draped lungis, on the streets outside the NID campus. Always interested in the human form as a subject for his art, he began asking NID students to pose for him in lungis, dhotis and saris. He became fascinated by the regional differences in tying these rectangles of homespun cloth. The late dancer Ranjabati Sircar posed for him, and the paintings on khadi for which she modeled are among the most striking in his exhibition.

Using khadi as his canvas, Schorr achieves subtle gradations of shadow with a meticulous drawing technique that dates from the

D

Renaissance, silverpoint. The fabric is coated with gesso and the drawing done with metal wire. Calcium in the gesso causes the metal to adhere to the canvas, creating a shimmering, sensuous effect. It requires great skill.

Since his first visit to India, Schorr has returned annually to NID, where he was resident for a year as a Fulbright fellow in 1998-99. The Chicago-born artist took degrees at Brown and Yale, and besides his career as an academic and artist, he is active in commercial art, illustrating books and posters.

What thrills Schorr about his latest exhibition is the opportunity to bring his renditions of India back "home." Audiences for his work in the United States come fi'om a different world. "In New York, people look at it, and it's about another place that they don't know about, and it's about color and cloth and it's intellectual. But here people look at it and say, 'You really looked at India. You've really observed closely. You've seen the difference between a dhoti in Kutch and a dhoti in Bengal. And you understand how they tie it in Tamil Nadu.'" This is what he wanted to hear. "If you work on someone else's material and you bring it there, you have to get it right," he declares. He was encouraged to bring his work to India after an incident in New York: "When I was working on the painting of Ranjabati, it was on my easel in New York, and a couple of my fi'iends from Ahmedabad, one of whom is a Bengali, came to stay." The two NID designers told him they "loved the picture of the Bengali lady." Schorr says, "Suddenly I realized 20 different Americans had seen that picture, and to Americans it was a lady in a sari."

But to the Indian designers, "immediately, it was a Bengali lady." He knew it would take a lot of effort, but "it was that moment I knew I wanted the show to come to India."

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MADRAS DUET, 70 em x 50 em, silverpoint, tinted gesso, and gouache on Bengali ikat khadi silk, 2000

NLINE

\------Traditionally, in a free-market democracy, the people ultimately make the decision as to how their press should act. But will this continue to hold true as media adjusts to the electronic age?

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0lumes have been written about the role of the mass media in a democracy. The danger in all this examination is to submerge the subject under a sludge of platitudes.

The issue of whether a free press is the best communications solution in a democracy is much too important at the close of this century and needs to be examined dispassionately.

Before addressing the subject, it helps to define the terminology. In the broadest sense, the media embraces the television and film entertainment industries, a vast array of regularly published printed material, and even public relations and advertising. The "press" is SlJPposed to be a serious member of that family, focusing on real life instead offantasy and serving the widest possible audience. A good generic term for the press in the electronic age is "news media." The emphasis in this definition is on content, not technology or delivery system, because the pressat least in developed countries-can be found these days on the Internet, the fax lines, or the airwaves.

A self-governing society, by definition, needs to make its own decisions. It cannot do that without hard information, leavened with an open exchange of views. Abraham Lincoln articulated this concept most succinctly when he said: "Let the people know the facts,

cracy and the country will be safe."

Some might regard Lincoln's as a somewhat naive viewpoint, given the complexities and technologies of the 20th century; but the need for public news has been a cornerstone of America's system almost from the start.

Thomas Jefferson felt so strongly about the principle of free expression he said something that non-democrats must regard as an absurdity: "If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

The implication of those words is that self-governance is more essential than governance itself. Not so absurd, perhaps, if you had just fought a war against an oppressive government.

In the wake of America's successful revolution, it was decided there should indeed be government, but only if it were accountable to the people. The people, in turn, could only hold the government accountable if they knew what it was doing and could intercede as necessary, using their ballot, for example. This role of public "watchdog" was thus assumed by a citizen press, and as a consequence, the government in the United States has been kept out of the news business. The only government-owned or -controlled media in the United States are those that broadcast overseas, such as the Voice of America. By law, this service is not allowed to broadcast within the country. There is partial government subsidy to public television and radio in the United States, but safeguards protect it against political interference.

Because the Constitution is the highest law in the land, any attempts by courts, legislators and law enforcement officers to weaken protected liberties, such as free expression, are generally preventable.

Fairly simple in theory, but how has all this worked out?

Generally speaking, pretty well, although the concept of a free press is challenged and defended every day in one community or another across the land. The American press has always been influential, often powerful and sometimes feared, but it has seldom been loved. As a matter of fact, journalists today rank in the lower echelons of public popularity. They are seen as too powerful on the one hand, and not trustworthy on the other.

In its early days, the American press was little more than a pamphleteering industry, owned by or affiliated with competing political interests and engaged in a constant war of propaganda.

Trust was not an issue. What caused the press to become an instrument for democratic decision-making was the variety of voices. Somehow, the common truth managed to emerge from under that chaotic pile of information and misinformation. A quest for objectivity was the result.

Many critics have questioned whether there is such a thing as "objectivity." Indeed, no human being can be truly objective; we can only seek objectivity and impartiality in the pursuit of truth.

Journalists can try to keep their personal views out of the news, and they employ a number of techniques to do so, such as obtaining and quoting multiple sources and opposing views.

The question is whether the truth always serves the public. At times, the truth can do harm. If the truthful report of a small communal conflict in, say, Africa, leads to more civil unrest, is the public really being served? The journalistic purists-often those sitting in comfotiable chairs far from conflict-say it is not their job to "play God" in such matters, and that one should not "shoot the messenger for the message." This is without a doubt the most troubling conundrum in journalism, and it forces fair-minded professionals (yes, they still exist) to a middle ground that might be termed "responsible restraint."

If, however, one takes the rigid view that the truth always needs to be controlled-or Lenin's dictum that truth is partisan-the door is wide open for enormous abuse, as history has demonstrated time and again. It is this realization (and fear) that prompted Jefferson to utter that absurdity about the supreme importance of an uncensored press.

What Jefferson and the constitutional framers could not have foreseen, however, was how modern market forces would expand and exploit the simple concept of free expression. While media with meager resources in most developing countries are still struggling to keep governments from suppressing news that Westerners take for granted, the mass media in America, Britain, Germany and elsewhere are preoccupied with their role as profitable businesses and the task of securing a spot on tomorrow's electronic superhighway. In such an environment, truth in the service of the public seems almost a quaint anachronism.

Is the capitalist drive an inherent obstacle to good journalism? In one sense, the marketplace can be the ally, rather than the enemy of a strong, free media. For the public to believe what it reads, listens to and sees in the mass media, the "product" must be credible.

Otherwise, the public will not buy the product, and the company

will lose money. So, profitability and public service can go hand in hand. What a media company does with its money is the key. If it uses a significant portion of its profits to improve its newsgathering and marketing capabilities and eliminate dependence upon others for its survival (e.g., state subsidies, newsprint purchases, or access to printing facilities), the product improves, and the public is served. If it uses its profits primarily to make its owners rich, it might as well be selling toothpaste. (See Krimsky's The Press and the Public for another look at how the public in a democracy uses the news media to govern itself.)

The assumption in this argument is that the public overwhelmingly wants to believe its news media, and that it will use this credible information to actively and reasonably conduct its public affairs. Unfortunately, that assumption is not as valid as it was in simpler times. In affluent societies today, media consumers are seeking more and more entertainment, and the news media's veracity (even its plausibility) is less important than its capacity to attract an audience. This trend is not lost on the big media conglomerates, such as Time-Warner, Disney/ABC and Rupert Murdoch's worldwide media empire. It is arguable that these companies have as much created the public demand for non-stop entertainment as they have tried to fill it.

But, you say, look at the new technology that can penetrate any censorship system in the world. Look at the choices people have today. Look at how accessible information is today. Yes, the choices may be larger, but a case can be made they are not deeper-that big money is replacing quality products and services with those of only the most massive appeal. The banquet table may be larger, but if it only contains "junk food," is there really more choice? Declining literacy, for example, is a real problem in the so-called developed world. That's one reason why newspapers are so worried about their future. But if panic sends the print media running to the Internet and cable television to serve the sh0l1ened attention span, it is difficult to see how literacy will be served.

Where is the relevance of all this to the emerging democracies around the world? Certainly the American experience, for all its messiness, provides a useful precedent, if not always a model.

For example, when one talks about an independent media, it is necessary to include financial independence as a prerequisite, in addition to political independence. The American revenueearning model of heavy reliance on advertising is highly suspect in many former communist countries, but one has to weigh the alternatives. Are government and party subsidies less imprisoning? If journalists are so fearful of contamination by advet1iser pressure, they can build internal walls between news and business functions, similar to those American newspapers erected earlier in this century.

If they are fearful of political contamination of the information-gathering process, they can build another wall separating the newsroom from the editorial department-another important concept in modern American journalism.

The problem in many new democracies is that journalists who

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once had to toe the single-patty line equate independence with opposition.

Because they speak out against the government, they say they are independent. But haven't they just traded one affiliation for another? There is little room for unvarnished truth in a partisan press.

Is objectivity a luxury in societies that have only recently begun to enjoy the freedom to voice their opinions? Listen to the comment of a Lithuanian newspaper editor shOltly after his country gained its independence: "I want my readers to know what their heads are for." His readers were used to being told not only what to think about, but what to think. Democracy requires the public to make choices and decisions. This editor wanted to prepare citizens for that responsibility with articles that inform but do not pass judgment. His circulation increased.

Though nearly 60 percent ofthe world's nations today are declared democracies-a monumental change from a mere decade ago-most of them have nevettheless instituted press laws that prohibit reporting on a whole array of subjects ranging from the internal activity and operations of government to the private lives ofleaders. Some of these are well-intentioned effOlts to "preserve public stability." But all of them, ALL of them, undermine the concept of self-governance.

The watchdog role of the free press can often appear as mean-spirited.

How do the government and public protect themselves from its excesses? In the United States, it is done in a variety of ways. One, for example, is the use of "ombudsmen." In this case, news organizations employ an in-house critic to hear public complaints and either publish or broadcast their judgments.

Another is the creation of citizens' councils which sit to hear public complaints about the press and then issue verdicts, which, although not carrying the force of law, are aired widely.

Last, and most effective, is libel law. In the United States, a citizen can win a substantial monetary award from a news organization if libel is proven in a court of law. It is much harder for a public official or celebrity than an ordinary citizen to win a libel case against the press, because the courts have ruled that notoriety comes with being in the limelight. In most cases, the complaining notable must prove "malice aforethought."

There is nothing in the American Constitution that says the press must be responsible and accountable. Those requirements were reserved for government. In a free-market democracy, the people-that is the voters and the buying public-ultimately decide as to how their press should act. If at least a semblance of truth-in-the-public-service does not remain a motivating force for the mass media of the future, neither free joumalism nor true democracy has much hope, in my opinion.

The nature and use of new technology is not the essential problem. If true journalists are worried about their future in an age when everyone with a computer can call themselves journalists, then the profession has to demonstrate that it is special, that it offers something of real value and can prove it to the public. There is still a need today-perhaps more than ever-for identifying sense amidst the nonsense, for sifting the important from the trivial, and, yes, for telling the truth. Those goals still constitute the best mandate for a free press in a democracy.

George Washington's admonition, uttered at the Constitutional Convention, still stands: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and hon0 est can repair."

About the Author: George A. Krimsky is the/ormer head a/news/or the Associated Press' World Services and author a/Hold the Press (The Inside Story on ewspapers).

34

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strange thing happened to my column last week after it was filtered through the mind of an editorial page editor (EPE) in Nebraska. It carried political COlTectness to a new dimension. I must assume that the editor was non-Indian.

First of all, I am Lakota (Sioux). I was born, raised and educated on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Southwestern South Dakota. I have been the editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper for 21 years.

I have written a syndicated column for 24 years.

I fully understand that an editorial page editor has the option of editing my columns for content, word usage, etc.

This is something all writers accept as a part of the trade.

However, I do not like it when an EPE changes the spirit of what I write.

My column last week was sent out to Knight Ridder Tribune News, my syndicate, with the headline, "Who is Indian and who is not? The editor in question changed it to "Who is Native and who is not?"

In the more than 20 years I have published a newspaper I seldom use the term "Native American." Why not? Because anyone born and raised in this country is Native American. I have heard this from readers and subscribers for many years.

I, and many elders of the different Indian nations (Ooops! Native nations, I should've written), have no trouble at all with the word "Indian." In fact, that is

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Š 2002 Lakota Media, tne. Originally appeared in LakotQ Times, ovember 18, 2002.

Notes from Indian Country

Is Illndigenous Fried Bread" on the Menu? what we call each other. Many Lakota elders have no trouble with the word "Sioux." That is what they call each other.

The lead sentence in the column in question began "When a tribe in Kansas adopts non-Indians "And guess what? The rewrite goes, "When a tribe in Kansas adopts non-Natives ..... " Native American as opposed to Indian happened during the age of political correctness. It was at the time when African American, Asian American, and Hispanic American came into vogue.

For as long as I can remember, we have always referred to ourselves as "Indian."

Many elders will tell you that Indian is not a bad word. They do not believe it was a word uttered by Christopher Columbus because he thought he was in India when he landed on the islands of the Western Hemisphere.

Rather they attribute it to the Spanish Conquistadors and the padres who accompanied them to a land they dubbed The New World. The Spanish padres saw the indigenous people as innocents. They called them Ninos in Dios. My Spanish is lacking here, but I believe it means "Children of God." As the words became words of common usage they were shortened to "Indios." In Latin American countries Indians are still known as "Indios."

And the word Indios soon became Indian when repeated by

the settlers from other European nations.

Many years ago, when as a young boy, I labored in the sugar beet fields of Colorado, the farm hands from Mexico called me "Indios." I did not find this offensive.

Columbus was an intelligent man. He would know after a day or two that he was not in India. Why then would he name the locals Indians? Why would that name bounce from nation to nation throughout North and South America? I believe the name "Indios" gained a foothold in the Southwest and in Florida because the Spaniards passed on the name they had coined for the indigenous population.

As I said, I seldom use Native American in my newspaper and it is circulated and read by many Indian people. I have never received a letter from any indigenous person objecting to the word Indian.

In 1983 when several Indian journalists met in Durant, Oklahoma, while forming the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA), we held a skull session about what to name our new organization. I had just been elected the first president of NAJA and I asked those journalists in attendance to throw out some names we could mull over.

One journalist suggested The Indigenous Journalist Association. Adrian Louis, who was managing editor of the Lakota Times quipped, "When we start calling our

favorite snack 'Indigenous Fried Bread' then I will consider that name."

The only reason we did not pick the name American Indian Journalists Association is because there had been an American Indian Press Association in the early 1970s that had failed. We wanted to separate ourselves from that failure. We chose Native American Press Association, which later became Native American Journalists Association because, after much discussion, we did want to make that distinction between our new organization and the one that had failed.

As a matter of record, the oldest and largest Indian organization in America is named The National Congress of American Indians. I wonder if that overly conscientious editorial page editor in Nebraska changes that name to National Congress of Native Americans whenever he or she is confronted by it?

I may be wrong, but as I said, I must assume that the editorial page editor who made me cringe by changing all of my words to Native, Native American, etc., is a non-Indian (Ooops! non-Native).

I kindly request that he or she stop trying to put words into my mouth that I would never use.

In other words, keep your "political cOlTectness" to yourself.

D About the Author: Tim Giago is an Oglala Lakota, a tribe of the Sioux Indian nation.

Narrwica Kciji is his Lakota name, meaning "Stands Up For Them. " He is editor and publisher of the weekly newspaper Lakota Jownal and the author of The Aboriginal Sin and otes fi-om Indian CountlY, Volumes I and II.

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Although today's business pressures and the threat of expensive lawsuits make some news companies nervous about supporting investigative reporting, it remains a strong force in American journalism-and one of the most important contributions that the press makes to democracy. n the 1970s, reporters played critical roles in revealing what became the most serious U.S. political scandal in the postWorld War 11 period. Washington journalists pursued the clues left at a petty burglary in the Watergate office building, following them all the way to the White House. The reportage led to congressional investigations and the ultimate resignation of President Richard Nixon.

The performance of the press during Watergate was held as the mirror that reflected the best that journalism could offer to democracy: holding power accountable. It became a trend in American newsrooms. The profession enjoyed high credibility in the years that followed, and a remarkable increase in journalism school enrollment occurred.

Almost three decades later, the situation has changed.

Investigative journalism does not seem to be the brightest star in the fillllament of American news. If the tone of the press was self-congratulatOly in the post-Watergate years, pessimism about the state of American journalism is currently widespread.

Observers have often argued that increasing media ownership concentration and the drive to sensationalize news coverage have sapped the vigor that investigative reporting requires. Business pressures also deter investigative reporting. Its demands for a

O

great deal of time, human and financial resources frequently conflict with profit expectations and production cost controls. Also, the fact that stories might result in expensive lawsuits makes news companies nervous about supporting investigations.

Notwithstanding these factors, there has been no shortage of investigative stories produced in the past decade. Major urban newspapers in the United States have produced aliicles that have revealed corruption, injustice, and environmental mismanagement. Local and network television news frequently produce investigative stories, which generally focus on diverse types of consumer fraud, in areas such as health care, social services, and home mortgages.

What Is Investigative Journalism?

Investigative reporting is distinctive in that it publicizes information about wrongdoing that affects the public interest.

Denunciations result from the work of reporters rather than from information leaked to newsrooms.

While investigative journalism used to be associated with lone repOliers working on their own with little, if any, suppoli from their news organizations, recent examples attest that teamwork is fundamental. Differing kinds of expertise are needed to produce well-documented and comprehensive stories. Repoliers, editors,

Former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee (above) piloted the newspaper through some of its most tlying and successful years, during the Watergate and Pentagon Papers scandals. He supported young journalists Carl Bernstein (left) and Bob Woodword (right) during their explosive Watergate investigations.

legal specialists, statistical analysts, librarians, and news researchers are needed to collaborate on investigations.

Knowledge of public information access laws is crucial to find what information is potentially available under "freedom of information" laws, and what legal problems might arise when damaging information is published. New technologies are extremely valuable to find facts and to make reporters familiar with the complexities of any given story. Thanks to the computerization of government records and the availability of extraordinary amounts of information online, computer-assisted reporting (CAR) is of great assistance.

Democracy and Investigative Journalism Investigative journalism matters because of its many contributions to democratic governance. Its role can be understood in keeping with the Fourth Estate model of the press. According to this model, the press should make govermnent accountable by publishing information about matters of public interest even if such information reveals abuses or crimes perpetrated by those in authority. From this perspective, investigative reporting is one of the most important contributions that the press makes to democracy. It is linked to the logic of checks and balances in democratic systems. It provides a valuable mechanism for monitoring the performance of democratic institutions as they are most broadly defined to include governmental bodies, civic organizations and publicly held corporations.

The centrality of the media in contemporary democracies makes political elites sensitive to news, particularly to "bad" news that often causes a public commotion. The publication of news about political and economic wrongdoing can trigger congressional and judicial investigations.

In cases when government institutions fail to conduct further

inquiries, or investigations are plagued with problems and suspicions, journalism can contribute to accountability by monitoring the functioning of these institutions. It can examine how well these institutions actually fulfill their constitutional mandate to govern responsibly in the face of press reports that reveal dysfunction, dishonesty, or wrongdoing in government and society.

At minimum, investigative reporting retains important agendasetting powers to remind citizens and political elites about the existence of certain issues. There are no guarantees, however, that continuous press attention will result in congressional and judicial actions to investigate and prosecute those responsible for wrongdoing.

Investigative journalism also contributes to democracy by nurturing an informed citizenry. Information is a vital resource to empower a vigilant public that ultimately holds government accountable through voting and participation. With the ascent of media-centered politics in contemporary democracies, the media have eclipsed other social institutions as the main source of information about issues and processes that affect citizens' lives.

Public Access Access to public records and laws ensuring that public business will be conducted in open sessions are indispensable to the work of an investigative journalist. When prior censorship or defamation laws loom on the horizon, news organizations are unlikely to take up controversial subjects because of potentially expensive lawsuits. Consequently, democracies must meet certain requirements for investigative journalism to be effective and to provide diverse and comprehensive information.

The Ethics of Investigative Journalism Every team of investigative reporters pursues a story under different circumstances, so creating an all-purpose ethical rulebook is problematic, though certain standards have become generally accepted. The legal implications of reporters' actions are, by far, more clear-cut than ethical issues. Ethics, instead, deals with how to distinguish between right and wrong, with philosophical principles used to justifY a particular course of action.

Any decision can be judged ethical, depending on what ethical framework is used to justify it, and what values are prioritized.

What journalists and editors need to determine is who will benefit as a result of the reporting.

If journalism is committed to democratic accountability, then the question that needs to be asked is whether the public benefits as a result of investigative reports. Whose interest does investigative journalism serve by publishing a given story? Does the press fulfill its social responsibility in revealing wrongdoing? Whose interests are being affected? Whose rights are being invaded? Is the issue at stake a matter of legitimate public interest? Or is individual privacy being invaded when no crucial public issue is at stake?

Most discussions about ethics in investigative journalism have focused on methodology, namely, is any method valid to reveal wrongdoing? Is deception legitimate when journalists aim to tell the truth? Is any method justifiable no matter the working conditions and the difficulties in getting information? Can television reporters use hidden cameras to get a story? Can journalists use false identities to gain access to information?

On this point, an important factor to consider is that the public seems less willing than journalists to accept any method to reveal wrongdoing. Surveys show that the public is suspicious of invasion of privacy, no matter the public relevance of a story. The public generally seems less inclined to accept that journalists should use any method to get a story. Such an attitude is significantly revealing in times when, in many countries, the credibility of the press is low. The press needs to be trustwolihy in the eyes of the public. That is its main capital, but too often its actions further undermine its credibility. Therefore, the fact that citizens generally bel ieve that journal ists would get any story at any cost needs to be an impOliant consideration. Exposes that rely on questionable methods to get information can fUliher diminish the legitimacy and public standing of the reporting and the journalists.

Ethical issues are not limited to methods. Corruption is also another impOliant ethical issue in investigative journalism.

Corruption includes a variety of practices, ranging from journalists who accept bribes, or quash exposes, or pay sources for information.

The harm to private citizens that might result from what's reported also needs to be considered. Issues of privacy usually come to the forefront, as investigative journalism often walks a fine line between the right to privacy and the public's right to know.

There are no easy, ready-made answers to ethical issues. Codes of ethics, despite some merits, do not offer clear-cut solutions that can be applied in all cases. Most analysts agree that journalists must remain sensitive to issues such as fairness, balance, and accuracy. Reporters continuously need to ask ethical questions throughout different stages of the investigations, and be ready to justify their decisions to their editors, colleagues, and the public. They need to be sensitive to whose interests are being affected, and operate according to professional standards.

D About the Author: Silvio Waisbord is an assistant professor in the department of journalism and mass media at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey.

SHARP

EYES ON

MEDIA

D~~[]J~~ Sevanti Ninan, undeterred by apathy of media giants, has forged The Hoot into a spirited venue for dissecting media in South Asia

he Intemet can be a bane or a boon, depending upon one's point of view. When it comes to online joumalism, the benefits generally outweigh the disadvantages, so long as there is enough money to stay afloat on the ethereal sea of zeroes and ones. As media analyst and online editor Sevanti Ninan wryly observed about her own online undertaking, The Hoot, "The great thing about the Web is that it works both for those with millions of dollars of funding and those with none at all. We are somewhere near the latter end of the scale." The Hoot is India's only active, independent, media-watch Web site. It is

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last very long. The Press Council ofIndia has got no teeth at all."

Liberalization has brought sweeping changes in the Indian media. Now that cable television is universally available, the emergence of the market is a major factor in not only entertainment programming, but also the news. This has become a paramount concem in media organizations worldwide. In the United States venerable news outlets have been bought out, forced to dilute content, or closed down by big business houses. Journalists committed to solid, old school joumalism are increasingly apprehensive, feeling like so many Davids confronting AOL-

about to celebrate its second year of life.

Speaking recently about the stilI-fledgling venture, inan said motivation to start The Hoot came from a growing awareness among joumalists that "the media needs watching." She reflected, "In India the institutional mechanisms for self-regulation are weak. Nobody has ombudsmen in India. I think The Times of India experimented with one and it didn't

Time Wamer-style Goliaths. Some nouveau media owners have nothing to do with joumalism at all. Media behemoths were quick to colonize the Internet, but it resists imperialism. The Internet provides an excellent stage for news alternatives and critique of mainstream news by analysts. Established journalism reviews have made room for valuable online media-watch services such as Global-

Vision (its mediachannel.org has gone on temporary "pause" mode due to a financial crunch) and Faimess and Accuracy in RepOtiing (FAIR). These provided inspiration to inan. "There are all these media-watch sites abroad," she recalled, "and I kept thinking' let's at least have a place where, if people want to, they can go and discuss these issues.'" As someone who has written a weekly column about TV for 12 years, Ninan sees newspapers in India as resistant to such stocktaking: "Not one newspaper has a column on all different media. Occasionally someone has been allowed to write on print media," but, by and large, it does not happen, "because that's how newspapers want it. They don't want a dog-eat-dog situation." So "where do you place criticism? You can only place it on the Net." The Hoot was started on a Rs. 50,000 grant from UNESCO, but "basically this site runs on love and rresh air," quipped Ninan. Getting content was a problem at the beginning, but after the first few months unsolicited articles began to arrive.

Contributors are paid: "I cannot pay fancy sums, but I will not pay lousy sums, either.

Because that, again, is an eth ics question. You can't exploit rreelance joumalists."

Ethics is one of the issues that animates The Hoot.

Ninan muses, "There was an interim period when we haven't worried too much about ethics. I think it is coming in again now, because there are odd voices that keep raising it, and also I think, no matter what you say about the media in India, it is beginning to be introspective." That, she feels, is where media watch can make its mark, in an environment where libel laws are poorly enforced. "If there was more of the media being slammed with couli cases, then they'd be forced to toe the line a lot more, in terms of just checking facts

and getting the other side." The Indian Broadcasting Foundation, she said, is slowly acquiring strength and has come up with a code of ethics. So has the Editor's Guild. While she lauds the good intentions, she points out that adequate enforcement of ethics codes is still lacking. Also absent are ombudsmen, the internal media watchdogs who monitor readers' reactions, investigate complaints and provide selfcriticism within the news organization.

"The other factor is the market leader sets the rules in India. For English newspapers it has been The Times of India, whose profits are so way ahead of everybody," Ninan observes. "You can say what you like, but at the end of the day you have to sell and you have to be in business, and it's The Times of India that makes the rules." She cited a recent Business Standard article where Times Internet CEO Mahendra Swarup admits that the Times group online company Medianet sells editorial space for photographs, interviews and stories in the Times daily editions to public relations reps pitching their clients. He is quick to point out, however, that editors select such items on merit, and "are not pushed to carry any stories."

Competition with the market leader is causing other papers and magazines to follow suit, with such things as sponsored "Impact Features" and even a sponsored cover story in a leading magazine. "This is a first," Ninan declares. "We have not before presented editorial matter in conjunction with advertising." The implications for doing unfettered good journalism in this atmosphere-something that has been an issue in newsrooms across the United States in the past decade-are now a topic for discussion here. How much is advertising influencing editorial content?

Are certain stories not being reported because of pressure from advertisers?

This is all grist for the mill at The Hoot, a free-for-all forum for discussion with plenty of links to media resources.

Significant stories from the subcontinent are posted and dissected. Articles and links provide information on impOltant issues such as press freedom, right to information, media law, ethics and gender issues.

Regional and grassroots media are covered.

Attention is also given to specialized reporting. The Hoot Web master is building an online database, which can be updated as needed. The useful "Statistics Ready Reckoner" for journalists, students and researchers provides facts about India at a mouse click. There are few volunteers ("It's in the wrong city," grouses Ninan) and it still requires more sponsorship. Although overhead is low because The Hoot operates from a few home offices and does not need commercial space, funds are necessary to pay contributors, researchers, tech professionals and the occasional upgrade.

Newspaper editors and media owners, with one or two exceptions, have pretty much ignored The Hoot, not even responding to solicitations for contributions to the online job ads, according to Ninan. Support has come largely from individuals, not all of them journalists.

Despite having to scramble for backing, Sevanti Ninan is optimistic about The Hoot's future as a regional media resource. Responses have been heartening from inside and outside India. There are regular inputs from Pakistan and Bangladesh. NRIs weigh in, she says.

"Non-resident Indians are great at having thoughts and opinions about what we do over here." And it should be noted that there are some powerful Pravasi Bharatiya voices in the American mainstream press. Fareed Zakaria, Peter Bhatia, Raju Narisetti and Tunku Varadarajan are a few examples. The Hoot connects to mainstream and alternative sources East and West-if there is East and West on the Internet-and it is developing strong media links that embrace South Asia.

"I'm very keen that it should be South Asian news," inan said. "I'd like to see the awareness grow, facilities grow so that it is the major online resource for research, news and other things on the media. An路 independent online resource which, like a little electronic library, is constantly kept updated. 1'd like it to be part activist, part research and part just news," she adds. The critical ingredients are people inside and outside journalism who value their vibrant press. People who give a hoot.

0 For infonnation visit <www.thehoot.org>

fJ:i

mongonline journalist congregations, the one with the ost snap, crackle and pop for those interested in South Asia has to be the South Asian Journalists Association, or SAJA. It was co-founded in 1994 by Colwnbia Graduate School of Journalism professor Sreenath "Sree" Sreenivasan and a group of 17 journalists as a professional network for journalists of South Asian origin in New York.

SAJA has since grown to encompass a group of more than 800 journalists across the U.S., Canada and beyond. Non-South Asians on the South Asia beat may also join. The goal is to improve and maintain journalistic standards of coverage of South Asia. SAJA is run on a shoestring and largely based in Sree Sreenivasan's computer at Columbia, from whence a stream of useful news roundups and "Sree Tips" regularly flows forth.

SAJA now boasts real time chapters in big cities across America, kept going by volunteer coordinators. The most active chapter is the headquarters in New York City, where a vigorous executive board organizes frequent panel discussions on current issues, lectures, film screenings and readings-the latter often held at midtown Manhattan's Maharaja Restaurant.

SAJA gives annual journalism awards for outstanding reporting in different news media: print, broadcast and online, including a recently instituted Daniel Pearl Award for overall outstanding reporting on South Asia. The awards are conferred at the annual national convention in June.

Finger-lickin' "pakora meetings" aside, SAJA lives and breathes on

o

With the des; wave enlivening newsrooms all over America, organizing was the logical next step

Sreenath Sreenivasan, co-founder of SAJA, hard at work.

the ever-awake Web. The SAJA Web site offers a wealth of information on South Asia-related news, from breaking stories to the arts. Links are provided to relevant sites. There is a SAJA Stylebook, advice on tackling genres of reporting and other features, with an emphasis on interaction.

SAJA mailing lists apprise subscribers of the latest events and articles of interest, U.S. domestic and international. This service was particularly valuable post-September 11 when harassment of Asians increased in the United States.

SAJA made efforts to separate truth from fiction, and present the

facts responsibly. It continues to do so.

Much of the credit for this newshound's gold mine goes to Sreenivasan, who teaches work- ::ยง shops on New Media, such as the ~ popular "Smarter Surfing: Better ~ Use of Your Web Time," at Columbia and around the country.

He is "Tech Guru" for ABC News channel WABC-7 in New York.

In his monthly free newsletter "Sree Tips" he reviews new Web sites and offers "Web tips and tricks" for researchers. Not all Web sites are created equal in credibility, and Sreenivasan helps separate the wheat from the chaff. Log on and look for www.saja.org or www.sreetips.com and see for yourself.

D

eople of Indian origin fill top slots in U.S. news organizations. Fareed Zakaria is a household name in India as Newsweek International editor. But there are others. Peter Bhatia, editor of The Oregonian, becomes president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April, a pinnacle of achievement. Based in Portland, Oregon, The Oregonian is one of the most influential regional newspapers in the U.S. Under Bhatia's editorship it has won several Pulitzer awards, including the most prestigious, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

In December Raju Narisetti was named managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe. He was previously deputy national editor for the U.S. WSJ edition, having worked his way up the ranks over the past decade.

Rena Golden, a veteran at CNN, which she joined in 1985, is now executive vice president and general manager of CNN International and responsi- Raju Narise I ble for six English language networks _.-1 that reach more than 160 million viewers across the world. A seasoned producer, she was a key development person in CNN's "regionalization" that created networks for Europe/ Africa/the Middle East, Asia Pacific, South Asia, Latin America and North America.

Rena was born in Bihar and migrated to the United States with her family as a child. Roy Wadia, formerly a producer for CNN, is now getting recognition as a freelancer based in Atlanta, Mumbai and Vancouver. Nisid Hajari is managing editor of Newsweek International. Fred de Sam Lazaro is a correspondent on the influential Lehrer Newshour. -L.T.

P

Dr: Franklin3

Plan

This printet; scientist and ambassador early formed a plan for himself and for the country he helped found

n a Sunday in late October 1776, 70year-old Benjamin Franklin sailed for France in the American 16-gun sloop Reprisal to take up his duties as one of his new nation's commissioners to the COUl1 of Versailles. He did so in the ce11ain knowledge that if Reprisal was taken by a British warship, he would be hanged for high treason. His signature was on the inflammatory Declaration of Independence, a document he had just helped craft.

Franklin had been home in Philadelphia barely a year and a half after spending almost two decades representing first Pennsylvania and, eventually, several colonies at the cOUl1of King George II of England, and when the king died, his son George III. The experience had made him more familiar with the ways of Europe than anyone else in the new American government.

The only way the war for independence was going to work was if the French helped fund it. 1t would be his task to squeeze from the most autocratic monarch in Europe the money to pay for a democratic revolution. He had no idea as he sailed that the task would keep him in France for almost 10 years.

His ultimate success in securing the assistance of the French, aid that would

result in the capitulation of the British forces under Gen. Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, would culminate with his negotiation of the Treaty of Paris, confirming the existence of the United States.

When he arrived in France, he was arguably the most famous man in the European sphere. Fashionable women wore bracelets and rings set with his profile. John Adams, who worked with Franklin in France, wrote of that time some years later, saying, "there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady's chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen, who was not familiar with [Franklin's name], and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind."

To this popular acclaim was added the weight of recognized scientific genius, and this and his friendships among the aristocracy of intellect in Europe gave him a potent network.

Coupled with an understanding of how to sway public opinion that was centuries ahead of its time, such connections and fame made Franklin a formidable proponent and adversary. And he was impervious to flanking character attacks. Warned of being spied on (as he was throughout the war), he replied, "1 have long observ'd one Rule which prevents any Inconvenience from such Practices. It is simply this, to be con-

cern'd in no Affairs that I should blush to have made publick, and to do nothing but what Spies may see & welcome."

His modest dress and workman's background, together with his benign and quiet manner, were deceptive to those used to grand gestures and obfuscating talk. "1 served," Jefferson would say much later, "with General Washington in

many years before devised a plan with three simple, practical steps: the creation of "virtuous" citizens, the fOlmation of small groups with a common purpose and commitment to the collective good, and the establishment of networks that grew from these groups. "I have always thought," he once wrote, "that one Man of tolerable Abilities may work great

i

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) ~ ~ ~ ~ z ~ 8

the legislature of Virginia before the Revolution, and during it with Dr. Franklin in Congress. I never heard either of them speak 10 minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point which was to decide the question. They laid their shoulders to the great points, knowing that the little ones would follow of themselves."

Franklin came late to the idea of independence, but early to the colonies as a distinct union. Once he had embraced independence, he had passionately held to a clear vision of the kind of country he wanted it to be: a democratic republic whose political power flowed from its citizens. To build such a society he had

Changes, and accompl ish great Affairs among Mankind, if he first forms a good Plan, and ...makes the Execution of that same Plan his sole Study and Business."

As early as 1751 he had outlined how a union of the colonies might be achieved.

Three years later, he wrote the Albany Plan of Union during a conference called to conclude a treaty with the Six Nations, a long-enduring confederation of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora tribes. In this document and in three subsequent letters, Franklin presented arguments that would define the War of Independence 20 years before it happened.

No other Founder even came close to Franklin's direct level of familiarity with the cultures, beliefs and byways of the diverse and contradictory land and people that would become the United States of America. When, in 1753, he was made deputy postmaster general of North America, he took up the appointment with delight. In an age when travel was difficult, problematic, frequently uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous, he loved it. He rode well, loved good foodalthough he would eat anything put before him-and was wonderful company. A compulsive scientist, insatiably curious, he could not cross an ocean without measuring currents, could not look at a stream without considering the fish that swam within, nor ride a horse without considering horse, weather and the species of tree they both might find shelter beneath.

His Poor Richard's Almanack" pamphlets and newspapers had molded public opinion for decades by the time he sailed for France. His work to establish a hospital, an insurance company, fire companies, libraries, learned societies, a college, sanitation programs and police departments had transformed Philadelphia and had shown the kind of society America could be. After 1752, when he carried out the famous kite experiment that showed lightning to be electricity, his scientific research took him to a plateau of celebrity completely new in the American colonies.

Yet his life had been very different from that of most of the other Founders.

He was a "leather apron man," in the slang of his day, was proud of it, and never forgot it.

Franklin was born January 17, 1706, in Boston. His father, Josiah Franklin, was nearly 50, a deeply religious Congregationalist and a soap and candle maker who had emigrated from the village of Ecton in the English midlands.

His mother, Abiah Folger, was 38.

Benjamin would be her eighth child. We know very little about her beyond Franklin's words in her epitaph. He called her a "discreet and virtuous woman."

%'

Left: Benjamin Franklin in the Court of France.

Above: In 1776, Franklin was appointed with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston to draft the Declaration of Independence from Britain. From the original painting by Chappel in the possession of Johnson, Fry & Co. Publishers, New York (etching c. 1857).

Intending that Benjamin go into the ministry, his father sent him to Boston Latin School, where he excelled. But after a year his father withdrew him and sent him to a local schoolmaster who taught tradesmens' boys a little grammar, writing and mathematics so that they could help their masters when apprenticed. In his Autobiography, Franklin said that the decision was made "from a View of the Expence of a College Education which, having so large a Family, he could not well afford, and the mean Living many so educated were afterwards able to obtain ...."

At age 12 he went as an apprentice to

older brother James, owner of a printing house, to learn the printing trade. ("Dr." Franklin would be created in middle age when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in 1759, and one from Oxford in 1762.)

Had we encountered him during his time with James, we would have seen a stocky, energetic boy, attired in the deerskin breeches that, along with thick, blue wool knee stockings, long-sleeved speckled shirt and thick, well-greased shoes, made up the uniform of a printer's apprentice. He already had a taste for books, and James seems to have encouraged his reading. He had read Plutarch and Defoe. He seems also to have been familiar with Swift, Pope, Addison and Steele. During this time he was first exposed to the English philosopher John Locke's writings on personal freedom and the natural rights of man, concepts that would so deeply affect many of the Founders.

He inherited his father's intense interest in the spiritual questions of life, but not his father's beliefs. He decided that while he was a Deist, he was not going to be a churchgoer. He began using the time people were at church to work on his reading and writing. However, he saw churches as the one institution, in a new world that had very few, that could support virtue, which he saw as critical to a citizen's inner growth and the creation of a civil society.

Franklin took easily to the patterns of science. He resolved to make his own life his first experiment. In 1722, at 16, not long before he left Boston, Franklin quite consciously changed his life. After reading The Way to Health by Thomas Tryon, he became a vegetarian for a while, began a regular exercise program and may have been the only man in Philadelphia who tried to bathe regularly.

He also became concerned with ventilation, proper breathing and good air.

(When he was 81, he told his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush that he had "never snuffed, chewed, or smoked.") These decisions flowed in part from the idea that respecting his body made him a bet-

ter, more productive person. Better individuals made better citizens, and better citizens made for a more civil society.

It was a view shaped by the Enlightenment's philosophers, who reasoned that the human species was infinitely perfectible.

To advance his knowledge, Franklin was willing to learn from anyone. Cotton Mather, the most influential Puritan in

"The Thunder-storm" by Charles Thomlinson, FR.S., 1877 in June 1752, Benjamin Franklin, with his son William, then 21, demonstrated that lightning is electricitywinning the elder Franklin fame and scientific immortality.

Massachusetts, was already famous for his involvement with the Salem witch trials when he published Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good in 1710. Its words had a profound effect on Franklin. "You must come forth to any Publick Service, whereof you may be capable, when you are call'd unto it....That Fault of not Employing ones Parts for the Publick, One calls, 'A Great Sacriledge in the Temple of the God of Nature,'" wrote Mather. Three-quarters of a century later, having lived a life of public service, Franklin would write Mather's son, Samuel: "If I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to [your father's] book."

He even used Mather's book title as an inside joke to create the surname for his first literary alter ego, a fictional middleaged widow named Silence Dogood. Her 14 letters, published in his brother's newspaper, the Courant, represent his first major public writing. By the time he had gotten to the eighth letter, published on July 2, 1722, the 16-year-old Franklin had gone beyond the gossipy humor with which he had begun the letters and embarked on what would become a lifelong working out of his philosophy in print: "WITHOUT Freedom of Thought," he wrote, "there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to Know.

"This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together. ... Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech ...."

Tn 1727 he proposed to a group of friends in Philadelphia that they join together to start what he called the "Junto." It was his first experience with the power of small associations. To create opportunities, he used the junto model again and again, spinning off clones when

a small group grew too large. The groups could become a loose network of independent societies. The plan was particularly effective in the creation of fire companies, but he started a city watch a~d libraries with it as well.

At 22 he compiled a list of "virtues."

He ranked his list according to how hard he thought it would be for him to attain each virtue, hardest last, and then set about working on them, one by one.

The order is revealing. At the head of the list was Temperance; easy for a man who had already decided against excessive drinking or eating. Then: Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility and, finally, the two really tough ones for him: Chastity and Humility.

In youth, biographer Carl Van Doren says, Franklin "went to women hungrily, secretly, and briefly." Before he entered into a marriage with Deborah Read Rogers, he fathered a child. The mother's identity was never known. Franklin acknowledged and reared the boy he named William.

Franklin was 24 when he and Deborah, a carpenter's daughter, were married by common law in September 1730. She was "a sturdy, handsome, high-co loured woman, untaught and sometimes turbulent, little interested in her husband's studies or speculations but devoted to him."

In 1732 a son, Francis, was born, only to die at age four from smallpox. Franklin would always mourn him. In 1743 a daughter, Sarah, known as Sally, was born; Franklin adored her.

There is no evidence that he was unfaithful to Deborah at any time in this period of their lives in Philadelphia, and he acknowledges in many places the debt he felt for all her suppOli of him. She called him "Pappy."

Once Franklin began to travel for the post office, however, they were apart for months at a time. During these trips around the colonies, he may have had affairs with younger women, although with whom or how many, we do not knOw.

10

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DIE.

The first American cartoon, dravm by Franklin and published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9, 1754.

Franklin's contemporaries thought him sensual, and he had a reputation for sexual affairs. He certainly enjoyed sexual innuendo. When John Jay's wife was visiting with Franklin in Passy while Jay was in England working on the peace treaty negotiations, Franklin took three magnets, and indicating one as Jay, the other his wife, he showed how the two magnets were drawn to each another. But introducing the third, which he described as a certain English lady, he showed how her attraction could become the stronger. Both Jay and his wife were amused by the story.

Franklin never saw Deborah again after he sailed to England in 1764 to continue his service as Pennsylvania's colonial agent. She died, at 66, in 1774, while Franklin was in London wrestling with the final deterioration ofthe colonial relationship.

His struggle with humility, which he had placed last on his list of virtues, turned out much more successfully than his attempts at chastity. One of the central influences that helped him in this was Freemasonry. He first learned of this secret society as a poor, young journeyman printer working in London. When the Lodge of St. John, the first in the colonies, was formed in Philadelphia, in 1727, he was becoming a man of considerable substance, master of a printing house and publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which he had purchased in 1729.

He was inducted into the society in 1731.

Once inside the brotherhood, Franklin discovered it almost exactly mirrored his own beliefs. Its ascending degrees, like

his list of virtues, were designed to help a man build a life that was "four square and true" through hard work and fair dealing.

Had we visited him at that time, working in his printing house on Market Street in Philadelphia, we would have seen a prospering tradesman with both the charm and toughness of a self-made entrepreneur, proud, brilliant, a little aggressive, a bit too self-promoting, but endlessly well-intentioned and hardworking. And everyone agreed he had a presence about him. He seemed bigger than his five foot nine or ten. Although he sometimes spoke hesitantly, his voice was pleasant, and he was already using the disarming flow of humorous stories and snatches of songs that marked the conversation of his later years. Once committed, he was decisive and tenacious.

On May 14, 1743, Franklin began work on his ultimate junto, the American Philosophical Society, which was modeled on the Royal Society, the leading intellectual association in Britain. We think of Franklin today principally for his experiments in electricity, particularly the indelible images of him flying a kite in a storm, but Franklin's contributions ranged across disciplines from climatology to oceanography to geology to medicine to what today we would call physics. By inviting the leading colonial natural scientists to join him in forming America's premiere intellectual society, he was exercising yet another variation of his small-group model.

As Masonry fed his spirit, so the American Philosophical Society and his memberships in the Royal Society (1756) and the French Academy of Science (1772) would come to feed his mind.

Back from his long embassy in France, in 1787 he was selected to be one of Pennsylvania's delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Immediately upon arriving in Philadelphia for the convention, George Washington paid an official call on Franklin, the only other man of comparable stature in the country.

Franklin was the oldest man at the Constitutional Convention, as he had been the oldest man in the Continental Congress in 1775. William Pierce of

Georgia later wrote, "Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age ...he does not shine much in Public Council,-he is no Speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary Man, and tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard ....He is 82 years old, and possesses an activity of mind equal to a youth of 25 years of age."

At the convention, Washington and Franklin acted as moderating forces.

Washington spoke but once in formal ses. sions, and Franklin only infrequently. But each, in his own way, worked to see that the convention did not fly apart as the passionate debate over the nation's form of government went on.

One Friday afternoon, on the 13th of July, 1787, during a break in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention, lobbyist Manasseh Cutler called upon Franklin at his home on Market Street.

Thanks to that visit we have a final word portrait of one of our history's most extraordinary figures. He was, said Cutler, "a short, fat, trunched old man, in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate, and short white locks, sitting without his hat under the tree ....His manners were perfectly easy, and everything about him seems to diffuse an unrestrained freedom and happiness. He has an incessant vein of humor, accompanied with an uncommon vivacity, which seems as natural and involuntary as his breathing."

Two years later, in 1789, Franklin's health was failing. With wisdom's long vision, he decided to amend his will. He stated his goal candidly: "I wish to be useful even after my Death, if possible, in forming and advancing other young men that may be serviceable to their Country ...."

He gave to Boston and Philadelphia each "One thousand Pounds Sterling."

This money was to be loaned in small sums to "young married Artificers, under the Age of twenty-five Years, as have served an Apprenticeship in the said Town; and faithfully fulfilled the Duties required in their Indentures, so as to

"Without Freedom of Thoughty there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech)which is the Right of everyMan))) wrote the 16-year-old Franklin. obtain a good moral Character from at least two respectable Citizens ...." Franklin clearly saw each set of three peoplea young "Artificer" and two "respectable Citizens"-forming a small group. In this way individuals would join in small groups, strengthening their cities, their states and, ultimately, their nation.

The trusts would live on until dissolved in 1991, still in accordance with Franklin's careful instructions. For 200 years they improved the lives of thousands of young families in Boston and Philadelphia, and they do so still, because the $6.5 million in the trusts when they were dissolved was used to support educational programs for the same people Franklin had originally designed them to serve.

His trusts anticipated the modern micro lending programs of the famous Grameen Bank and similar efforts, which have had an empowering effect in many of today's nations.

By the fall of 1789 there was a sense that Franklin was dying, and people great and small began to say goodbye. One of the most moving farewells is in a letter Washington wrote. It says a lot about these two men who had grown old in their country's service, in the process forging a remarkable relationship, in spite of their very significant differences. The letter ends: "If to be venerated for benevolence-if to be admired for talent-if to be esteemed for patriotism-if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain; And 1 flatter myself that it will not

be ranked among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured that so long as I retain my memory-you will be thought on with respect, veneration and Affection by Your sincere friend George Washington" Franklin's last great effort was dedicated to eliminating slavery from his new country. He had owned slaves, advertised their sale in his newspaper and even traded in human beings. But by 1751 he had begun to think the institution was philosophically and economically unsound. In 1787 he helped reinvigorate the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the first such society in America, by becoming its president.

When he wrote his wi II at the end of a life filled with honors and celebrity, he defined himself as: "I, Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia, printer, late Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America to the Court of France, now President of the State of Penn sylvania ...." franklin died about 11 o'clock Saturday night on April 17, 1790, three months past his 84th birthday. His was the largest funeral that had ever been held in America. It was estimated that 20,000 people witnessed the procession and ceremony.

On April 22, James Madison moved that the House of Representatives wear mourning for a month. It passed unanimously without discussion. The Senate, though, would not agree. Jefferson took the matter to Washington, who rejected it, asking, if the practice were once begun, where the line would be drawn. "I told him," Jefferson later wrote, "that the world had drawn so broad a line between him and Dr. Franklin, on the one side, and the residue of mankind, on the other, that we might wear mourning for them, and the question still remain new and undecided as to all others." It is an appraisal two centuries of hindsight has only strengthened.

0 About the Author: Stephan A. Schwartz, based in Virginia, has authored four books and has written for numerous newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, The ew York Times, and Harper's.

"Remember, it's not whether you win or loseit's how you handle the tax consequences. "

"My physical therapist says this is the worst possible position you can lie in. " Copyright Š The New Yorker Collection 200 I Mike Twohy from Carroonbank.com. All rights reserved.

Copyright Š The New Yorker Collection 200 I Christopher from Carroonbank.com. All rights reserved.

"1 wanted to eliminate the patient's pain and suffering, so 1lowered his bill by 20 percent. "

Weyant

What's killing the great Atlantic salmon?

Text by MICHAEL PARFIT Photographs by BILL CURTSINGER

he story of Atlantic salmon is both murder mystery and parable. It begins and ends in rivers.

In September 2001, late in the salmon season on Newfoundland's Humber River, lodge owner Sterling Pittman took me to a place called Big Falls, where dark water turns to foam on black rocks. We were looking for salmon, but there were none to be seen.

The Humber flows through a big, wild country of dense, low spruce forests and open marsh. Caribou drift by, and blueberries grow in the clearings. Once, near the Humber, I saw for the first and probably last time in my life a lynx, a skittish, ungainly creature so rare and wild it sometimes seems more mythical than real. This is the kind of place where salmon flourish.

At dusk, Sterling and I stood by the falls, waiting. "There," he said.

I didn't see anything.

"There." All I saw was a wall of white water, with a faint brown tea stain from the bogs upstream, tumbling down a 1.5meter cliff. Could there really be salmon here? Could it be that they left here two years ago about 18 centimeters long and now they weigh 4.5 kilograms? That they have returned here all the way from Greenland? That they can climb these falls like a ladder? Hard to believe.

Then, in a split second, as fleeting as the shadow of a bird, the glittering fish leaped from the turmoil of water below

T

Canadian biologist Pierre D 'Amours surveys rivers to learn what is responsible for the dwindling population of Atlantic salmon. Here he examines a salmon in the Restigouche, New Brunswick.

the cliff and flew two, three, perhaps even five meters, doing the long jump before the high jump event of the falls. Then it disappeared. But that was enough. I believed.

"If there's any glamour fish, it has to be the Atlantic salmon," says Bill Taylor, president of the Atlantic Salmon Federation (ASF), a Canadian and American organization that is fighting to save the salmon from a variety of dangers, known and unknown, that have drastically reduced its numbers in many rivers and threaten it in others. "Like the bald eagle, these fish embody strength, beauty, perseverance."

Bill Taylor is a serious fly fisherman.

When I talked with him, he was fishing New Brunswick's Miramichi River, where he stood surrounded by a blaze of autumn colors, casting a wet fly in graceful curls across pools called Hovey's and Dudley's and Home. In the way of most salmon fishermen these days, he was delighted, after all his casting, to report the hooking of a single fish, which he didn't land.

The Atlantic salmon is the king of sport fish, but no longer a monarch of the sea.

It is bereft now of many of the places that used to be its home. There was a time when its domain reached as far south as the Connecticut River and all the way to Portugal. Once salmon were so abundant they were used as fertilizer. They ran thick in the Thames and the Rhine, and as far west as Lake Ontario.

The 20th century took care of that.

Heavy commercial sea fishing, plus industrial development on the rivers, either used up or drove away the salmon, along with lots of other fish. Or polluted

them out. Though some rivers-the Humber among them-still run with enough fish to draw sportfishers, the salmon that remain are at best a remnant of the great runs of the past.

And what has happened in recent years has been both devastating and baffling. In the 1970s and early '80s, conservationists thought the greatest threats to salmon were at last coming under control. In Canada, the government spent $45 million to buyout and shut down virtually the entire Atlantic salmon industry there.

Rivers were being cleaned up, and, in some places, new fish ladders-essentially water staircases-were moving salmon around dams that had blocked them for years. Maine's Penobscot River, which had lost most of its salmon, saw a dramatic recovery in the late 1970s and early '80s. A biologist at Maine's Craig Brook hatchery remembers his colleagues celebrating as the numbers of returning salmon in the Penobscot rose from a few hundred to some 4,000 in 1987.

Then something unexpected happened.

In the 1990s, the numbers of Atlantic salmon returning dropped precipitously everywhere. Over the past decade in Europe, there has been a 50 percent decline, and in the United States the numbers have dropped by two-thirds. The rivers of Maine and parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have been particularly hard hit. Last year about 800 fish came back to the Penobscot, the highest number in the United States. Most of Maine's other rivers counted salmon only by tens, and the government recently classified the salmon of seven Maine rivers and a Penobscot tributary-which are genetically distinct from other

Left: The mystery of the demise of the Atlantic salmon lies beneath the sUI/ace.

At this point in the murder case, researchers have few options beyond believing that better understanding of the salmon:S life cycle will help save them.

Salmon in the Humber Riva Right: The king of sport fish, Atlantic salmon like this one leaping from the Humber Rivel; were once so abundant they were used as fertilize/~

Atlantic salmon-as officially endangered. Canada has labeled as endangered the runs of 33 rivers that flow into the inner Bay of Fundy.

The question is: What has happened, and what can be done about it? The answer: No one knows. But just about everyone who cares about this fish is trying to find out.

"I think there are 62 official hypotheses," says Ed Baum, author of Maine Atlantic Salmon: A National Treasure, and a biologist who has studied the fish over the course of a long career. "Everybody's looking for the magic bullet."

The multitude of explanations for what's going on has a great deal to do with the marvelous complexity of the Atlantic salmon's life cycle. Salmon spawn in the fall, in rivers, and the young hatch the following spring. As the fly grow, they are called parr, and for two or three years they resemble small trout.

Then, one April or May, they turn silver and become known as smolts. (Out of

7,000 eggs, only three to five make it to smoltdom.) They then head downstream, where they must adapt to saltwater.

Rather than retaining salt, their kidneys now prepare to excrete it.

When the salmon reach the sea, they slip off the radar of most researchers. But tagging has established their general routes. Most Atlantic salmon-from both sides of the ocean-head for the waters off Greenland, where they spend one or more winters. They appear to cross the ocean-thousands of kilometers-guided by the earth's magnetic field and the positions of the sun, moon and stars. And once they near their home streams, they apparently smell the difference between, say, the Narraguagus or the Penobscot or the Miramichi through olfactory sensors on the lateral line down their sides.

Atlantic salmon return to their home rivers from June through October, but usually wait to spawn until late October into November. Unlike Pacific salmon, they don't die upon spawning. (One ofthe

main differences between the Pacific and Atlantic species is that the latter can spawn multiple times.) Some head right back out to sea, while others hang out under the ice, giving up their silvery brightness in the somber light of winter.

Salmon change colors to match where they live, so by the time they leave the rivers again in the spring, they are lean shadows of what they were, and people who fish for them call them black salmon.

Returning to their home streams either one or two winters later, they are fat and bright again, and bigger. The largest Atlantic salmon-which can weigh more than 25 kilograms-have been to sea and back several times. At every point in their odyssey, the fish are vulnerable to habitat change and predators, which is why there are so many theories to explain their decline.

The hypotheses begin with spawning, which can be disrupted by silt from roadbuilding or logging, which can clog the gravel beds where salmon dig their nests.

Dams and other obstacles may slow the passage of smolts to the sea and make it harder for adults to get home. Increasing numbers of predators, such as cormorants, may be taking more smolts than they used to, and chemical runoff from farms may damage fry and parr.

Meanwhile, most of the southward-flowing rivers in Nova Scotia have been virtually ruined for salmon by acid rains caused by fossil-fuel emissions drifting

east from the continent. And though water quality does not seem to be reducing the numbers of smolts heading for the sea elsewhere, no one knows what effect pollution may have on the fish once they leave.

That's critical, because at the moment, the sea is where the disaster appears to take place. Though enough smolts are leaving the rivers to provide respectable runs, the survival rate for salmon after

they leave has dropped from about 10 percent 15 years ago to about one percent today. "There's mass murder going on somewhere in the ocean," said Fred Whoriskey, chief scientist for the Atlantic Salmon Federation. "We don't know what it is or where it is. As scientific detectives, we have to look for clues to what the culprit is."

As he spoke, he was doing just that, working over a four-kilogram salmon in a rock-and-concrete cave at the edge of a dam on ew Brunswick's Magaguadavic River. A fish ladder led up through the cave, and in the middle there was a big steel cage in which all upriver-bound fish were temporarily caught.

Today the cage contained two salmon.

But they were not, for Whoriskey's purposes, good ones. Their dorsal fins and tails looked deeply scuffed, evidence that they had spent their lives not in a river or at sea but in a salmon farm from which they'd escaped. These salmon, in fact, were among the many unindicted suspects in the disappearance of their wild cousins. "We let wild fish go on up the river," said Whoriskey, "but these fish will go to heaven." Though not before being bagged and sent on to a lab to be tested for disease.

The past decade's boom in Atlantic salmon aquaculture, which now produces about 650,000 tons of salmon for market fi'om farms in Norway, Scotland and Ireland, was expected to lower the price of salmon to the point at which commercial fishing at sea would be uneconomical. It did-in fact salmon prices today are so low it's tough to make a profit even from farming the fish-but the introduction of millions of caged salmon, with the inevitable escapees, has raised some concerns. For one thing, disease flourishes more readily in crowded aquaculture cages, and the mixing of domesticated stock with wild fish may weaken the wild stock.

So far, though, the evidence has proved inconclusive. A disease called infectious salmon anemia has caused losses among farmed fish, but it has not yet been found in a significant number of wild salmon.

And though some New Brunswick rivers have had runs of escapees reaching over a thousand a year, no direct link has been found between their presence and wild salmon losses.

So the murder case continues unsolved.

The ocean, after all, is a mysterious place, yet Whoriskey and his colleagues in detection are developing remarkable ways to snoop. Case in point: one morning I went out on the Bay of Fundy near the U.S.-Canada border with Gilles Lacroix, a biologist with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Out in the bay, at about a kilometer intervals, buoys floated at anchor in waters up to 180 meters deep. At each one, the 7.3meter twin outboard stopped, and Lacroix and his crew carefully winched a small PYC cylinder up from the depths.

Earlier in the year, Lacroix's staff had implanted transmitters, each about the size of a painkiller capsule, in some 200 wild salmon smolts. Each contained a battery that would last about four months,

and each would emit a coded set of tiny beeps that would be received by recorders in the PYC cylinders. A web of receivers was stretched across the bay, a distance of about 75 kilometers. Now the winched cylinders were plugged into a laptop computer and data downloaded from them.

Lacroix was amazed at how well his experiment had worked. "You are looking for a fish this big," he said, holding his hands less than a foot apart, "and there are only 200 of them out there. And we're finding them."

Results from two years of research have already yielded significant information. Scientists had wondered whether the huge numbers of farmed fish in ocean pens might attract the smolts on their way past and either infect them with disease or delay them en route to the ocean. They didn't; nearly all the smolts headed directly for the open sea. Lacroix found some of the tagged fish dead in nets and others eaten, but generally their exodus was successful. "Eighty percent made it

The Atlantic salmon, on the endangered species list of the Us. Fish and Wildlife Service, may be looking at extinction if scientists and conservationists cannot solve the riddle of its disappearance and, more important, find a remedy.

out," he said. "We were able to account for every fish we released."

Lacroix's research project is among the more advanced in this detective story.

Similar electronic tracing is being done in some rivers, but elsewhere guesswork prevails. From Maine to Newfoundland, every theory about the decline of the salmon, and every possible solution to it, has its passionate advocates. Where you stand on these issues often depends on where you fish.

In Newfoundland, for instance, I heard a lot about seals. In the 1970s and '80s, campaigns by Greenpeace and other environmental groups stopped much of the traditional killing of seals for fur and meat. As a consequence, the numbers of

harp seals-the most abundant seals in the ewfoundland region-have been growing by about four percent a year, reaching a population of at least 4.8 million. Fishermen believe these seals may be responsible for cod and salmon losses.

"If you estimate that each seal eats about two kilograms of fish per day," says Ches Loughlin, editor of Spawner; a Newfoundland-based fly-fishing annual, "that's a lot offish."

Marine mammal conservation groups dispute the seal hypothesis, maintaining that diet studies of seals almost never reveal salmon in their stomachs. Yet there have been reports from Maine of an increasing number of seal bites found on salmon. And a recent paper by Canadian scientists concluded that the seals' diet need contain only one salmon in thousands of meals to account for a 10 percent loss of young, seafaring salmon.

Other suspects in the salmon crisis include global warming, which could be stressing the fish with water too warm for their health or forcing their prey to different waters; trawlers that disrupt the sea bottom with nets they drag across it; and the decline of capelin, the small fish that salmon like to eat.

Finally, some fishermen believe that salmon poaching has a far greater impact than most people think, and that there are simply not enough law enforcement officials to stop it. "Individuals don't think they make a difference if they take one home," Bill Taylor told me. "But they do." In fact, one fisherman told me about a fish he had taken in a river where it is illegal to keep big salmon. "It was 20 kilograms," he said, "and that was after it was cleaned."

Then again, there may be no single explanation for what has happened-no identifiable villain and no convenient quick-fix solution. "The magic bullet everyone is looking for isn't there," Ed Baum told me. "The fish have been assaulted for 150 years. It's a cumulative problem. The main thing we need to do is reclaim the salmon's habitat, for all its life stages. There is still a lot of human impact on these runs. There's obviously

something going on in the ocean. But if we can hold on to the habitat we have, then when the marine conditions change, the fish will come back."

Bill Taylor believes there are three short-term goals that would help save the fish. One is to continue researching the cause of their decline. A second involves buying out remaining commercial salmon fisheries, including Greenland's.

The third would be restoring habitats-for instance, by removing river dams and building more fish ladders.

The cost for all this would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Are the salmon

"There's mass murder going on somewhere in the ocean. We don't know what or where it is."

-FRED

WIIORISKEY,

chiefscientist. Atlantic Salmon Federation

important enough to justify that kind of money? Many people-both taxpayers and contributors to organizations like ASF-are convinced that they are, perhaps because almost everything about the Atlantic salmon is so memorable to those who have fished for them, seen them or even imagined them.

I have two indelible memories of my own.

One is of Bill Taylor. When he catches a salmon, he says, he holds it gently by the tail and runs his other hand up its belly until he can feel its heart beat strong and fast against his fingers. "You realize this fish has come all the way from Greenland," he says. "It almost makes you get a lump in your throat." He feels the life in his hands, completely under his control, to take or turn free-like all life that humans now touch in the world. Then he lets it go.

My second memory is of late in the season in Newfoundland. I went there with two scientists to a stream called Fischell's Brook. The summer had been dry, and the brook was very low, a narrow brown flow like a stain across a bed of stones. The men were there to survey the brook, and as we walked downstream we would snorkel through the places where it pooled and count the salmon.

Most of the pools were empty. In about seven kilometers of river we counted 26 fish, 22 of them crowded in a single big pool. Then, near the stream's mouth, there was one more pool, just a flat spot in the brook beneath a big red rock on the channel side. I went in first, in water only a meter deep. It was a hazy cool place, faintly brown, with walls that seemed distant, though they were only about six meters away, and a shimmering silver ceiling. Bits of moss from the bottom drifted lazily ahead of me, and a couple of parr about 13 centimeters long scooted off behind a stone.

At first it seemed they were alone.

Then I saw it. In a little hollow by a boulder, a grown salmon lay almost still on the bottom. It was perhaps half-a-meter long; not that big for a salmon. A fisherman would call it a grilse, a fish returning after only a single year at sea.

Ir hardly moved as I drifted past. We were both pretending to be logs. Its color was muted, and its sides soft with slime.

There were two bright patches of si Iver on its back, each the size of an old silver dollar. I floated by, then turned to hold my place in the current. To me, living just for a moment with this fish was even better than having a salmon on a line. I lay there and watched. We do indeed have the fate of these fish in our control, but this was something different. This salmon had made it in spite of us. Despite seals, poachers, warming water, disappearing capel in-in spite of all a changing world had thrown at it-this miraculous fish had come home.

0 About the Author: Michael ?ClIfit writes frequently for Smithsonian on environmental subjects.

GLOBALIZATION

Gaining Points in the Match In the late 1980s and early 1990s when India faced the worst financial and balance of payments crisis, the government announced measures to reform and revitalize the ailing economy. Free trade and open markets were conceived as the only course to raise the standards of living, reduce environmental destruction and share prosperity.

For more than a decade, the issue of globalization occupied the center stage, debated by both Indian and foreign economists. Political science professor John Echeverri路Gent, a former Fulbright and MacArthur scholar, spent more than two years in remote villages in Pune and Ahmednagar districts of Maharashtra, where he studied the impact of the Central Government-funded Employment Guarantee Scheme. He also examined the administrative structures in West Bengal's Midnapur district where the National Rural Employment Programme for poverty alleviation was being implemented.

Echeverri-Gent is an associate professor at the department of political science in the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. He has written extensively on globalization. His book, Politics of Markets: The Political Economy of Reforming India's Stock Markets, will be published later this year. An earlier book, The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States, is considered an insightful account of poverty alleviation programs in India. Recently on a lecture tour to India, Echeverri路Gent spoke to SPAN's A. Venkata Narayana. Excerpts from that interview: SPA : What do you think are the real impediments to broad globalization of the Indian economy?

John Echeverri-Gent: The Indian economy has strong fundamentals, but their application is very weak. Based on current trends, India is a country with strong economic indicators, but unfortunately there hasn't been a corresponding progress of economy. Never in the past five years have so many economic indicators looked as positive as they do now. Inflation is at a low level, deposits and lending interest rates have come down and banks and financial institutions are flush with funds. Foreign currency reserves have touched a new high of $60 billion in 2002. But the Indian capital market continues to slumber and there have not been any new, fresh issues in the primary market.

The industrial production, especially in key sectors like cement, steel, automobiles and coal, registered low growth.

I was interested to study the issues of globalization and stock markets because I had done previous work on the politics of economic reforms in India. In my study I found that the reform process is very uneven-in some sectors the reform process is much more visible than in other sectors. For example, in the area of stock exchanges the reform process was quick and the impact of globalization is much more perceptible. So I was interested in understanding why there was much progress in the stock exchange sector, the equity sector, but less progress in other sectors. Within the financial sector, the process of globalization was uneven. Reforms in government securities have been much slower than they have been in the equity market. One of the reasons was due to the distinctive role the RBI plays not only as a

regulator of that sector but also as the government merchant bank or debt financer.

After globalization, the Indian economy failed to attract enough foreign investment into the countly. Why did the economy fail to live up to expectations?

Even after foreign direct investment (FDI) was allowed by the government in the 1990s most people were disappointed with the volume of investment that has come to India. FDI inflow into India was about $4 billion in 2001 as compared to $47 billion to China. Lack of infrastructure, bureaucratic restrictions, which still exist in some form or the other, and the Enron debacle are the three most important reasons why the foreign investors were wary. However, on the foreign pOlifolio investment fi'ont, i.e., investment in India's equities and securities, which in 2002 stood at $16 billion total stock, India is doing better. Also the NRls' remittances have been quite substantial in recent times, which have contributed to India's unprecedented foreign exchange reserves.

Of course, there are American institutional investments, investments from mutual funds which are interested in diversifYing.

There is a broad range of American investment which might show interest in Indian corporations. At this point in time I am not sure whether small American investors would be interested in investing in India, but celiainly many NRls would be keen to take this oppoliunity to invest in Indian sunrise companies.

Many Indian cOlporations now are listed in Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange. Do you think this is an appropriate step for the Indian companies inviting foreign investment?

It's certainly an important development. In order to get a listing on Nasdaq, these corporations have to maintain international accounting standards and financial transparency. So in terms of corporate governance these are important developments. The most recent initiative of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) to allow companies to have public offerings on foreign markets also helps the development of the domestic market. ~ Since 1995 the primary market for new ~ I

issues of capital in India has been buoy-

co

ant. For instance, companies like Tata ~w I Consultancy Services want to make large issues, but it was not sure whether the Indian market can support them.

Did you find any parallels between the various poverty alleviation schemes launched by the American and Indian governments?

From the political and economic point of view I was interested in looking at both the United States and India. My study covers the period of Great Depression in the United States. In India I examined the hierarchical social structure and how the government tried to uplift the people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. So I compared different administrative and legal systems. I worked on two major public works projects in India, the National Rural Employment Programme in Midnapur district in West Bengal, which was implemented through panchayats, and the Employment Guarantee Scheme in Pune and Ahmednagar districts in Maharashtra, which was implemented through government agencies like the public works and irrigation departments. In the United States I worked at the Farm Security Administration, which was implemented by a single agency. The idea was to explore both the advantages and disadvantages of each of these different administrative delivery systems in alleviating poverty. In terms of delivering money to these programs, the Indian system is more time-consuming and precious resources are spent on non-productive areas.

What lessons did you draw from your research and experience in India? Why aren't the poverty alleviation programs more effictive?

One of the remarkable features about India is that people in the lower segment of society participate in the political process more actively than the affluent section of society. Because of this factor I am optimistic about the future. But I think much more can be done by the government in promoting welfare ofthe people in the lower echelons of society, especially encouraging them to utilize the basic facilities such as primary and secondary education. It's important because as economic development becomes more knowledge-intensive, education really becomes a major input that promotes economic development and will enable India to take advantage of the market forces. The more equitable the educa-

tional system is, the broader the oppol1unities of education made available to wider segments of the public.

Since the reform process began, there have been tremendous changes in the stock markets. Do you think the markets are on the right course?

The Indian equity markets have undergone a tremendous institutional transformation since the early 1990s. As a matter of fact, they are on the cutting-edge of market microstructure and different trading technologies. So this has been a wonderful transformation. If you go back and look at the markets prior to the reforms and compare them to the post-reforms, it has made them much more equitable, efficient and contributed a great deal to corporate governance. In a certain sense, improving corporate governance will help the poor more than any single poverty alleviation program because as corporations become more responsible to their investments they use their money and profits to promote further economic development and thus more jobs are created. That will create a substantial spiraling benefit.

Critics argue that globalization will benefit the multinational corporations and the privileged consumers. In your opinion, what are the positive and negative effects of globalization?

Globalization can have both good and bad consequences. It can create opp0l1unities as well as challenges. A country like India, as I mentioned earlier, should place more emphasis on education, especially primary and secondary education so that the community has considerable educational opportunities to derive benefits. There has been an unfounded apprehension among the general public that globalization will result in large-scale unemployment. Globalization is really a contingent process which very much depends on the politics and the political economy within the country. One must also appreciate the fact that globalization helps production by enhancing technology.

Many countries are content with forging bilateral or multilateral ties rather than embracing globalization. Do you think the process of globalizatiQn gets diluted with these alternatives?

Some countries have opted to pursue bilateral and regional trade liberalization instead of globalization. But in the long run these are not alternatives to the World Trade Organization.

Bilateral and regional trade agreements can spur liberalization and set positive examples, but in the end it is the global system that is crucial.

We need to take advantage of the timely opportunity that globalization offers to further open the trade process between the developed and developing world so that the living standards of the rich and the poor are improved. If we fail to meet this challenge, we may miss what is undoubtedly a win-win situation for the global economy.

0

\.L~Ul路LLG~LL1"

South

India

Beckons

Peter Schmitthenner .

Indian roots of a Virginia Techscholar

W!!I

hen Peter Schmitthenner was offered a fellowship by the Chicago-based American Institute of Indian Studies (AIlS) in 2001 to study technological history in South India, he received it with a feeling of homecoming and nostalgia. Born and brought up in South India until he went to the United States for higher studies in 1974, South India beckoned him. After all he was the third generation of his family to have a strong affiliation with India.

Peter's grandparents, August Schmitthenner and Maarian Eyster, arrived in India on November 20, 1921, as single missionaries supported by what is today known as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. They malTied in Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh, the following year. August served in Tadepallegudem, Peddapuram and Yeleswaram in Andhra Pradesh between 1922 and 1945 except a year-long furlough in 1938-39 when the couple was in the United States.

August died in a hotel fire in Chicago on June 5, 1946, while attending a missionary conference. Maarian again came back to India in 1947 to work as housemother in Kodaikanal International School in Tamil adu. The school was set up in 1901 in the

Palani Hills for the children of missionaries. UnfOltunately, she fell down from the stone steps of the school campus and died on September 28, 1948.

Peter's father Samuel was born in Rajahmundry on Februaly 23, 1928. His mother, Ruth Gosselink, was born in the United States but accompanied her parents to Basra, Iraq. Both attended Kodaikanal School during the 1930s and 1940s. They arrived in India as missionaries on JanualY 24, 1952, after marrying in 1950, and ended their service here in 1981. They lived and worked at several locations in Andhra Pradesh including Yeleswaram, Narasaraopet, Bhimavaram and Guntur.

His mother died in 1996. Samuel is now settled in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Born in Kodaikanal on May 21, 1956, Schmitthenner completed his schooling from Kodaikanal International School in 1974. He then left for the United States for undergraduate studies. He joined Small Liberal Arts College, University of Massachusetts, and afterwards worked as a cartographer for five years. After completing his Ph.D. in Indian studies from the University of Madison in 1993, he joined Virginia Polytechnjc Institute and State University as associate professor of history and humanities in the Center for

Interdisciplinmy Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. He specializes in the 19th-century cultural histOly of South India.

His first book, Telugu ResurgenceCP Brown and Cultural Consolidation in Nineteenth-CentUlY South India, was published two years ago. "I was also drawn to [British civil engineer] Arthur Cotton who is a much revered, and almost worshipped figure in coastal Andhra, mainly for the construction of a dam in the Godavari delta in the 1850s," he says. In fact his AIlS fellowship project was on the engineering legacy of Sir Arthur Cotton.

"To me India is like Europe," Schmitthenner says. "It is one country but has separate countries with different languages and richness of cultures." He is fascinated by the fact that many ancient traditions still exist in India despite the advent of new technologies. "People are much more concerned with the preservation of ancient traditions here," he says.

"Telugu is my second language," he says. Initially he learned Telugu because his was the only English-speaking family in the place where he spent his childhood.

But he never studied it in school. His parents hired private tutors to teach him the

Left: Peter Schmitthenner outside their house in Narasaraopet in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, in the early 1960s.

He built the model bungalow out a/mud.

Above: Samuel Schmitthenner with wife Ruth at Kodaikanal International School in the early 1960s. Below: Peter with wife Pam and daughter Hillary at Kodaikanal School last May.

language during vacations. He formally studied Telugu as a postgraduate student at the University of Wisconsin, which also has faculty to teach Indian languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Sanskrit. "There are different universities in the United States that are known for particular Indian languages. For example, University of Texas at Austin teaches Malayalam," he says. He picked up limited Tamil during his days at Kodaikanal.

Schmitthenner fondly remembers a field trip through Tamil Nadu that one of his teachers at Kodaikanal organized, which exposed students to various temples, the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, a Parsi tower of silence and other meditation centers. "In the 1960s and 1970s my school was predominantly for children of missionaries from America and Europe. The school was a little white island surrounded by Tamil Nadu. Some of the teachers encouraged us to explore Indian culture, but their general attitude was to prepare us for life back in the United States after high schoo!."

Since the Kodaikanal International School curriculum is based on the American system, Schmitthenner is less familiar with the Indian education system. Still he notes some differences: "In

American classrooms, students are always expected to be more inquisitive, ask questions rather than mere listen to lectures, while in the Indian system, there is more listening to the professor.

That might be a gross generalization but that's one thing I've observed." The American system has its disadvantages as well, he says. "A lot of American students, I have observed, do not know the basics in many fields." But the advantage is that there is a lot of flexibility and students are allowed to be more inquisitive.

"I got my bachelor's degree in geography and Ph.D. in history, whereas here, I think, one is set on an early track and continues on that track," he notes.

He likes Indian food. His upbringing in South India has made him an ardent lover of South Indian cuisine, especially "items like idli, vadai and dosai."

Although he does not follow Indian movies or music too closely, he occasionally enjoys movies starring Rajanikant and other Tamil and Telugu stars.

Admiring tabla mastero Ustad Zakir Hussain, he says "I guess it is his boyish exuberance combined with fine talent" that makes him one of his favorites.

What keeps Schmitthenner connnected to India while being in the United States? "I have the opportunity to teach courses on Indian history and every time I teach the course, about half my students are of Indian origin-some call them-

selves ABCDs, or American-Born Confused Desis. They are probably less conversant with the culture of their homeland than I am." There are about 250 students of Indian origin at Virginia Tech to keep him in touch with Indian culture.

He has some interesting research findings to share from his last project. The earliest large-scale riparian irrigation projects undertaken by the British colonial government in South India were designed by Sir Atihur Cotton in the deltas of the Cauvery and Godavari rivers. These projects, which were completed in 1836 and 1852 respectively, were not entirely Western innovations.

Schmitthenner's research says these incorporated pre-existing networks of canals and adapted older Indian dambuilding technologies. For instance, the "anicuts" (low dams or weirs) built across both the rivers at the head of their respective deltas were modeled on precolonial Indian-designed weirs. While the older weirs acted mainly to divert the passage of river water, the weirs designed by Cotton also acted to store water for perennial use. Compared to river-based irrigation projects in other parts of India around the same time, for example, the Ganges Canal, these South Indian delta projects had fewer negative environmental consequences, such as enhanced soil salinity.

Both these projects drastically improved the agrarian economy of these delta regions. This resulted in rising wealth in society and also, to some extent, helped revive the regional cultures. Cotton was the first to draft a blueprint of linking major rivers in India-an issue of major importance now, according to Schmitthenner, who says Cotton's reason for river-linking was to provide an inland-waterway platform for transport. It was abandoned as the railway network was started.

During Schmitthenner's last trip to India a new generation of Schmitthenners was introduced to the family alma mater, when his ll-year-old daughter Hillary studied for a year-and-a-half at the Kodaikanal International School.

D