SPAN: September/October 2004

SPAN

George W. Bush Vs. John F. Kerry

The Home Stretch

By Lea Terhune

Publisher Michael H. Anderson

The People Choose What's a "527"?

Editor-in-Chief Gabrielle Guimond

Race Against History

Editor

Barack Obama's

Lea Terhune

Miraculous

Campaign

By Noam Scheiber

Associate Editor

Can Youth Rockthe Vote?

A. Venkata Narayana

A Move Toward Equality for All

Hindi Editor

By Thomas K. Grose

Govind Singh

Urdu Editor

Off the Beaten Track

AnjmnNaim

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

By Paul Maliszewski

Madhu Goud Yaskhi

By A. Venkata Narayana

East Meets Best Western

Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar

Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

Production/Circulation

Tete-a-tete with NRI Parliamentarian

Manager

Rakesh Agrawal

Printing Assistant Alok Kaushik

Business Manager R. Narayan

By Daniel B. Haber

Giving Each Other Space U.S.-India Space Collaboration Revs Up

By Dipesh Satapathy

The Lunar Connection Natural Partners A Look Into History

By Dipesh Satapathy

Research Services

Doris Duke's Islamic Art Retreat

AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

By Doug Stewart

Front cover: Whether the fanfare is for Democrats or Republicans, balloons are part of the festivities of every political party convention, along with confetti, posters, signs, buttons and flags. Here balloons hang from the ceiling at the Democratic Party Convention in Boston, for eventual release during the grand finale. AP photograph by Stephan Savoia. See story on page 3.

Edging Away from Anarchy

By Gal Beckerman

On the Lighter Side Why Big Companies Can't Invent

By Howard Anderson

Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manu-

scripts and materials and does not assume responsibiJityfor them. Query letters are accepted.

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 23316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi.

Printed at Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., 95B Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110052. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

By John Hodgman

Sweet Hope for a Malaria Vaccine

By Erika Jonietz

Fight Against Malaria

By Lea Terhune

Ray Charles

"I'm Movin' On"

By Anthony DeCurtis

A LETTER

FROM

A s the United States enters the final nstages of pre-election frenzy, SPAN offers some guidelines for observers and a profile of an up-and-coming contender.

"Race Against History,"

by Noam Scheiber, profiles the young Mrican American politician, Barack Obama, who made a big impression as keynote speaker at the recent Democratic National Convention. Obama, the son of an Mrican immigrant and a white woman from Kansas, became an embodiment of the American Dream through his hard work and bipartisan appeal. The rise of this formidable candidate coincides with the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which made such strides for minorities possible. '~ Move Toward Equality for All," by Thomas K. Grose, and "Off the Beaten Track," by Paul Maliszewski, respectively, tell the story of the Civil Rights Movement and its dramatic effect on a family of Alabama sharecroppers. Still on politics, A. Venkata Narayana talks with Madhu Goud Yaskhi, the New York lawyer who is the only nonresident Indian to win a seat in the present Indian Parliament.

Globalization and tourism are practically synonymous. Savvy hotel chains know this, which is why several of the biggest names in American hotel business have established themselves in India.

Ranging from five-star to budget, from Radisson to Comfort Inn, signs familiar on U.S. highways are now popping up here. Read "East Meets Best Western," by Daniel B. Haber.

The Bangalore conference on space exploration saw U.S. and Indian commercial, scientific and government representatives enthusiastically celebrating 40 years of accomplishments and exchanging views on how to increase cooperation in the future.

SPAN's Dipesh Satapathy covered this landmark meeting and recounts the story in "Giving Each Other Space" and "Natural Partners."

THE

PUBLISHER

The Taj Mahal in Hawaii? The late heiress Doris Duke tried her best to recreate it and other fantasies of South Asian and Middle Eastern art and design on her seaside estate, Shangri La. Doug Stewart gives us a glimpse of its grandeur in "Doris Duke's Islamic Art Retreat."

Journalism is changing, and the Internet is the place where the metamorphosis is most apparent.

"Edging Away from Anarchy," by Gal Beckerman describes today's media counterculture, where journalists and activists from around the world contribute to globe-spanning news and analysis Web sites like that of the Independent Media Center.

Research and development were once the prerogative of big business, but today they are becoming more of a liability. "Why Big Companies Can't Invent" by Howard Anderson, explores this shift and the alternatives offered by small research companies. An import~nt area of research and development is in public health. "Sweet Hope for a Malaria Vaccine," by Erika Jonietz, charts progress toward defeating this disease that kills millions every year and how scientists are in hot pursuit of a malaria vaccine.

Innovation has been part of filmmaking since the first moving picture was created. Now information technology is pushing the boundaries again.

Kerry Conran makes movies on his computer, and he may be changing filmmaking in the process.

"Mr. Invisible and His Secret Mission," by John Hodgman, describes Conran's incredible journey to Hollywood. Finally, we bid farewell to a great musician: Ray Charles. 'Tm Movin' On," by Anthony DeCurtis, and tributes from fellow musicians round off this issue.

We hope you enjoy reading it.

A

lthough there are always a few independent or small party candidates who opt to run in any U.s. presidential election, the only real cona. tenders, at least since the ~ mid-20th century, are the ~ Democrat and Republican ~ nominees. For the 2004 ÂŤ ~ election, the nominees are ~ the incumbent President ~ George W. Bush, RepubliI o can, and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat.

George W. Bush After a presidential race in 2000 in which he garnered only three more Electoral College votes than Al Gore, his opponent, George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States on January 20, 2001. He is the son of former U.S. President George H. Bush, attended Yale University, and was in the oil business before being elected governor of Texas.

The most shattering hostile ~ event on United States soil ~ after the Japanese attack on ~ Pearl Harbor in 1941 ~ occurred during Bush's first ~ year in office, when terror-

ists attacked the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,2001. Events that transpired since then, including the passage and implementation of the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq have made his presidency controversial at home and abroad, yet he maintains an approval rating in the high 40 percent range, according to recent polls. Vice President Dick Cheney is his running mate.

Kerry's candidacy was winnowed from a field of nine Democratic challengers during Democratic primary elections and caucuses last year. One of these rivals, John Edwards, is now on the ticket as his vice presidential running mate. Right now Kerry and Edwards are stumping around America, introducing themselves and the Democratic Party platform to voters. The candidates are working hard to win over an almost evenly divided electorate.

John F. Kerry Son of a diplomat and U.S. Senator from Massachusetts since 1984, John Kerry has spent a life in politics. After graduating from Yale and active service in the U.S. Navy, he received a law degree from Boston College, became an assistant district attorney and started a law practice. He was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts before being elected to the U.S. Senate, where he is serving his fourth consecutive term. He is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It's in the Swing

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"Swing states" are those that are likely to swing the election one way or another, and are where the candidates will campaign hard. In these states the contest may be close or uncertain.

Especially crucial are states with a large number of Electoral College votes, like California, that has 55. In the 2000 election, Florida, with 25 electoral votes, was vital to success. Bush won the state with a narrow margin of 537 votes. With two more elec-

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The people, not party bosses,pick the candidates

I

nmost democracies the head of a party's parliamentary bloc becomes, at election time, its de facto candidate for prime minister. He, or she, is a wellknown quantity, having worked his way up the ladder of party leadership over many years, even decades, gaining the approval of the party leadership. In many countries neither the candidate for this position, nor any other, can run without the approval of higher leadership. In fact, virtually any would-be office seeker normally needs the imprimatur of the party before he can even present himself as a candidate and must adhere to the political platform they have outlined.

The presidential nominating process in the United States, reflecting the country's individualistic culture and its highly decentralized political system, could not be more different. It brings new faces, with new ideas, into the political process, challenging more established candidates.

These newcomers often win. Neither former President Clinton nor President Bush

was a major national figure before the nominating process began.

The process gives little role to the leaders of the two parties. And each candidate has the freedom to choose his or her own message. It may seem surprising that the leadership of a national party will have very little role in deciding who will carry its standard into the f~l election. But it is something that Americans take for granted.

Throughout the long nominating campaign, the party leadership cannot tell the party members who to vote for. They cannot prohibit any party members from declaring their candidacies and running for the top office in the country. They can't even choose who will be a member of their party. Virtually any voter can register as a member of whatever party he or she chooses.

These facts underline one of the keys to understanding the American presidential nominating process; it has become increasingly democratic over the last few decades. The final step in the process is a

giant national convention of party delegates who vote for the party's candidate, and the great majority of those delegates are chosen not by the party bosses, but by a primary election vote of the millions of voters registered as members of the party in the 36 states that hold such primaries.

Most of the rest of the delegates will have been chosen by state caucuses, to which all party members in the state are invited and encouraged to vote.

History shows that the U.S. nominating system does not favor sitting legislators or vice presidents. Only twice in U.S. history has a sitting vice president been elected to succeed the president under whom he served. The process does favor the governors of the 50 states who have experience as chief executives of states. They can and do claim that this gives them a natural advantage and know-how to be chief executive of the nation. Four out of the last five presidents had served as governors before 0 being elected president.

toral votes in 2004, the result of redistricting, Florida remains an important state to win. Eleven other states could go either way.

Missouri, while only possessing II electoral votes, could be called the prophetic swing state. It has voted for every successful candidate in the 20th century, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.

Finally, a note about the Electoral College: this system dates back to the founding of the United States and consists of 538 electors. Electoral votes are apportioned to each state based upon the combined number of federal senators and representatives allotted to the state, which are, in turn, based upon the state's population.

That is why a candidate may win more popular votes yet still lose the election, as happened with Al Gore in 2000. He won the popular vote by a small margin of 543,895 votes, but Bush got Florida, an electoral vote-heavy state. The magic number that elects the president is 270. An analogy might be drawn to the 273

seats required in the Indian Parliament for a party to form a government. Due to redistricting in the states after the recent census, some states have gained electoral votes while others lost. Because the number of seats in Congress is flxed, representation is reapportioned when population changes warrant it. Most states affected this time are swing states, making the contest all the more tense.

This year, as in the 2000 election, Ralph Nader entered the race, much to the consternation of many Democrats, who feel that his 2.74 percent of the vote helped to skew a very close election result and gave George W. Bush an advantage that got him into the White House. Nader's support has dwindled significantly, however. Bush and Kerry are the ones to watch.

-L.T. For more information on U.S. Election 2004, visit usinfo .state. gov /dhr/ democracy/elections .htrnl usi nfo .state. gov /products/pubs/ election04/

o, 527s are not a new line of supersonic aircraft, but they could well make their candidates fly if they strike the right chord in swing states and sway voters. 527s are organizations so called because of Section 527 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, which lets groups raise money for voter mobilization and issue advocacy. These groups may run partisan ads in the media as long as they are not directly linked with-that is, take orders or funding from-the parties or candidates they back. Recently a Republican 527, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, made news after allegations of false claims surfaced about their ad, which attempted to discredit Democratic candidate John Kerry's military service.

Mudslinging in election advertisements is not new to either party. Since the 1960s, when television became a significant feature in most American homes, it has been the chief sparring ground at election time. On the other side of the aisle, one of the most successful 527s, MoveOn, founded in 1998, began taking elections to the Internet in a big way when they held the first Internet primary election earlier this year, in which Democrat Howard Dean swept the field of nine contestants. Events later swept him out of the running, but MoveOn had set a new precedent for cyber-grassroots participation via the Internet. Since then they have been impressive fund-raisers, catalysts for Congress-directed petitions, and are now focusing on outreach in swing states with anti-Bush ads and various kinds of "meetups." They claim a network of two million members.

Not all 527s are strictly partisan. Many are issue-based. Alongside groups such as National Federation of Republican Women, the Republican Leadership Council, Democratic Victory 2004 or Grassroots Democrats, there are also conservation organizations like the Sierra Club and labor unions like the AFL-CIO. Most 527s are concerned with voter apathy. Volunteers of every political stripe are mobilized to canvass neighborhoods and encourage people to vote. The League of Women Voters (ww.lwv.org) is a leader in voter registration and education drives. A list of the top 50 527s and their finances may be seen at www.opensecrets.org.

-L.T.

N

Barack Obama, the Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from the state of Illinois, draws impressive bipartisan support.

Barack Obamas miraculous campaign

t the Will/Grundy County Annual AFL-CIO (American Federation of LaborCongress of Industrial Organizations) Dinner in late April, it is just before State Senator Barack Obama arrives to make a pitch for his U.S. Senate campaign. At 9:00 p.m., a couple hundred union members are gathered in a banquet hall whose hard linoleum floor, institutional ceiling tiles, and decorative band of Christmas lights give it the feel of a high school cafeteria.

Joliet is only about 45 minutes from downtown Chicago, at the center of Will, one of the suburban "collar" counties that surround the city. But, culturally, it feels much farther away. The women's hairdos are noticeably bigger, the men a little heavier. Everyone appears to be drinking beer and cocktails from clear plastic cups. And, as I walk in, an emcee reminds the audience not to forget about tonight's "50-50 raffle," in the working-class Illinoisan accent "Saturday Night Live" made famous.

George W. Bush carried Will County by a few percentage points in 2000; in 2002, Republicans swept just about every local office here. But you'd never know it listening to Margaret Blackshere, the diminutive president of the state AFL-CIO, who gives the speech directly before Obama's.

Blackshere carries on for what must be 15 minutes about corporate greed, the exploitation of workers in Beijing, and the uselessness of the federal Occupational ,

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Safety and Health Administration. And, Obama says. "And that is that we are all connected as one people ....If there's a cruld while her message seems to resonate with the audience-a group of ironworkers as- on the South Side of Chicago that can't sures me that everyone here is concerned read, that makes a difference in my life, even if it's not my cruld." about the migration of jobs overseas-her And it works! This crowd oflocal ullion tone is a little jarring. The speech's crescendo is a surprisingly mjJjtant indjctheavies-which, 10 rllinutes earlier, had ment of not only the president, but of any been incited to rip the limbs off the first politician who would "wrap themselves politician it could find-is visibly moved. in our flag." "Thank you very much, It's an even more impressive feat given Margaret, we have our work cut out for that wrute, blue-collar voters have never us," is the only trung the slightly stunned been particularly hospitable to African emcee can think to say once she finishes.

American candidates. Indeed, over the last When Obama is finally introduced, he's 40 years, despite the advances of the Civil at no such loss. A self-described "skinny . Rights Movement, black politicians have guy from the South Side" with a mild counmade almost no progress representing try drawl, rus broad srllile and high cheekanything but predominantly black areas. bones make him an impressive figure on Since the 1960s, there have been only two stage. Obama frames his speech as a playAfrican American senators and a single ful introductjon to himself. ("When I first African American governor-none of ran for state Senate ... [people] would call whom are currently in office. The reason me 'Yo Mama.' And I'd have to explain, for the poor showing is that African 'No, it's O-bama' -that my father was American candidates for statewide office from Kenya, from Africa, which is where I nearly always end up in a catch-22: Attempts to motivate their African got the name ...and that my mother was from Kansas, wruch is why I talk the way I American base usually alienate white do.") But, more than that, hjs speech is a moderates. And, when black candidates call for uplift so earnest it would make try to tailor their message to wrute moderDemocratic vice presidential candidate ates, they dampen enthusiasm among John Edwards blush. "People would ask African Americans and liberals. me, 'You seem like a llice guy, you're a Obama is one of the very, very few church-going man, got a wonderful law de- African American candidates since the gree, great future ahead of you, why in the civil rights era to whom these constraints don't seem to apply: Despite having run as heck would you want to go into sometlling dirty and nasty like politics?' But I tell peoa black progressive, he managed to win over white, blue-collar Democrats across ple the reason I got into politics is the same reason that people decided to form unions," the state in this winter's Illinois Senate

Obama's keynote speech at the De~ocratic National Convention in Boston on July 27, 2004, put him on the map. People are already talking about his potential as a presidential candidate of the future.

primary, taking 53 percent of the vote.

That's nearly unheard of in a seven-candidate field, one which included multimillionaire Blair Hull; Dan Hynes, the scion of a prominent Chicago political family (and the current state comptroller); another African American candidate; and a prominent Latino.

Integral to Obama's success are the factors he cites in his speech: his unusual racial and cultural background. Whereas many working-class voters are wary of African American candidates, whom they think will promote black interests at the expense of their own, they simply don't see Obama in these terms. This allows him to appeal to white voters on traditional Democratic issues like jobs, health care, and educationjust like a white candidate would.

Shortly after Obama's speech, I break off from the scrum surrounding him and approach two middle-aged men, who identify themselves as officials from the local branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The first, a short, bearded man, is effusive. He tells me this is the first time he has seen Obama in person and that he especially liked the fact that Obama didn't put anyone down, even Republicans.

When he's finished, the ,second, a

heavyset, balding man, slaps me on the back so hard I almost knock his friend over. "The thing about Obama," he gushes, "is that there are no racial lines, there are no party lines. He reaches everybody."

Barack Obama, now 43, was groomed for higher office from pretty much the day he entered the Illinois state Senate in 1997. It was then that Emil Jones, the chamber's powerful minority leader (and now its president), took an interest in Obama's career, personally dispatching an aide to handle his press and strategy. But, despite the lofty expectations, Obama's first attempt to reach beyond the state Capitol was a disaster. In 1999, he decided to challenge four-term Representative

t ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Bobby Rush for his congressional seat.

But Rush, a former Black Panther and community activist, enjoyed a stature in the South Side's heavily black first district that made him nearly impossible to dislodge. It didn't help that, throughout the race, Rush's campaign painted Obama as an overeducated technocrat from Harvard, where he'd earned a law degree. Obama's campaign naturally interpreted these jabs as cynical nods to black ambivalence about educational achievement. But the damage from intimations that Obama wasn't "black enough"-that he "[hadn't] been around the first congressional district long enough to really see what's going on," as Rush charged-was difficult to contain. "It was a delineation that was effective," says one Obama aide. Obama lost by a two-to-one margin.

But, if Rush made racial identity an issue for voters, it was an issue Obama had long ago resolved for himself. Not that the path to that resolution had been easy. For Obama, the product of a brief marriage between a Kenyan father and a white mother, racial ambiguity was an early fact of life.

Obama's mother married an Indonesian man shortly after his parents' separation, and the family moved from Hawaii to Indonesia when he was still in elementary school. Obama recalls in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, how his mother fed him a steady diet of idealized black images during his years in

Obama after his stunning victory in the Illinois Democratic primary election on March 16.

He won 53 percent of the vote in a sevenperson race, receiving significant support from a coalition of labor unions, community leaders, activists and endorsements from many newspapers.

Indonesia: "She would come home with books on the Civil Rights Movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King." It was only at age nine, when Obama stumbled across a picture of an African American who'd tried to lighten his complexion, that he discovered that being black might be a source of shame to some in the United States.

The years that followed were no less confusing. Obama returned to Hawaii the following year to live with his white grandparents and attend the elite Punahou School, where he was one of only a handful of African American students. Obama describes his adolescence as a period of rebellion: His grades slipped, he experimented with drugs, and he generally emu-

lated stereotypes of African American males, even if he could never shake the suspicion that he was just acting a part. ("At least on the basketball court I could find a community of S01tS," Obama writes of his countless hours spent playing the sport.) The image finally began to wear thin when Obama arrived at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In one of the more poignant passages of his book, Obama recounts an exchange he had with two black classmates: Marcus, "the most conscious of brothers, ...his lineage was pure, his loyalties clear, and for that reason he always made me feel a little off balance"; and Tim, who "wore argyle sweaters and pressed jeans and talked like Beaver Cleaver" (lead character in a

an election that promises to be hair's-breadth close, could the potential 50 million voters in the 18-30 age group make a difference? You bet they could, if even half of them get to the voting IIbooth. But according to Veronica De La Garza, the executive director of the Youth Vote Coalition (YVC) in Washington, youth participation in the U.S. political system has been steadily declining since 18-year-olds were granted franchise in 1971 (before that the voting age was 21). Young people feel that politicians ignore them as a group and do not address issues important to youth. They feel that their views don't count.

Consequently, young voters often don't bother to vote-and by not voting they turn their perception into reality.

Nonpartisan organizations such as the YVC (see www.youthvote.org) and other groups are trying to turn that around. They educate young people about the issues, register them to vote, encourage them to make their voices heard. The YVC has set a goal of registering 20 million young people to vote in November's presidential election. La Garza recently told an audience of students and academics that the most important factor in motivating people to vote is to teach them how politics affects their everyday lives. "Many times young people are unaware that politics decides if they're safe on their streets, if they're going to have enough to eat, how they're going to go to school and how their family is living," she said. The YVC Web site provides links to affiliate organizations such as Project Vote Smart at www.vote-smart.org, another useful information source, providing "the necessary tools to self-govern effectively: abundant, accurate, unbiased and relevant information" about political candidates, issues and processes~

wholesome 1950s-era TV series about a typical white family).

One night Obama was hanging out with Marcus when Tim came by and asked for the day's economics assignment. "Tim's a trip, ain't he? Should change his name from Tim to Tom," Obama recalls saying, thinking it was what Marcus wanted to hear.

Instead the comment brought a stem rebuke. "Tim seems all right to me," Marcus said. "He's going about his business. Don't bother nobody. Seems to me we should be worrying about whether our own stuff's together instead of passing judgment on how other folks are supposed to act."

What makes both the book and author interesting is that Obama's eventual response to his multicultural background

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The Young Democrats may be found at www.yda.com and the Young Republicans at www.youngrepublicans.com but it is Rock the Vote, with slogans like "Get Loud, Be Heard," and endorsements by hip-hop and rap artists, that has built-in youth appeal. The snazzy www.rockthevote.com Web site offers a palatable guide to presidential elections ("Elections 101"). It gives simple directions for registering to vote; posts political news relevant to youth; sends e-mail and SMS updates; and in a daily blog records matters as diverse as Lil' Kim using Rock the Vote's online registration to "Bush daughters hit the campaign trail to reach the new generation." Rock the Vote, founded in 1990 by community-conscious members of the recording industry, is "dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and empowering young people to change their world." Realtime meetings and bus tours to college campuses, organized by the "street team," are part of the outreach.

-L.T.

black 'middleclassness' that hypnotizes the successful brother or sister into believing they are better than the rest of US." Obama would go on to become the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review before returning to Chicago, where he and his wife, Michelle, became members of Trinity.

Race has, of course, always been an issue for African American political candidates, and it has generally compelled their campaigns to take one of two forms. The firstwhat you might call the Bobby Rush strategyhas been to rely either exclusively on African American voters or on a coalition of African Americans and white liberals, with little attempt to reach white moderates. The last black U.S. senator-Carol Moseley Braun, also from Illinois-essentially pursued this strategy, patching together a coalition of blacks and liberals in her 1992 campaign. (Braun did win over some moderate Republican women, 2 but it was thanks almost Another immigrant living the American Dream: first as a movie entirely to her being a superstar, now as a politician. California Governor Arnold woman in a year when Schwarzenegger speaks to delegates on the second day of the abortion rights and the Republican National Convention in New York, August 31.

Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy weighed heavily on the minds of female voters. She lost her reelection bid from college. Shortly before leaving decisively in 1998.) Harold Washington, Chicago for Harvard, he had a meeting with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the the only African American mayor of Chicago, pursued an even more racially charismatic black pastor of Trinity United segregated strategy, winning with just Church of Christ, one of the most socioover 51 percent of the vote against his economically diverse all-black congregaRepublican opponent in 1983, in an overtions in Chicago. Obama was taken with Wright's worldview, perhaps best encapwhelmingly Democratic city.

The problem with this approach, of sulated by a Trinity brochure proclaiming course, is that it has tended to limit that, "while it is permissible to chase 'middleincomeness' with all our might," African American politicians to areas where African Americans and white liberambitious African Americans must beware the "psychological entrapment of als add up to a majority. To win elections

was neither to shun his black identity, nor to shore it up by segregating himself from whites. It was to be racially proud, while striving to succeed in mainstream (and predominantly white) institutions. Obama had moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer not long after graduating

in parts of the country where culturally moderate whites are the decisive swing voters-which is to say, most of America-African American candidates have attempted a second approach: deemphasizing race and running to the political center. Perhaps the most successful of these candidates was former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder, a longtime state senator who first won a dramatic victory as lieutenant governor in 1985.

Paul Goldman, a top Wilder adviser who managed the campaign, recalls that he avoided drawing excessive attention to Wilder's race whenever possible-for example, by declining to cast Wilder in some of his own commercials. Meanwhile, Wilder positioned himself as a moderate on taxes and crime. (One of Wilder's most famous ads featured a local white cop testifying to his fitness for office.) Goldman also relied heavily on Wilder's heroism during the Korean War. The campaign ran on the slogan "From Korea to Richmond, He's Still Fighting for Virginia" in hopes of capitalizing on the state's rich military tradition.

But, though Wilder won both the 1985 race and his 1989 campaign for governor, these episodes testify as much to the limits of his election strategy as to its effectiveness. Wilder won the governorship by less than one percent-and even that was thanks to the unusual resonance of his prochoice views on abortion at a time when the issue was all over the news.

Even more instructive about the pitfalls of failing to excite the African American base is the example of Cory Booker, a black city councilman in Newark, New Jersey, whose statewide ambitions were (at least temporarily) derailed in a losing' mayoral race in 2002. Booker, a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School graduate who had actually moved into a Newark housing project to live among his poorest constituents, had been the darling of affluent whites in the New York metropolitan area (who largely bankrolled his campaign).

But Booker's campaign foundered on accusations that he wasn't authentically black, which his opponent, incumbent Mayor Sharpe James, took pains to fan.

hen Obama entered the Senate race in January 2003, he quickly dispelled any suspicion that he might attempt to replicate Wilder's strategy for appealing to moderate whites. He was unapologetically liberal, outspoken in his opposition to the Iraq War, and proud of the progressive legislation he'd passed in the state Senate. His campaign touted his role in passing a bill intended to reduce the rate of wrongful executions by requiring homicide confessions to be videotaped and another designed to crack down on racial profiling by requiring police. to record the race of individuals they searched. Obama also claimed credit for extending the life of a state-sponsored health insurance program for children and emphasized his efforts at creating a jobtraining program for unskilled workers.

More important, Obama played up his achievements in a way that called attention to his race. David Axelrod, a media consultant and Obama aide who was si-

multaneously advising John Edwards, believed Obama's biography was perfect raw material for the kind of hopeful themes he was crafting for the North Carolina senator's presidential campaign-particularly Obama's status as the first-ever black president of the Harvard Law Review. "It worked on two levels," Axelrod says. "For those for whom the knocking down of barriers is important, it was very important. For others, the Harvard Law Review was a big credential." In Obama's first advertisement, the telegenic state senator looks at the camera and explains, "They said an African American had never led the Harvard Law Review-until I changed that." The commercial concludes, "Now they say we can't change Washington, D.C .... I approved this message to say, 'Yes we can.'"

Then Obama ran into a bit of luck. The media turned up evidence that Hull's exwife had sought a restraining order against him, and Hull's campaign, which had built a 10-point lead, imploded after the candidate essentially admitted to having abused her. Still, it was by no means clear Obama

entered the race.

In fact, the truth is closer to the opposite. In 1993, sociologists Jan Rosenberg, of Long Island University, and Philip Kasinitz, of Hunter College, stumbled across an interesting finding in their study of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn: While white employers in the area were perfectly comfortable-even eager-to employ West Indian immigrants from outside the neighborhood, most were deadset against hiring local African Americans and Puerto Ricans. One local employer boasted of the team of West Indians he'd hired to guard his factory, but, when asked about hiring local African Americans, remarked, "What, the bums hanging around outside? You want me to hire the guys who are trying to rob me?"

As The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell explained the finding in 1996:

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would become the race's front-runner. His appeal to white moderates remained unproven. Compounding Obama's problem was a factor almost as immutable as his race: his name. That it would be hopeless to run for statewide office with a last name that rhymes with "Osama" was more or less the accepted wisdom when Obama

with the crime and dissipation they

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saw on the streets

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"Good" also meant that you were an immigrant, because employers felt that being an immigrant implied a loyalty and a willingness to work and learn not found among the nativeborn.

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Campaigning on foot in Chicago's Chinatown district, Obama shakes hands with voter Henry Leong. At an AFL-CIO meeting last April, he told listeners, "There's nobody in this room who doesn't believe infree trade," adding, "I want India and China to succeed. " It took nerve to make such statements in an area badly affected by outsourcing. Yet he got AFL-CIO endorsements.

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It was not that the employers did not like blacks and Hispanics. It was that they had developed an elaborate mechanism for distinguishing between those they felt were "good" blacks and those they felt were "bad" blacks. "Good" meant that you came from outside the neighborhood, because employers identified locals around them.

The distinction between "good" blacks and "bad" blacks has a rich pedigree in the United States. Sociologists have for decades commented on the differences in the ways white New Yorkers relate to Jamaican immigrants, as opposed to native-born African Americans.

And Jamaican immigrants have, in turn, drawn similar distinctions. "The most important element in Jamaican (and West Indian) ethnicity in New York City is a self-perception that Jamaicans are hardworking, goaloriented, success-driven individuals-in short, achievers," the sociologist Milton

was a very different America that President John F. Kennedy addressed on television the night of June 11, 1963. It was an America where, throughout the South, racial segregation was culturally accepted and legally sanctioned.

It was a country rent by protests pleading for full freedoms for African Americans, where often the response was racist taunts, intimidation, and bloodshed. It was, in short, a nation that was deeply wary of extending civil rights to blacks.

And John Kennedy himself was no exception.

Kennedy's embrace of the civil rights movement had been hesitant and politically calibrated.

But increasing levels of violence in the South convinced the President that moral courage mattered more than political calculus. That night he delivered what historian Robert Loevy calls "one of the greatest civil rights speeches ever given," eloquently laying out the moral imperative for a colorblind republic. And it resulted in â&#x20AC;˘ the most sweeping civil rights legislation

Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine black students ordered to be admitted to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, September 1957.

Eckford later got a bachelor's degree and was the first black nonjanatorial bank employee in St. Louis, Missouri.

ever enacted by the u.s. Congress: the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That landmark legislation-which Kennedy would not live to see become law-barred segregation in places of public accommodation, including restaurants, hotels, and theaters; ordered the desegregation of public schools; set uniform voting standards; and required employers to provide equal employment opportunities. Though it did not stamp out racism, it ushered in an era of positive change in American race relations that remains ongoing-and incomplete-nearly 40 years later. "A social revolution was put in place by the act," says Robert Dallek, author of a recent Kennedy biography, An Unfinished Life.

Passage of the act marked the culmination of organized social protests that began soon after the end of the Second World War. But it was necessitated by social upheaval of a much different sort nearly 100 years earlier in the 11 states of the Confederacy. After the Civil War came Reconstruction in the South, and blacks enjoyed newly gained rights, bolstered by occupying federal troops.

A trio of amendments to the U.S. Constitution was meant to help integrate blacks into society. The 13th Amendment, which became law in 1865, abolishe~ slavery. The 14th Amendment

(1868) gave all Americans equal protection under the law. The 15th Amendment (1870) proclaimed that voting rights should not be infringed by race, color, or previous servitude.

But after federal troops were withdrawn in 1877, the South's white power structure-seething with resentment against federal authority-reasserted itself and began to whittle away at the former slaves' hard-won freedoms. "There was no lasting commitment to enforce these laws," explains Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson. "And without that commitment, it was easy for the South to just say no." Onerous poll taxes and socalled literacy tests kept blacks disenfranchised. Local codesthe Jim Crow laws-segregated everything from restaurants and hotels to restrooms and theaters. They were enforced in part by . legal authorities and in part by extralegal ones, like the Ku Klux Klan. Protesting was not an option. "If you staged a sit-in in the 1870s," says Carson, "you'd have been a lynching statistic." In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson, that "separate but equal" public accommodations were legal. And Jim Crow became the law of the land.

The first 20th-century breakthrough for civil rights occurred in 1954 when, in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, the high court unanimously ruled that segregation in public schools was inherently unequal, thus unconstitutional. Despite the Brown decision, integration of Southern schools was exasperatingly slow.

So as the decade unfolded, the pace of protests, boycotts, and vio-

Million Man March: the largest assemblage of black Americans in Washington, D.C., since the Civil Rights march of 1963. Tens of thousands of black men from across America came to express "unity, atonement and brotherhood" on October 16, 1995.

Participants were asked by organizer Louis Farrakhan to pledge to "clean up their lives and rebuild their neighborhoods" and "take responsibility for their lives and families, and commit to stopping the scourges of drugs, violence and unemployment. "

lent reactions quickened. The movement's main driver was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an advocate of nonviolent protest and a brilliant strategist. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to oversee the desegregation of Central High School, setting a precedent for executive branch intervention to enforce court orders.

In 1960, presidential candidate Kennedy supported civil rights legislation, but once ensconced in the Oval Office, he did little more than give the issue lip service. JFK had won a squeaker election with support from working-class Southerners, and so he feared antagonizing the white South. But events in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963 prodded Kennedy to act. Thousands of peaceful protesters-led

by King-converged on the city, seeking the integration of restaurants and jobs for local blacks. Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, an archetype of helmeted white authority, ordered his men to attack the demonstrators with police dogs, hoses, and cattle prods. The irpages that were transmitted

from Birmingham, JFK said, made him feel sick.

"Kennedy changed completely after Birmingham," Loevy says, and he threw the full weight of his office behind passage of the act.

In Congress the bill faced a huge hurdle: the filibuster, which could be used by the Senate's 22 Southern members to kill legislation that a congressional majority supported. (Note: A filibuster is the term for an extended debate in the Senate which is a tactic used to prevent a vote. It came from "filibusteros," 19th-century pirates who held ships hostage for ransom.) At the time of his assassination on November 22, 1963, Kennedy-still worried about re-electionwas negotiating to water down the bill. Proponents, led by new President Lyndon B. Johnson, eventually passed a stronger measure by evoking the memory of the slain leader. The assassination gave President Johnson "an incredible amount of legislative and psychological leverage, and Johnson knew how to use it," recalls Robelt MaIUl, who was then an aide to Louisiana Senator Russell Long.

As expected, the Southern senators filibustered to derail the act.

It lasted 83 days, the longest in history. A successful cloture vote to end the filibuster required 67 of the body's 100 votes. To do an end run around the filibuster, Johnson's forces negotiated with Republican Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who controlled 'about eight Republican votes. Deeply conservative, Dirksen was also a man of conscience with a sense of history. When cloture was invoked, Dirksen paraphrased Victor Hugo, saying that "stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come." On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the bill into law. Johnson, whose earlier record on civil rights was spotty at best, was heartfelt in his support of the measure. But he correctly forecast that its passage would help deliver a Southern majority to the Republicans.

Although the measure couldn't have passed without key GOP support, "the Republicans got a free ride in the South," Mann says.

After years of street battles and sit-ins, the integration of public accommodations was largely accepted without a whimper.

Explains Carson: "Once change came, it came relatively rapidly in many parts of the country."

On other fronts, the pace of change was slower. The enfranchising of blacks required the stronger language of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And the desegregation of housing was not addressed until three years later in the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Carson calls the legislation an "important watershed" and a "psychic win for African Americans" because it "dealt a death blow to Jim Crow." But blacks are still struggling for full freedoms, justice, and equality. Angelo Ancheta, legal director of the Harvard University Civil Rights Project, says that despite the act, inequality still haunts the workplace and the classroom. "And housing is the area where the least progress has been made."

Yet the Civil Rights Act has unquestionably influenced American culture. Industry now sees inclusion as a good business practice, and the Supreme Court re-endorsed affirmativeaction policies. "Racism and inequality are now seen as serious problems," Ancheta says. "We would not have made the progress we've made without the act."

0 About the Author: Thomas K. Grose is a freelance writer based in Washington, D. C.

Off the Beaten Track During a civil rights march in 1965, photographer Bruce Davidson left the highway to focus on a single Alabama sharecropper and her nine children.

single mother of nine, Annie Blackman picked cotton from six in the morning until eight at night, and in 1965 her day's pay was $1.25. The Blackman home, in Trickem Fork, Alabama, was a wood cabin with a front porch and a brick chimney. The windows were large but held no glass, just openings with shutters. There was an addition on the back, apd the walls

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were patched with newspapers and magazines to keep out drafts. There was no electricity. Water was a mile away.

Trickem Fork, off Route 80 between Selma and Montgomery, drew national attention after 3,200 civil rights protesters led

by Martin Luther King Jr. marched down the road in March 1965; by the time they reached the state capital, where they called for equality and voting lights for African Americans, they numbered 25,000.

Davidson's photograph reminds Felicia Blackman (in her mother's arms in 1965) of the obstacles her family would overcome.

Newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, who was coveling the march, suggested that Bard Lindeman and W.e. Heinz, reporters for the Saturday Evening Post, "get off the highway" and fmd the real civil rights story in the towns along the way. They did. Their article, "Great Day at Trickem Fork," reported that

the Blackman family ate mostly fatback and bread and that the Blackman children took . peanut butter sandwIches to school when they could but sometimes went days without any lunch at all. Four decades later, Lindeman, who now lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and writes frequently about aging and the elderly, recalls the encounter. "Blackman did not think there was anything unusual about her circumstances," he says, but "her life was the embodiment of what the march was all about."

Bruce Davidson, a photographer based in New York City, was documenting the march and took photographs for the Saturday Evening Post article, including an arresting image of Blackman in the d?orway of the paper-covered room holding her youngest daughter, Felicia. The photograph, reprinted in Davidson's 2002 book Time of Change (St. Ann's Press), captures abstract subjects like racism and rural poverty--eoncerns of the growing protest movement-and renders them immediate and personal. Blackman was polite but wary in welcoming the journalists into her home. "She kept saying, 'Yes, sir,''' Davidson recalls. "It was kind of like, you're white, you have the power. There's a certain fear that comes from never knowing when that power is going to turn on you."

Davidson, who is 70 and ranks among America's foremost postwar photographers, has usually found people willing to let him into their lives, beginning with photographs he took in Paris in the 1950s of an elderly woman he called the Widow of Montmartre. A native of Illinois, in 1961 he joined the second Freedom Ride, led by civil rights activists determined to test a Supreme Court decision requiring that buses crossing state lines be integrated. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was attacked and set on fire, and some of the riders were beaten. EMILY DAVIDSON As he continued to travel, Davidson grew increasingly concerned about the "underpinnings of the civil rights movement, the migrant camps and the child laborers," he recalls, and photographed them.

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Felicia Blackman is an insurance agent and her daughter, Alicya, 16, an honor student.

Below: Davidson (in 2001) tries to make himself invisible.

Davidson is nothing if not patient; he spent two years photographing life on a block in Spanish Harlem for his 1970 book East lOOth Street, expanded and reissued last year. "I'm sort of able to make myself invisible," he says. "Because I'm looking, I'm not talking. I use my eyes and my other senses and make myself stealth." He adds, "You have to relate to people, and they have to begin to trust you. It takes a long time. With Miss Blackman, I was able to do something overnight, but that was a rare situation."

Davidson returned to Alabama in 2002 with a documentary film crew and managed to find some members of the Blackman family. He learned that Annie Blackman had moved out of the cabin in Trickem Fork in the 1970s and eventually into a five-bedroom house about a mile away. She remodeled the kitchen, covering the drywall with paneling, and did over a long, openair porch, gleefully etching her name in wet concrete that the contractor poured under it. She died in 2000 at 77 .

For years, she had kept a copy of the Saturday

Evening Post with the story about her family, but then she lost it. In the mid-1980s, one of her daughters, Alma Surles, a law librarian for the Alabama Supreme Court, found the article at work and shared it with the family. It was a potent reminder of what they had Jived through. "My mother was proud of the fact that her life had changed," says Felicia Blackman, now 40.

Felicia lives near Trickem Fork, works as an insurance agent and has one child, Alicya, a 16-year-old daughter. In some ways, she says, Trickem Fork is much the same. It remains decidedly rural, with a few mom and pop grocery stores, service stations and churches. In other ways, though, much has changed. "It was something huge that happened," Felicia says of the civil rights movement and its effects on even her own family. Alicya, who earns A's and B's in the tenth grade, is taking courses at a local university as part of a Department of Education program called Upward Bound.

For Felicia, Davidson's photographs are more than a glimpse of a time and place in the American history. "We never really had any photos of us while we were young, because we were pretty poor," she says. "To see those photos and see all of us, it was really touching. They're really our family photos."

0 About the Author: Paul Maliszewski is a freelance writer who contributes to Harper's and Paris Review.

Tete-a-tete with

Parliamentarian fter Indian immigrants' success in American politics, it is now the turn of NRIs to make their preseuce felt in Indian politics. Madhu Goud Yaskhi, a New York-based lawyer, contested parliamentary election this year from Nizamabad constituency, Andhra Pradesh, as a Congress Party nominee. He won with an impressive margin, and became the only NRI parliamentarian in the 14th Lok Sabha.

Yaskhi immigrated to United States in the late 1980s to pursue postdoctoral course in law, but the prohibitive cost of education and family circumstances forced him to take up a part-time job at the Indian Consulate in New York. He also had a brief stint as a journalist with News India- Times, a widely circulated tabloId among immigrant Indians. In 1995, Yaskhi founded a partnership firm, the International Legal and Trade Consultants in New York, which handles business immigration issues.

Born in a middle class family in 1960 in Hayatnagar in suburban Hyderabad, Yaskhi graduated from Nizam College, Hyderabad, received a law degree from Delhi University and did his masters in law from Osmania University, Hyderabad.

He started the Madhu Yaskhi Foundation in New York, which receives 25 percent ofYaskhi's earnings in donation. The foundation helps poor farmers in Nizamabad district.

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SPAN: How did your journey to politics begin? Did you ever aspire to become a member of the Indian Parliament?

MADHU GOUD YASKHI: I am a novice to Indian politics. After seeing my social work among poor farmers since 2002, Congress Party offered me membership. I joined the party in March, a couple of months before the parliamentary election. I was nominated by the party to fight from Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency with only 18 days left for campaigning.

But my real journey to my homeland began two years ago after I read a newspaper report about the plight of farmers in Machareddy mandai of Nizamabad district. There has been a lot of talk about-the state making good strides economically, especially in the IT sector, and the liberalization policies impacting people's lives.

But to my surprise, I read the reports of farmers committing suicide. So I thought I should go and see to myself what's happening. When I saw the reality I was appalled; more than 50 farmers took their lives and their families were on the brink of starvation. How to provide immediate succor to the bereaved families was on top of my mind. I gave a small donation ofRs. 10,000 each to the 42 affected families.

My help restored in them confidence, which enabled them to stand on their feet.

What qualities did Congress see in you when it nominated you as party candidate especially, when many senior lead~rs were in the race?

First, the party is keen to give opportunities to youth. Secondly, my work among

Nizamabad farmers was acknowledged and that made the party think about my candidature. Thirdly, the district and the state committees of the party unanimously supported my nomination. They argued that they need a person with my educational qualifications and social background since the assembly elections were also simultaneously being held. By hindsight, their assessment proved right-both my party and our coalition partner, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti, swept the election in the entire region.

This new responsibility as member of Parliament demands full time attention.

How are you going to apportion your time between New York, New Delhi and Nizamabad?

It is a privilege as well as a responsibility being a member of Parliament. I have made a conscious decision to continue with my business in New York. My partner at my New York firm will look after the day-to-day functioning of my company.

The job as a parliamentarian is social commitment, responsibility and accountability to the constituents. I would like to stay in' Delhi when the Parliament is in session.

That will perhaps give me enough time to interact with ministers and senior officials with whom I can discuss several developmental issues. Very soon I will open a fullfledged office in Nizamabad, which will be a nodal point with my people.

As a member of Lok Sabha, what do you plan to achieve?

As a parliamentarian, I have a bigger role to play, representing not only my con-

stituency but representing the entire country. The rules that are made in the Parliament reflect the views not only. of my constituents but also the entire country. As a parliamentarian, I want to become a role model for the younger generation. I will also devote time for the party, and work for well being of the economically deprived people and strengthen the social fabric of the country.

I want to become an interface with the 2o-million-strong Indian diaspora and be their voice in the Parliament. NRIs have been playing an important role in economic development of the country. But in some countries they have no rights and no insurance facilities. I will focus NRIs' issues in a big way both within the Parliament and outside, primarily NRIs in ~ \?z the Gulf region.

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What are the services your consultancy ~ w company provide?

I I have about 25 employees in my firm which provides consultancy services on If more Indian Americans participate in international trade, business management the American political process that would and immigration issues. It is a partnership help to strengthen bilateral relations, fight firm which is serving not only the Indian international terrorism and bring peace to immigrant community but also American the world. Both are democratic countries businesses that want to set up offices in and the need of the hour is to create closer, stronger and mature relationships between India. We concentrate on trade, business and immigration issues relating to busiboth countries. nesses only. We basically deal in business India is the world's largest democracy immigration, and do not help asylum and America the world's oldest democseekers or visa seekers. More than 400 companies, especially in the IT sector, are racy. How do the twain meet? on our client list. ?oth have their strong distinctive features. If you look at democratic . How do you look at the bilateral rela- norms in India, you will see a minority tions between the United States and India?

Muslim elected the President, a minor,

ity Sikh heading the government, and a minority Christian leading the largest party in the coalition government. This reflects the true democratic nature and the strength of our great country. In case of America, individual dignity is of utmost importance. No other country in the world grants such unfettered freedom and dignity to an individual. That is why the whole world is looking at America and wants to come and live there. So both the democracies have their own strengths. I believe both need to have a closer relationship so that they can bring peace and prosperity to the entire world.

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Every major Indian,metro has at least one American hotel brand. And upmarket Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and Radisson brands may be upstaged by budget hotels like Best Western and Comfort Inn. recording n his trip around the world in the book Following the Equator (1898), American author and humorist Mark Twain wrote about Banaras as being "older than history, older than tradition, older than even legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!"

Traveling in the 19th century, Twain endured many hardships in his travels in India, and while we don't know exactly where Twain stayed in the legendary city of Kashi, the abode of Lord Shiva, were he able to time-travel and come back today, he'd be rather astonished and probably pleasantly surprised to find his options for comfortable lodging in the timeless city would now include American hotel chains such as a Best Western Hindustan and Radisson Varanasi.

He'd be further surprised to find a down-home bakery and whole foods restaurant called Bread of Life run by an American expat from Kansas City! Thanks to globalization, the world has shrunk.

Even a generation ago, when another American writer, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg visited Varanasi to bathe in the Ganges, India was still an exotic, far-away place to most Americans and the idea that one day typical American fast-foods such as pizza, burgers and fries cou}d be found

I

along with American hotel chains in India's most sacred, traditional city-or any other of India's metropolises-would have been unimaginable. But here we are with our Banarasi-wallah friends sitting on the steps of Assi Ghat on the Ganga munching on crusty wood-oven pizza washed down by a Pepsi as pilgrims take a dip in the holy timeless river just a few meters away.

Or on a summer Sunday afternoon in June, school is out and the air intoxicating-which in America would be cause to take the old Chevy out for a drive in the country-I find myself on the winding road up from Dehra Dun to Mussoorie joined by hundreds of Indian families out for a drive in the mountains in their Marutis-or Chevys or Fords-to escape the torrid heat of the plains and enjoy the cool, fresh air.

Mussoorie is about 2,130 meters up in the Himalayas and far from the sea, but as resident Anglo- Indian writer Ruskin Bond puts it, in many ways Mussoorie feels like and shares the characteristics of a seaside resort-in that it is packed with middleclass families and holiday-makers in the summer months.

And where do they stay? True, Mussoorie, the old Raj-era, dowager "Queen of the Hills," has quite a number of

old colonial properties such as The Savoy and former maharaja's palaces turned into hotels, but there is also a Best Western and Comfort Inn, two of America's most popular motel chains-and both of them packed with families from the plains. Best Western, happens to be the world's largest hospitality franchise and Comfort Inn is not far behind.

Americans know them primarily as budget, family-friendly highway lodges that are good value for money and where basically every room is the same. The no-surprises, cookie-cutter concept-whether it be uniformity in hamburgers (think McDonald's) or hotels-is an American concept that seems to have caught on, whether it be Missouri, USA, or Mussoorie, India.

While the Holiday Inn brands-which originated in the U.S.-have been in India for some 30 years, the major American ho-' tel chains entered India less than two decades ago when the government under P.v. Narasimha Rao, with the help of then finance minister, now Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh began liberalization of the economy in 1991. Now every major Indian metro has at least one American hotel brand such as Best Western, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Radisson and Ramada.

Many of the American hotel ventures are tie-ups or joint ventures with Indian companies such as the Hilton's Trident brand with

Oberoi, Marriott. with the Welcomgroup and Carlson Country Inn & Suites (a subsidiary of Radisson's parent company) with Chanakya Hotels.

Marriott International, for example, announced in June that it plans to shift its focus from North America and Europe to the three emerging markets in Asia-the Middle East, China and India. Fredelick Miller, vice president of global sales, Marriott International, said, "When you are looking at the new emerging market, these three regions are growing faster than any other around the globe. We are looking at increasing our presence in India and for this a clear growth map has been chalked out." At present, Marriott

Comfort Inn Daspalla Executive Court in Visakhapatnam.

has seven properties in India including its Marriott, JW Marriott, Renaissance, Marriott Executive Apartments and Ramada International brands, and plans to open a 308-room hotel in Hyderabad as well as the budget Courtyard Lodging brand soon. Hospitality industry pundits attribute the shift to Asia to the saturation of the North American and European markets.

Another growth area-and sign of India's economic boom-is the sudden spurt in the construction of serviced luxury apartments catering to foreigners and overseas businessmen, many of them nonresident Indians or persons of Indian origin.

Major U.S. brands entering India in this sector include Hyatt, Marriott and Oakwood, which exclusively operates serviced apartments. Oakwood is planning its expansion in India by setting up ser-

viced apartments in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai.

Apartment hotels or serviced apartments are ideally suited for corporate executives relocating to India for the long term. With economic growth and globalization, multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly need to send their high-echelon executives to India. Thus, there is a need for furnished accommodation, and serviced apartments target MNC executives, diplomats, NGO representatives and others looking to India as a new business destination. Marriott International pioneered the concept of apartment hotels in India when it opened its Lakeside Chalet Marriott Executive Apartments in Powai near Mumbai, in June 2000.

From budget motels to luxury serviced apartments, American-often Indian American-hoteliers are sharing their expertise with India. One of the priorities of the new NRI Affairs Ministry headed by Jagdish Tytler will be to get clearances for Indian-origin American hoteliers who wish to set up motels and budget hotels along the highways of India. This is "on top of the agenda" for his ministry, said Tytler.

This should come as a shot in the arm for the Asian American Hotel Ownâ&#x201A;Źrs Association (AAHOA) which has a membership base of over 8,400, owning assets of over $40 billion, and is supporting various marketing initiatives on the Visit India 2004 campaign in the United States. "We are keen on putting India on the global tourism map since that will create big investment opportunities for us," says AAHOA director Hitesh Bhakta.

Although persons of South Asian origin Quality Inn River Country Resorts in Manali opened in July.

Silver Springs, Maryland-based Choice Hotels International, operates in India through Choice Hospitality India Private Ltd., which has 25 hotels of the "Quality Inn" and "Comfort Inn" brands all over India.

are a minute percentage of the U.S. population, Indian Americans (mostly hailing from Gujarat) own about 17,OOO-about half-of U.S. franchise and independent economy motels, and New Delhi would like to woo them back home to put their expertise to work in India.

While one Amelican trend is for uniformity, another is for individuality and exclusivity. So, while Best Westerns and Comfort Inns are starting to sprout up in Indian cities, one Indian hotelier, Priya Paul, chairperson of Park Hotels Ltd., has created a small but exclusive chain of designer boutique hotels. Taking inspiration from American celebrity boutique hotelier Ian Schrager, Paul has created a splash in Chennai with her Hollywood-inspired, California-designed Park Hotel.

On the street of Anna Salai, Chennai' s main business district, there is no hotel signage, only the word "Park" outside a driveway which my driver mistook for a parking lot, not the name of a chic boutique hotel that has skillfully disguised itself in the former Gemini Film Studios building. As one enters the domino-like double doors punctuated with a series of port-hole windows, the stark'

Quality Inn River MGM Beach Resort in Muttukadu, Tamil Nadu.

minimalist lobby might give the impression of entering. a contemporary office building with its elongated lozenge-shaped desk.

The casually dressed staff in fashionable charcoal gray appear more like employees in a California fitness center-no doormen in mock military or naval uniforms that one might be tempted to salute. Above the layered lobby area are two scrims with mute movies unspooling, lest one forget that this is perhaps one of the most unique hotels in India-a themed, designer hotel centered around its past as a major film studio in the South Indian film industry.

While minimalist contemporary boutique hotels may be a rarity in India where the trend is usually toward the display of opulence and where more is definitely considered more, the understated designer _hotel has been popular in the United States for over a decade for sophisticated ,clien-

tele. It is not surprising then to learn that Priya Paul chose Los Angeles interior design firm Hirsch Bedner and Associates to transform the former Gemini Studios into its present reincarnation.

Each room is decorated differently with oversize movie posters, framed stills in the bathrooms and corridors, vicariously fulfilling a fantasy of being in the movie business. There is even a private mini-theater screening room holding about 30 seats for movie mogul wannabes who would like to show their own movies to their guests. And that's what the Park is all about. Like Miami Beach's legendary Fountainbleu, where guests could feel that they were living in a movie set, descending the grand stairs for their close-up, the Park makes you feel not only that you could be a star, but a movie mogul as well. The rooftop pool with its very 1960s black and white cabanas is very Miami Beach.

Back in the 1980s, Miami Beach was known for its decaying Art Deco hotels.

At the time, New Yorker Ian Schrager, of -Studio 54 (center of the Manhattan disco culture) notoriety, made a name for himself by transforming the old Deco hotels into fashionable boutique properties and making his stylish hotels as places to see and be seen. With rooms with a point of view, rather than a mere view, it was Schrager who said, "You are where you sleep." However, as one Chennai-based writer put it, sleeping is probably the last thing that you'd think of doing when you enter the Park's charged hyper-cool atmosphere.

So, whether today's traveler prefers an American-style budget motel, a designer boutique hotel or a serviced apartment, India now has it all. A reincarnated Mark Twain today would have been bewildered for choice.

Who said that East is East and West is West?

In Indian hotels the twain do meet.

D About the Author: Daniel Haber is a freelance writer based in Kathmandu.

U.S.-India space collaboration revs UP

F

rmer chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) K. Kasturirangan recalls a reception hosted in the mid-1990s at the Indian Ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C. There Daniel S. Goldin, longest-tenured administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), told him that India and the United States would be natural partners in space exploration in the 21st century.

The conference on space science, applications and commerce at Bangalore, jointly organized by the Astronomical Society of India and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was the first major effort in many years to revive the partnership envisioned by Goldin. It was also the single largest activity "-I sponsored by the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology ~ Forum. More than 500 scientists, businesspersons and ~ officials from both countries gathered from June 21 to 25 to further the U.S.-India space cooperation was that formally kicked off at the 1963 sounding rocket experiment at Thumba, Kerala.

Both India and the United States have much to offer each other in space research. B?th have a well-devel-

oped space program; both want commercial space activities and apply space technology to agriculture, disaster management, weather monitoring, ocean studies, education, communication and broadcasting. Some significant U.S.-India collaborations are underway, notably in monitoring the environment. Under a 1997 memorandum of understanding (MoU), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA collaborate with India's Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Department of .

Space (DoS), exchanging Indian and U.S. geostationary satellite data for earth and atmospheric science activities. It is one of several MoUs between Indian and U.S. space-related agencies.

(From left) Ambassador David C. Mulford, Undersecretary of Commerce Kenneth I. Juster and Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation G Madhavan Nair look at a model of a Geostationary Launch Vehicle at the Bangalore space conference in June.

The data strengthen the scientific information base, enhance weather forecasts and sustain major science programs addressing global monitoring, sustainable development, climate change and natural disaster reduction. The MoU was extended in December 2002 for five more years, and now includes ocean issues. NOAA and ISRO are partners in the International Chmter on Space and Major Disasters, a coordinated effort to make civil space agency data more readily available to emergency authorities during major disasters. NOAA also offers technical expertise to a $16-million Disaster Management Support (DMS) project in India, a collaborative effort of US AID and the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Senior officials from both sides are optimistic that as impediments to bilateral high-tech exchange are lifted, space cooperation will improve and the early potential realized. The Next Steps in the Strategic Partnership (NSSP) initiative will provide impetus to new programs, such as that cited by NOAA's Deputy Administrator John J. Kelly, who said, "The United States and India must continue leading the Im'ger international effort to establish a comprehensive Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS)."

"Let us give each other space, both figuratively and literally," said Ambassador David C. Mulford. He observed that there are tremendous opportunities for enhanced cooperation in civil space and high technology commerce-from telemedicine and teleeducation to enhancing agricultural productivity and satellite communications systems. "Progress will entail understandings involving the handling of sensitive technologies," he said. "With goodwill and trust, we can move forward."

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who started his career with ISRO, said at the conference, "I visualize in the year 2050, an Indo-U.S. team establishing a habitat in Mars; establishing. mining industrial units in space and working on a joint program to destroy or deviate the asteroids when the earth is endangered." He also sees opportunities in energy generation, strides in using nanotechnology in space science, and more effective earthquake prediction. "We will have a voyage, a purposeful voyage, and a challenging journey," Kalam said.

While Kelly urged India to expand its participation in the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS), of which Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) is a member, senior Indian scientists stressed the need for joint efforts in satellite and payload development, data analysis and launches that will be economic and profitable. They also want collaboration with U.S. federal agencies on satellite data exchange. IRS-P6 or RESOURCESAT-I, launched in October last year, is ISRO's most advanced remote sensing satellite that has vastly enhanced the quality of remote sensing data. "The future avenues of cooperation m'e manifold," says ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair.

Both countries are discussing the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) as a buildillg block for a future global air navigation network. India is already using GPS extensively for surveying, precision agriculture and environment monitoring and will use it in its planned satellite-based augmentation system called GAGAN (GPS and Geo Augmented Navigation). David Turner from the U.S. Department of Commerce said deve}opments could be faster real-

Tbelunar Connection n January 14, President George W. Bush announced a proposal for NASA to go back to the moon and send a manned mission to Mars. The President's Moon-Mars Commission recommends significant international participation. Two possible mechanisms were identified: coordination of independently planned and executed missions; and joint paIticipation of transnational aerospace industry in system development and fabrication.

According to Paul P. Spudis from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, India should consider paIticipating in both mechanisms. The first major U.S. mission planned is a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbitor (LRO), expected to be launched in 2008. Chandrayaan-I and LRO will be orbiting the moon, possibly at about the same time. This opens up possibilities of collaboration between U.S. and India, PRL's N. Bhandari, program coordinator of National Planetary Sciences and Exploration Programme, said at the Bangalore conference.

Spudis says Chandrayaan-I will collect strategic information on lunar topography and environment, which will be vital to successful return of people to moon.

Although the objectives of Chandrayaan-I and LRO are different, they may have similar payloads. Both focus on mineral and chemical mapping, search for water/ice, study of polar regions and the Mars South Pole's Aitken basin in more detail, says Bhandari. In particular, both the missions may study the Shackleton crater, supposed to have ice on its walls, and the Malapert mountain, which has sunlight almost year round. This will help in drawing a better gravity map of the moon so as to sustain spacecraft for long periods in low altitude orbits, says Bhandari.

In fact, U.S. resem'ch teams are keen to join the ChandrayaanI mission and have submitted proposals to ISRO. Two of these are CHAMPA-a camera for hydrologic assay for moon's polar atmosphere to be jointly developed by Boston University and Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, and a satellite-borne optical remote sensing platform. The latter is a joint effort by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. the Naval Research Laboratory, Boston University and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

-D.S.

Top: This IRS image shows the lake formed in July by landslips blocking the Pareechu River in China:S Tibet province. India ability to monitor the environment has been boosted by years of joint work with NASA. Above: This U.S. satellite image from NOAA shows a tropical cyclonic storm over the Bay of Bengal on December 12 last year.

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ized if India reduced its 10 to 40 percent import duty on GPS goods.

According to U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce Kenneth I. Juster, the U.S.-India MoU involves NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, NOAA's geostationary operational environmental satellites, and India's INSAT and Kalpana satellites. The U.S.-India High Technology Cooperation Group (HTCG) was set up in November 2002 and a "Statement of Principles for U.S.-India High Technology Commerce" was negotiated last year. Juster says the Indo-U.S. Trade Agreement aims at reviewing U.S. export licensing processes and policies to grant India expanded access to U.S. dual-use goods and technologies, lowering tariffs and other barriers to high-technology trade with India, and working in partnership with the private sector in each country. Business experts are in the best position to identify obstacles to high technology commerce and propose specific policy changes.

Industry delegates from both sides felt that U.S. dual-use export controls imposed after the Pokhran-II nuclear tests were a major hindrance to commercial cooperation. Juster said misperceptions continued about U.S. trade sanctions and cited statistics to support

his point. "Since the lifting of sanctions in September 2001, only a small percentage of our total trade with India is subject to controls.

The vast majority of dual-use items simply do not require a license for shipment to India," he said. In fiscal year 2003, 90 percent of all dual-use licensing applications for India was approved while the value of such approvals more than doubled from $27 million to $57 million. These trends have continued in the first part of 2004 fiscal year, he said, adding that after the High Technology Cooperation Group was set up, U.S. licensing has increased in the export of sophisticated high technology to India. In the past year and a half, the number of licensing decisions for ISRO and its subsidiaries has increased by 75 percent. The license approval rate now stands at about 93 percent.

Indian space industry representatives stressed the need for "predictability, reliability of supply and kindliness" in the U.S. licensing process and hoped space science is included in future high-tech cooperation. "There is still the potential for greater level of bilateral high technology trade," Juster emphasized.

According to Madhavan Nair, sourcing of U.S. components for the space program has become easier after 2002. Meanwhile, Boeing Corporation has been licensed to exchange specific information with ISRO about possible joint fabrication of a communications satellite. DoS's Antrix Corporation has a commercial agreement with Space Imaging of USA for marketing and sale of IRS data. ISRO and Raytheon are in the final stages of negotiating a contract to install GPS equipment in Indian aircraft.

Early this year NASA announced a major thrust in moon and Mars exploration over the next decade, with proposed robotic missions to the moon starting 2008 with the goal of continuous presence of humans on the moon by 2020. Many scientists saw exploratory missions to the moon as a potential area of collaboration (see sidebar "The Lunar Connection").

During the first five years of the 1997 MoU, NASA and IMD initiated seven projects. One of them was to improve continuous monitoring of rainfall in the Indian subcontinent. NASA upgraded IMD's cyclone detection radar in Karaikal, Pondicherry, and provided data tapes. Another project involved long-range forecasting of regional climate over India. Dedicated communication links were established between IMD and U.S. agencies for exchange of data. Other projects on climate and atmospheric sciences, disaster management, ocean research and geodynamics are underway, and more are ahead. Among them are an ISRONOAA collaboration on the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), to be launched in 2009. Data from this will help predict cyclones and support disaster management efforts.

Atmospherics at the conference were positive-both literally and figuratively-as the scientific, government and commercial space community took stock of the possibilities. It does, indeed, look as though India and the United States will be giving each other much more space for creative projects that continue to benefit the people of both countries. And a decades-old dream of partnership will come true.

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In the late 1960s, geologists Noel G De Souza and M.S. Sadashivaiah from Karnatak University, Dharwad, received Gemini-ll images of peninsular India, such as this one, for study.

A look Into Historv

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pace scientists excitedly gazed as the setting sun lit the orange trail left by the sodium vapor payload of the U.S. Nike-Apache rocket that sliced its way through the silent sky on the evening of November 21, 1963, at Thumba, near Thiruvananthapuram (then Trivandrum). A gift from the United States to India, the purpose of this sounding rocket was to further mid-level atmospheric research. Its sodium trail was stereoscopically recorded using K24 cameras supplied by NASA. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the then chairman of Indian Atomic Energy

NERS Commission, said, "NASA has launched India into space."

The collaboration in space science had, in fact, started much earlier, recalls Eknath V. Chitnis, a key architect of India's space program since its inception. Chitnis was serving at the Division of Sponsored Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he received a call in the early 1950s from Vikram Sarabhai, the father of Indian space program, to join him at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad. Sarabhai was a visiting professor at MIT and came in contact with important ~ gj ~ ~ ~

Left: A Nike-Apache sounding rocket is lifted into the firing position about 15 minutes before launching at Thumba in 1968.

Far left: E. V. Chitnis at Kodaikanal in the early 1950s.

The equipment on the ground was part of a joint cosmic ray experiment carried out with MIT's George W. Clark for high-energy physics studies.

people like experimental physicist Bruno Rossi and Jerome B. Wisesner, science adviser to President John F. Kennedy and member of President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee. "So obviously," as former ISRO chairman K. Kasturirangan says, "there was an opportunity to discuss the emerging areas of space in the context of India's interest." The PRL, founded by Sarabhai in August 1947, was the cradle of India's space program.

The Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) was constituted in February 1962 under the chairmanship of Sarabhai. India approached NASA and space agencies from other countries on its proposal for a sounding rocket station at Thumba. "The first agency to help India in a major way was NASA," recalls Chitnis, a former director of Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad.

An agreement between NASA and India's Department of Atomic Energy (all space-related research was under the purview of this department then) in January 1963, initiated India into the mysteries of rocketry. NASA concluded another agreement with INCOSPAR for a joint space research program at Thumba. A NASA team visited Thumba to check its suitability.

The work Ion joint cosmic ray exPeriments) allowed high qualitv research ollundamental imponance and also provided an unique opportunity to gain " a very intimate understanding ~ 01satellite techologV as a whole. " t -0.8.8ao If

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H.G.S. Murthy, the then director of Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS), and senior members of his team received training at the NASA rocket launching facility at Wallops Island, Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and other U.S. installations. NASA provided most of the electrical equipment at Thumba including a telemetry radar and computer vans and two rocket launchers, one for Nike-Apache (47 such rockets were launched from Thumba between November 1963 and March 1973) and the other for Judy-Dart (37 Judy-Dart sounding rockets were launched between July 1964 and August 1969).

"We also had some collaborative experiments with the University of New Hampshire on developing magnetometers to

NASA astronaut Sandra H. Magnus visited schools around Bangalore during the space conference. Conditions are better in space, she said: "We learned a lot from those early years, and have a fairly comfortable existence in orbit, " despite full work schedules.

The conference also featured an exhibit on Indian American astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who died along with her six crewmates when the space shuttle Columbia crashed during re-entry in 2003.

look at the earth's magnetic fields," recalls Kasturirangan. The generous assistance from NASA provided many such rockets to enable Indian scientists to carry out meaningful experiments during 1963-75, which greatly helped in accelerating the growth of TERLS, he says.

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who was among 10 engineers who spent six months in NASA training for the sounding rocket program, recalled the Thumba days for conference delegates: "Let me describe the event at the payload integration laboratory. It was a round-the-clock operation for many weeks. Three space teams, two dealing with scientific payloads and the other dealing with rocket, payload and system integration were on the site ... .The flight data was monitored with multiple cameras, telemetry and radar stations. It was a beautiful, successful experiment with the cooperation of three nations-India, U.S.A. and France."

In the late 1960s geologists received Gemini-ll photographs of peninsular India for study, and Indian researchers obtained lunar samples from NASA during 1969-74. At the same time, Indian scientists carried out space experiments in the United States, using balloons, rockets and even spacecraft, according to u.R. Rao, chairman, PRL-Council, Department of Space (DoS), who participated in cosmic ray experiments in Pioneer and Explorer missions.

India tested its earth station and associated paraphernalia for the 1970s Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) when the ATS-6 satellite was over the United States, which had agreed to position the satellite over India for a year. "SITE was a learning experience for INSAT," says Chitnis. During SITE's planning stage in 1970, ISRO set up joint engineer teams with General Electric and Hughes to system-study INSAT. An INS AT satellite study was conducted with MIT. SITE allowed about 2,400 Indian villages to receive television broadcasts. Rao calls it "a milestone in Indo-U.S. cooperation."

ISRO has had fruitful collaborations with other countries too, but the biggest advantage with NASA, according to Chitnis, "was their openness, frankness and English language. Problem solving became a common concern." When the first preliminary study on INSAT was being done, Boeing satellite pioneer Harold Rosen provided ISRO about 30 engineers to work for

Designing the Moon Citv oup

of 17 students from Budha Dal Public School and Thapar Institute of ~ ngineering and Technology (TIET) in Patiala won the Space Settlement Design Competition held in July at the Kennedy Space Center in Orlando, Florida. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which organjzed the contest, received 33 entries from all over the world, but preliminary rounds narrowed it down to eight teams that competed in the finals.

The Indian team acted as a company under a NASA engineer as CEO. Its task was to propose the design, development, construction and operations planning of the fIrst human settlement on the moon, focusing on space utilization for residential, industrial, commercial and agricultural uses.

They balanced human factors with operations and infrastructure, incorporating cut-

ting-edge technologies such as robotics.

"The concept behind building the moon city is to control global warming which is threatemng our atmosphere. By 2025 it will become difficult to contain the problem unless a solar shield is built around the earth. We can't send people from earth every time so we need to put them on moon or Mars to build the shield," explains team leader Abhishek Agarwal, a first-year student at TIET. The team was guided by TIET assistant professor Maneek Kumar.

Even though space experts have been discussing the concept since 1970, NASA is yet to begin the project. To popularize the idea, NASA has been conducting competitions, holding seminars and presentations so that more students come up with innovative designs.

Sahil Arora, another team member

two days and a preliminary INS AT design was formulated. On the invitation of Chitnis, American communications pioneer Wilbur Schramm spent two months in India to see the development in communications research. Indian scientists were thril1ed that Schramm, considered a founder of communications studies, was there.

Under an MoU signed in 1977, India was among the first countries to establish a ground station at Hyderabad to receive data from NASA's Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), later renamed LANDSAT. The key application components that India has developed in communications, broadcasting and satel1ite resource survey, had their genesis in the U.S. systems, says Kasturirangan. "In a way, this was real1y a crucial input," he adds.

"Between NASA and ISRO, there was no feeling of 'we' and 'they.' We were only a single team working for a cause. That was the beauty of the relationship," says Chitnis. So when the time arrived to build the third-generation INSAT, Indians were technological1y handicapped and Ford Aerospace & Commumcations Corporation-now Loral Space & Communications Ltd.-was given the contract for building the satellites. The first four unique multipurpose INSAT-1 series satellites were fabricated by Ford Aerospace as per Indian design specifications.

.. Even as we moved to our own space program in a big wav. the U.S.was an imponant source for us to get the high technologv components."

-K. Kasturirangan

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Abhishek Agarwal and Maneek Kumar with AlAA members Dick Edwards and Anita Gale.

who worked on the structural design of the project, feels that it is easy to colomze the moon since radiation and gravity problems can be handled easily.

Agarwal says that the concept is neither fiction nor fantasy. "We can control life at wil1 under this project. Year round, for example, we can grow mangoes on the moon," Agarwal maintains.

-A.V.N.

Three of them were launched from Cape Kennedy.

An ISRO team was stationed at Ford Aerospace's premises in Palo Alto, California. The idea was to understand better the technology, both at the level of components as well as overall satellite development, remimsces S. Rangarajan, former INS AT director at ISRO. "Today, if we are having a robust program where we can deliver satellites to the needs of the country, the procedures, I think, were understood by the interactions we had had at Ford Aerospace," says Rangarajan, now senior vice president in Worldspace Corporation, Washington, D.C. Indo-U.S. space cooperation, particularly in the exchange of meteorological and remote sensing data and their application to disaster forecasting and the management of natural resources, grew tremendously over the years. Likewise, data from Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satel1ites, beginning with the first ground station established at Norman, Oklahoma, in the early 1990s, are now being received at seven ground stations across the United States, including the one in Alaska.

One of the most significant col1aborations was the Indian cosmic ray experiment Anuradha flown on board Spacehab-3 shuttle in 1985. The col1aboration was relatively low in the 1990s.

An MoU between Indian and U.S. agencies signed in December 1997 gave a fresh impetus but the trade sanctions on dual-use components and technology imposed the next year put a damper on relations. The recent Bangalore conference demonstrated a marked revival in space cooperation and as Kasturirangan opines, sanctions did not discourage India because "we always recognized United States as a pioneer in this program and certainly working with the United States was one of the important aspects of the Indian space program."

0

1938, American tobacco heiress Doris Duke embarked on one of her periodic shopping trips to Europe and Asia. Then 25, "the richr est girl in the world"-as newspapers had , L-dubbed her when she was a child-was ~ eagerly acquiring antiques and fragments of old buildings to outfit her lavish new home in Hawaii, which she called Shangri La. "It seems almost incredible," wrote New York Daily News society editor Nancy Randolph, "that there can be a square inch of space left..Jor another bit of bric-a-brac, after the months and months Doris has spent scouring Europe and the Far East for furnishings and knickknacks."

Today those "knickknacks" form the nucleus of one of the most spectacular collections of Islamic art in America. Duke, who died in 1993 at age 80, spent nearly 60 years filling her secluded Hawaiian home with more than 3,500 art objects, almost all from the Muslim world: ceramics, textiles, carved wood and stone architectural details, metalwork and paintings. The oldest pieces date from the 7th century, but the majority come from the 17th to 19th centuries.

Having no direct heirs, Duke left the bulk of her billion-dollar estate to charity. Among other bequests, her will established the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art to "promote the study and understanding of Middle Eastern art and culture." The foundation transformed her Hawaiian hideaway into a museum, which opened in November 2002. Tours have been sold out ever since, hardly surprising in light of Americans' newfound hunger to understand the Islamic world. An additional lure is the chance to step inside the dream house of one of the wealthiest, most eccentric and most reclusive public figures of the 20th century.

"For most Islamic art historians, Shangri La was a kind of rumor, a shadowy place everyone had heard about but few people had actually seen," says Thomas Lentz, director of the Harvard University Art Museums, who visited the new museum last year.

"Walking into that building for the first time was an amazing experience. It's a kind of marvelous jumble of mediums, periods and quality you wouldn't find anywhere else. To see an imitation of a 17th-century Safavid palace facing a huge swimming pool on a spectacular site on the coast of Hawaii-after a while, the mind starts to whirl." Shangri La's two hectares are tucked into an upscale Honolulu neighborhood near the promontory Diamond Head on Oahu. Access is limited to a dozen visitors at a time, who arrive by van four to six times a day from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, about 10 kilometers away, where a new Duke Foundation-funded gallery of Islamic art serves as an introduction to the museum.

Duke, born November 22, 1912, was the only child of Nanaline Lee Holt Inman Duke, a chilly, distant figure, and James Buchanan Duke, the hot-tempered, high-living founder of the American Tobacco Company (original maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes) and the Duke Power Company, as well as the benefactor and namesake of Duke University. The press welcomed Doris as "the Million Dollar Baby" and claimed that she ate from a 14carat-gold dish. Her father lavished the little girl with gifts (a ,

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"You wouldn'tfind this home in the Islamic world," says Sharon Littlefield, Shangri La's curator. "It's one collector's personal vision." Duke called it "Spanish-Moorish-Persian-Indian.

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pony, a harp, furs) and named his private railway car Doris.

At his death in 1925, "Buck" Duke left l2-year-old Doris a $50 million fortune. (His widow had to make do with a $100,000 annual allowance.) Doris asserted her independence early on. At 14, she took her mother to court to stop the sale of Duke Farms, the family's baronial estate in New Jersey-and won. When she received the first chunk of her inheritance on her 21st birthday (along with an accordion, which she'd requested from her mother), photographers laid siege to the family's 54-room Fifth Avenue mansion. Newsweek was already calling her a "legendary figure."

As a young woman, Duke was unpretentious, headstrong, adventurous and reserved, even reclusive. The ferocious press attention she endured from childhood fed a lifelong mania for privacy. She refused virtually all interviews and booked hotel rooms under assumed names. Slender and leggy with exotically large eyes and a prominent chin, she was self-conscious about her height (6 foot I)-in photographs with shorter companions, she often slouched or leaned. She inevitably made good copy.

She converted a B-25 bomber into her own private luxury airliner and for years kept a pair of Mongolian camels at one of her estates. When local officials forbade camel ranching, she gave the animals the run of the mansion's ground floor, carpets be damned.

"She had a very soft voice," says Emma Yeary, 73, a longtime friend who was often a guest at Duke's homes. (Besides Shangri La and Duke Farms, there were estates in Rhode Island, New York and California.) "We called her 'Lahi Lahi,' which means fragile in Hawaiian, because of her voice." But she wasn't路 mousy, Yeary says. "In her quiet way, Doris was very strong. She knew what she wanted, and she had the wherewithal to get it."

In 1935, at 22, Duke married James H.R. Cromwell, a 38-yearold sportsman and gambler who was going through his own inheritance at a furious clip. The couple set sail on a lO-month,

much-publicized round-the-world honeymoon, with stops in this was all her-it was a declaration of her own aesthetic. She Europe, Egypt, India, Indonesia and China and meetings with had no need to do things because other people were doing them." both Stalin and Gandhi.

The house was basically completed in 1938, the first private For Duke, the honeymoon was a life-changing experiencehome in Hawaii to cost more than a million dollars ($1.4 million no thanks to Cromwell, to whom she quickly cooled (starting to be precise). Duke, a lifelong movie buff, took its name from when his check for the first leg of the honeymoon bounced). She the 1937 film of the book Lost Horizon, about a remote and sedeveloped a passion for Islamic art, especially the graceful royal cret paradise called Shangri-La, where no one ever grew old. architecture of Mughal India. She was especially moved by the After separating from Cromwell in 1940, Duke wintered nearly Taj Mahal, completed in 1647 in Agra by the emperor Shah every year at her tropical estate. (Her only child, a premature Jahan. Inspired by motifs she saw there, Duke immediately or- daughter, died 24 hours after birth in 1940. A second marriage, to dered a sumptuous marble bedroom-bathroom suite, inlaid with Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa in 1947, lasted just a year.) jade, malachite and lapis lazuli. The couple intended it for a wing Shangri La's New York- and Palm Beach-based architect, they planned to add to El Mirasol, the Palm Beach estate of the Marion Sims Wyeth, had first proposed a huge and imposing groom's mother, Eva Stotesbury. (Critics referred to the proposed mansion, but his young client overruled him. The completed addition as the Garaj Mahal.)

1,300-square-meter house is hardly small, but it is low and ramDuke also fell hard for the last stop on the honeymooners' itinbling rather than grand. It reveals its secrets step by step. Facing erary: Hawaii. Delighted by the island chain's climate, informal- ~ ity and remoteness, the couple extended their stay to four@ .~ months. By the time they left, the young bride had dropped the :0 ; idea of moving in with her mother-in-law and had resolved to 0 create an Islamic-flavored home of her own on Oahu. In a rare ~ public comment, she explained her thinking in a 1947 article for ~ Town & Country: "The idea of building a Near Eastern house in ~ Honolulu must seem fantastic to many," she wrote. "But pre- ~ cisely at the time I fell in love with Hawaii and decided I could never live anywhere else, a Mughal-inspired bedroom and bath- ~ 1i room, planned for another house, was being completed for me ini India, so there was nothing to do but have it shipped to Hawaii '" ::!' and build a house around it."

-5 Socialites were expected to furnish their mansions with art, of ~ course, though not usually with Islamic art. "Doris Duke was C2 perfectly comfortable living with old masters and American decorative arts and furnishings, which she grew up with and had in her other homes," says Shangri La's executive director, Deborah Pope. "But when she built her own house here in Hawaii-and D

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The press dubbed Doris (at age 6 with her tobacco tycoon father, James Buchanan Duke, c. 1919) "the Million Dollar Baby."

a banyan-shaded front courtyard at the end of a twisting, gated driveway, the house's exterior is unremarkable: a plain one-story plaster. wall bisected by a dark wooden door. Behind the door, elegantly appointed living spaces and walkways radiate asymmetrically from an inner courtyard, much as they do in homes of the wealthy in the Middle East But "you wouldn't find this home in the Islamic world," says Sharon Littlefield, Shangri La's curator, "partly because it is such a mishmash of different cultures and regions. It's definitely one collector's personal vision." In Town & Country, Duke called the decor "Spanish-Moorish-Persian-Indian:' She chose the placement of every tile, dish and lamp.

The interior is especially rich in ceramics. Duke was fond of mina'i ware (from the Persian word for "enamel"), delicate glazed pottery from 12th- and 13th-century Iran that is commonly painted in gold, turquoise and cobalt blue before being fired a second time. Some moon-faced horsemen adorning the ceramics have a decidedly Chinese cast, a legacy of Buddhist art that early travelers imported into Iran. "We may think of the Islamic world as isolated from other cultures," says Littlefield, "but there was a huge amount of trade going back and forth with China and later Europe:'

The prize of the collection is a large, exquisitely crafted mihrab, or prayer niche. The fixture, which came from a wellknown tomb in Veramin, Iran, and dates to 1265, once oriented the devout toward Mecca. Its surface is composed of luster tiles, a luxurious, hard-to-work medium that, according to Persian chronicler Abu'l Qasim in 1301, "reflects like red gold and shines like the light of the sun:' Duke's mihrab is significant not only for its monumental size and superb craftsmanship but also because it's signed and dated by a member of the Abu Tahir family, an illustrious line of Kashan potters who passed down their glazing secrets from father to son and dominated the industry for four generations.

"This is one of the most important works of Iranian art and possibly of Islamic art in North America," says Marianna Shreve Simpson, a former curator of Islamic Near Eastern art at the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and a consultant to Shangri La from 1997 to 2003. "Few such virtually intact interior features survive today-certainly nothing of this grandeur:' Duke bought the mihrab from a dealer in 1940 and installed it off of Shangri La's living room, pointing not to Mecca but to Mexico.

Though Duke was not religious, she meditated daily and told

Above: Used as a pool house/guesthouse, Shangri La's "Playhouse" was patterned after a 17th-century royal pavilion in Esfahdn, Iran. Its interior features artworks created during the 19th-century reign of Iran's Qajar dynasty.

Far left: One of the most important works of Iranian art in North America, the living room's 13th-century mihrab, or prayer niche, is faced with luster tiles.

Left: The "Turkish Room" was created from pieces of the interior of a 19th-century Damascus mansion.

friends she believed in reincarnation. "She was interested in everything," says Violet Mimaki, 69, her Shangri La secretary and estate manager for 22 years. "I can't say that she was a Catholic or a Buddhist, but she had a Bible in her bedroom. And copies of the Koran-lots of them."

The oldest Koranic text in the collection is a sheet of parchment from around A.D. 900. The bold, angular lettering in ink and watercolor is an early writing style called Kufic script.

Considered the literal word of God, the Koran has always been viewed as Islamic art's most exalted subject, and Shangri La is everywhere embellished with Koranic calligraphy and geometric . abstractions. A wall of the inner courtyard, for example, is embedded with a rare collection of monochromatic tiles believed to ,

have once graced the Takht-i Sulayman, a 13th-century Mongol palace in Iran. As in much of the Muslim world, the home's decorations-from tiles and wall hangings to carved doors and ornamental ceilings-enliven spaces the way prints or paintings animate a Western home. In fact, there's a notable absence of pictures or other personal effects on display at Shangri La. "This is how it was in Doris Duke's lifetime," says Littlefield. "I think there were a few photos in her bedroom, mostly of her dogs."

Though Duke mixed centuries and continents at will, her focus on light, color, texture and geometric repetition helps to unify the result. "She was interested in surfaces," says Kazi Ashraf, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Hawaii, who acted as a consultant to the new museum. "That's why she was drawn to marble, which changes with the light." It was the look and feel of the Taj Mahal's stonework, he points out, not its overall form, that first inspired her to build an Islamic-style home.

Duke used traditional elements in untraditional ways. "In my Indian bedroom," she wrote in 1947, "the carved, cut-out marble jalis, or screens, which were formerly used by Indian princes to keep their wives from other eyes, have a new purpose: they are not only decorations, but a means of security, for they can be locked without shutting off the air. ... "

In a more modern vein, an entire wall of Shangri La's living room is a sheet of glass that can be made to disappear into the basement. "It's one of the marvels of the 1930s," says Jin DeSilva, caretaker of the house during the last 14 years of Duke's life. When the wall vanishes, the room opens directly onto Diamond Head. "When Miss Duke was alive," says DeSilva, "she rarely lowered the glass wall completely. At one time she had 12 German shepherds, and if this was down they'd come running inside wagging their tails. We had two or three accidents that way." An enormous ceramic vase was one such casualty, as its cracks attest. "Miss Duke would sit down and glue everything together herself," DeSilva says.

Several of the artifacts in the room once belonged to publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Facing bankruptcy in the late 1930s, Hearst was forced to sell many of his antiquities at bargain prices. Duke took advantage of the tycoon's distress by picking up, among other objects, a,medieval stone fireplace from Islamic Spain, which is now installed in the living room.

Duke loved bargains. Gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell once wrote of Duke and her first husband that "he could, and did, spend a fortune; she thinks twice before agreeing to buy a ticket to a charity ball." Following a rare photographic session for Life magazine in 1939, Duke asked photographer Martin Munkacsi where she might buy a camera wholesale. A receipt for three antique bureaus she purchased in Damascus, Syria, in 1939 bears the dealer's notation: "Only: Fourty-Three Dollars & 601100."

The merchant obviously understood his customer.

Duke was no purist.To dress up a courtyard wall, she customordered reproduction tile mosaics from a workshop in Esfahan, Iran. And she had a studio in Morocco fabricate the ornately

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9

carved and painted wooden ceilings of her foyer and living room.

Her taste was defiantly personal. To guard her front door, she selected a pair of stone camels from a Honolulu department store.

But if Shangri La's decor was eclectic, it was hardly thrown together. In 1938, Duke visited Iran with art adviser Mary Crane, a New York University graduate student. There they obsessively sketched and photographed a 17th-century royal pavilion in Esfahan known as the Chihil Sutun. Duke had a scaled-down version built at Shangri La, which she called the Playhouse and used as a combination guest and pool house.

Unlike most of the art in Shangri La, the works inside the Playhouse teem with human figures. While Sunni Muslims have long mistrusted representational art-even pictures of animals and buildings-as invitations to idolatry, Shiite Muslims tend to be more easygoing about representation, especially regarding their secular art. A large tiled fireplace surround in the Playhouse, depicting court life during Iran's Qajar dynasty early in the 19th century, is decorated with colorful acrobats and musicians.

Nearby, a Qajar oil painting shows a young, bejeweled woman strumming a long-necked stringed instrument. "One reason Iran produced so much figural art is that it had a rich tradition of secular literature," says Littlefield. (Persians devoured love poetry in Below: On their honeymoon in 1935, husband Cromwell wrote, Duke fell in love "with the Taj Mahal and all the beautiful marble tiles with their lovely floral designs. " She immediately commissioned a bathroom inspired by the inlaid motifs.

Right: In the early 1960s, Duke turned the dining room into a tentlike environment, with Egyptian and Indian textiles, -evocative of nomadic Islamic life.

particular.) Until recently, scholars dismissed Qajar art, with its European influences, as decadent; Duke found it "amusing" and thus perfect for the Playhouse.

"Doris was a prankster," says friend Emma Veary, whose Hawaiian mother Duke often enlisted as a traveling companion.

"Mother was very dark-skinned, and once, for a party, Doris dressed her in saris, put her on pillows, and stuck diamonds on her nose, then introduced her to everyone as the maharani of somewhere. People bowed and kowtowed to her all night. Doris had told her, 'Don't say anything,' so Mother just glared at the people."

In her first years in Hawaii, Duke sometimes entertained socially but, says museum director Deborah Pope, "usually with just a small circle of friends, mostly native Hawaiians. A lot of them were swimmers, surfers, dancers and musicians-people

with day jobs. They weren't socialites. That's what she came to Hawaii to get away from." Shangri La was not air-conditioned, and Duke padded around it in bare feet or flip-flops. She learned to play Hawaiian music, hula and surf (the collection includes some old surfboards), and she once won an outrigger canoe race off Waikiki Beach with her friend Sam Kahanamoku, brother of legendary surfer and Olympic gold medal swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku.

In an interview with Andy Warhol in 1979, writer Truman Capote recalled being surrounded by a pack of Duke's snarling dogs while taking a stroll around Shangri La one evening. "No one had warned me," Capote said, "that each night after Miss Duke and her guests had retired this crowd of homicidal canines was let loose to deter, and possibly punish, unwelcome intruders." After standing rigid for wha! seemed to him like hours,

Capote was finally rescued when a gardener whistled to the dogs and they trotted off, tails a-wagging.

Now that the dogs are gone, visitors to Shangri La can experience Duke's garden as a paradise of shade trees, running water and quietude-a recurring image in the Koran. A particular gem is the Mughal garden, a smaller version of the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore that reveals itself like a mirage behind a door near the entrance. Its centerpiece is a narrow pool of water punctuated by lotus-shaped fountains.

The formality of the Mughal garden reflects Duke's later taste.

Her last major acquisition was an elaborate interior from a deteriorating 19th-century mansion in Damascus, which she bought from the estate of New York dealer and philanthropist Hagop Kevorkian in the early 1980s. The home was one of at least four villas owned DAVID FRANZEN by the Quwwatlis, a wealthy merchant family in the old city. "When the crates [containing the dismantled room] arrived, the boards were all black and dirty," says ex-secretary Violet Mimaki. Duke, then in her seventies, oversaw a. months-long clean-up campaign. "She had us spread everything out in the courtyard, and she tested out different cleaning solvents with Q-Tips," Mimaki recalls.

Duke supplemented the room's original interior with glassware and metalwork she already owned and cabinetry she commissioned from woodworkers in Rhode Island. She called it the Turkish Room. Below a few small, high windows, everything seems to be carved, cushioned, mirrored, inlaid or gilded. The overall effect is a bit overwhelming. "It's clearly not a space you live in," says Deborah Pope. "Although Duke used it for entertaining, it's more of a display space. At this point, she was thinking about how she wanted the house to be when she was no longer here."

Despite its Hollywood name and its owner's many eccentricities, Shangri La is the creation of a serious collector, not a dilettante's indulgence.

"There was a degree of escapism maybe in that Doris Duke was trying to distance herself from her upbringing," says Sharon Littlefield, "but this was no passing fancy. Her interest in Islamic art was very personal to her, and it sustained her to the end of her life."

0 About the Author: Smithsonian.

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"lt1Jo wants to be design coordinator this week?" The question comes from Nandor, a red-bearded trollish man moderating an evening meeting of New York City's allvolunteer Independent Media Center (IMC).

He is composing the table of contents for the next issue of the collective's biweekly newspaper, the Indypendent.

A pair of fans swish around warm air in the low-ceilinged Manhattan loft. The 30 members of the print committee sit in a circle beneath an upside-down American flag and pass around a packet of trail mix.

Someone named Jed, not present at the meeting, is finally nominated to be design coordinat01~ partly because no one else seems to want to do it: "lt1Jat about Jed? He's unemployed, isn't he?"

The meeting lasts one hour and five minutes-Nandor clocks it on his watch. Like all things at the center, tIle process has been precarious, democracy teetering on the edge of anarchy There are some rules-people raise their hand to speakbut the collective believes everyone should have his or her say Tony wants to report on union labor and summer fashions.

Someone else knows a columnist who has a piece to contribute-'1t's about the deportations, but it's really funny" Don, in his seventies and bya few decades the oldest member of the collective, has an idea for a historical piece about the SpanishAmerican War. '1t's about how we have been misled into past wars," he says.

Everything makes it in. There is no editor to say otherwise. At least not yet. ,

Democratic Press: Emerging Alternatives he alternative press has enjoyed a healthy, if somewhat harried, life in America ever since Tom Paine first circulated his influential "inflammatory" pamphlets which helped galvanize colonists to fight for their independence from England. His most significant work, Common Sense, was published in 1776 and is still so freshly relevant that it remains in print in English and numerous translations. Paine was, effectively, a precursor of today's global alternative media exponents, pamphleteering, as he did, in a transformational era, not only in America, but in Britain and France when he traveled there.

Over the years the alternative press evolved and sometimes melded with literature and philosophy in the hands of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and the like. Women espousing equality, such as First Lady Abigail Adams, and African slaves recording their experiences became part of this discourse in the 18th and 19th centuries. Mark Twain, whose writing career bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, used his keen satirical wit to similaily critique the establishment.

His horizons included other societies and cultures, particularly Asia and Africa, where he traveled extensively. His concern about the role of the United States in the world makes him a spiritual grandfather of modem, world-straddling commentators.

In the 1960s, a vibrant "underground" press arose with the issues of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights as focal points. College students and interested writers developed newspapers and magazines that represented the views, ideals and art of what became widely known (thanks to social historian Theodore Roszak) the counterculture. One example is the Liberation News Service (LNS), formed in 1967. Its purpose was to provide alternative reportage to that of mainstream news agencies such as the Associated Press and the United Press International. Counterparts on the right included-and still include-conservative bastions like the National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, who only stepped down from its

T

eetings like this one, experiments in democratic media, have been taking place all over the world in increasing numbers. New York City's Independent Media Center is just one piece of the rapidly expanding Indymedia movement, a five-year-old phenomenon that grew

out of the trade protests of the late 1990s, and now encompasses a constellation of about 120 local collectives from Boston to Bombay. Each collective has a diverse palette of media it uses, including radio, video, print, and the Internet. Each is driven by political passions its volunteers don't find in the mainstream press, and each struggles to make the process of covering news as inclusive and empow-

masthead in the 1990s and who still writes for it. The 1960s and '70s were the heydays of alternative political and cultural commentary that looked both within and beyond the boundaries, to the impact the United States had upon the world. The LNS survived into the 1970s, and most of the old underground newspapers eventually folded, too, with a few exceptions, like the Village Voice and Rolling Stone that standardized and became niche establishments. Yet the spirit of unmitigated free speech is an old one, and it now thrives in a fabulous, new incarnation.

Enter the Internet and the day of the blogs. Blogs, short for Internet Web logs, range from schoolkids' rant or hobby pages to sophisticated political, social and cultural analysis a la Andrew Sullivan. It is as grassroots as writing can get, and its unrestricted commentary tums AJ. Liebling's remark in a long-ago New Yorker article-"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one"-upside-down.

All the blogger needs is a bit of Internet savvy and the money to pay a nominal fee. The 1990s and early 2000s have seen a surge of blogs. So influential have some of them become, that for the first time bloggers had a notable presence at the July Democratic convention in Boston, and had a community site, www.conventionbloggers.com. Free comment is what the alternative press in America has always striven to do, from Tom Paine to Indymedia, the media collective described in the next article. Today the alternative press in America, which embraces radio and, to some extent, television, serves the right and the left wings of the political spectrum as well as the middle; it serves ethnic groups such as Asian Americans, Latinos, African Americans. It serves development and environmental groups, women, infotech nerds, writers, gays, doctors, religious sects, animal lovers and a thousand other special interest groups. The profoundly democratic Internet has given this kaleidoscopic communication exchange unprecedented, global dissemination, with the added dimension of interactivity. Blogs elicit and fulminate with debate. Bloggers are also going after mainstream journalism, challenging assertions and fact checking.

The news is now a two-way street.

-Lea Terhune

ering as possible for the community in which it exists.

Although the individual collectives have their political and cultural idiosyncrasies, they are united through their Web sites. To join the worldwide collective, a new Independent Media Center must have an online presence. This is the kernel of the experiment, the clearest expression of the movement's vision. The concerns and

interests of these activist-journalists are immediately apparent on any of the local Indymedia sites. Go to the Melbourne, Australia, site, for example, for an article about aboriginal elders protesting the dumping of nuclear waste on their land; or to the Washington, D.C., site to read about the USA Patriot Act's many alleged violations of the Bill of Rights; or to the United Kingdom site for a piece titled "New EU

Constitution Threatens Free Education."

The sites all have a similar format and feature a newswire that employs a technology called open publishing.

This allows a writer to post a story directly to the newswire from his or her own computer, without going through an editor.

Using a simple form on the site, you merely paste in your file, click "Publish," . and immediately see a link to your article appear at the top of the Web site's wire.

The open wire usually appears on the right side of the homepage of the local sites, while the center column is reserved for particularly relevant stories off the wire that a committee of volunteers has decided .to highlight. The network of collectives also maintains a global site (www.indymedia.org) that pulls content from all the local sites. More than any other element of Indymedia, the accessibility of open publishing has allowed activists from Brazil to Italy to Israel to Los Angeles to answer the revolutionary demand that inspired this grassroots movement: Don't hate the media. Be the media.

But Indymedia volunteers are also learning that being the media is not so simple. An open, representative form of media may be a worthy ideal, but in reality is often a messy thing. As the collective evolves, the volunteers are faced with difficult decisions many members never contemplated: about their Web site's usefulness, about editorial policy, about money. Whether they thrive or fade into irrelevance will ultimately depend on how well they keep their most extreme tendencies at bay. It won't be easy. Pure democ-

racy can be chaotic, spontaneity can tip into incoherence, absolute independence might just mean poverty. t their best, Indymedia Web sites serve as a sort of activist bulletin board and a space to report on and support a wide range of causes-from environmental extremism and anarchism to fairtrade advocacy and universal health care.

One IMC in Urbana, Illinois, for example, relentlessly reported about the detention of a local pro-Palestinian activist, Ahmed Bensouda, who was being held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service after 9/11 for a minor violation.' After a few weeks of constant attention, he was released. Because each posting can be followed by potentially endless comments, Indymedia sites have also facilitated difficult debates within the activist community. A graphic photograph posted on the Prague IMC site of riot police being hit with a Molotov cocktail during that city's September 2000 International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting inspired a contentious online discussion about whether violence was an acceptable form of resistance.

Indymedia's reporter-activists believe that no journalism is without bias. They criticize the mainstream media not simply because, in their eyes, the networks and newspapers work to maintain the status quo, but because they believe the mainstream claims neutrality to mask these biases. Indymedia journalists say they are not afraid to admit their own bias: journalism in the service of upending the status quo. They make the argument that this unabashed commitment does not conflict with fairness and accuracy. At many collectives, Indymedia reporters are advised not to participate in direct action at protests they are covering. But as a whole, this journalism is argumentative, angry, and often written without the basic journalistic concessions to attribution and balance. A recent issue of the Indypendent, for example, was headlined LIAR!, next to a photo of President Bush.

"The majority of IMC people I know

,

don't believe in ,objectivity," says Chris Anderson, 26, a \Volunteer at the New York City collective. "They think everyone should have an opinion and make it known. In this way, Indymedia goes back to the partisan press of the 19th century."

Indymedia first went online amid the tear gas and tumult of the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999. The belief that the mainstream media were never going to explore deeply the downside of globalization, and the story of the various groups trying to fight it, had taken root throughout the mid-1990s. Activists concluded that if they wanted their story told with nuance and depth, they would have to do it themselves.

Early inspiration came from deep within the jungles of the Chiapas region in southern Mexico, where Subcomandante Marcos, the ski-masked leader of the Zapatista movement, articulated the case for an independent alternative media. In a videotaped message to a 1997 gathering called the Media and Democracy Congress, he made the argument that would have the greatest influence on the founders of Indymedia. "The world of contemporary news is a world that exists for the VIPs-the very important people," Marcos said. "Their everyday lives are what is important: if they get married, 路if they divorce, if they eat, what clothes they wear and what clothes they take offthese major movie stars and big politicians. But common people only appear for a moment-when they kill someone, or when they die."

Instead of simply conforming to this reality or becoming paralyzed with cynicism, Marcos proposed a third option. "To construct a different way-to show the world what is really happening-to have a critical world view and to become interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit every comer of this world."

As the WTO meeting neared, a group of Seattle activists began building this "different way" in a 250-square-meter space that was donated to the group by a local nonprofit housing advocacy group.

It became the first Independent Media Center, a place where reporters could bring their articles, as well as video and

radio reports, to be uploaded to a central Web site.

The activist community in Seattle coalesced around this center. Unlike previous efforts to coordinate the often fractious groups, the IMC became an energetic hub of collaboration. "It was like we were high," says Sheri Herndon, 43, one of the founding members of Indymedia. "The right people came and we plugged them in. And one of the things that was pretty powerful is that we weren't really fazed about working together. We had a shortterm common goal. The smaller differences, you just let them go."

The use of open publishing made the Seattle Indymedia experiment revolutionary, even though the original motivation for the technology was practical. It would take too long to upload all the reporters' accounts manually in one location. The solution came from an Australian computer programmer involved with Indymedia who, three weeks before the protests, adapted an open-source code that enabled the activists to use any computer to simply post accounts or photographs of what was happening on the streets. "With open publishing, your experience of the news is different," says Jay Sand, 31, another of Indymedia's early volunteers. "You really feel like you were there, even more so than TV. On TV, you are seeing one image at a time. Real life is more confusing and this comes through on the IMC site."

The result was a street-level collage of text and image: a photograph of a legion of police in riot gear. An account of a protester whose nose had just been broken. A video of the anarchist group Black Bloc smashing the windows of a Nike store. An analysis of the trade talks over fishing rights happening that day inside the convention hall. An explanation of the cause that drove activists to dress up like sea turtles.

Unwittingly, the Indymedia organizers had found a technology that fit philosophically with their ideas about how to transform the media. Everyone was now empowered to contribute to the creation of the news.

In the four years since the Seattle protests, it wouldn't be farfetched to say that Indymedia has become a brand-

although that might not be the word activists would choose. From the time the first Web site was set up, Independent Media Centers have proliferated at a rapid pace, about one new one every eleven days. It soon became clear that the Indymedia format was attractive to activists around the world, not just as a way to cover protests but as a day-to-day accounting of the local and global concerns of social-justice and antiglobalization advocates.

Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the crucial "tech geeks" of the Indymedia network, has seen Indymedia grow from the Seattle collective to a universal prototype that can now be found even in Montevi?eo, Uruguay, where he is temporarily living.

"It blows my mind sometimes how much Indymedia has spread," Henshaw-Plath says. "In every place I have gone to present Indymedia, it's not been something I have ever had to convince somebody of.

The first thing people say is, 'We want to start one.' " he ideal of creating a media source that would be totally inclusive has had to endure tremendous tests. Open publishing, the purest form of the idea, has become, in some instances, Indymedia's greatest liability.

The New York City IMC is typical. It was started in the spring of 2000 in anticipation of that fall's UN Millennium Summit for the world's heads of state. A space in midtown Manhattan was donated to the group. In the three years since its founding, the print committee has been dominant, putting out the 10,000-circulation Indypendent. And the collective has grown exponentially.

Financially, it scrapes by, as most collectives do, by putting on benefits and selling merchandise like T-shirts. The volunteers are also typical of American IMCs. As John Tarleton, 34, one of the founders of the New York IMC, who supports himself by picking blueberries during the summer, says, "Volunteers are mostly in their twenties and thirties, unmarried yet largely college educated, predominantly ,white,

Indymedia's reporteractivists believe that no journalism is without bias. They criticize the mainstream because, in their eyes, it claims neutrality to mask these biases.

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struggling to make ends meet, underemwhat's not. Is it our business to tell them ployed or unemployed." what is acceptable? Two years later, I was The Web site (www.nyc.ndymedia.org) the one pushing for more moderation of the wire. So I guess there was an evolubecame a place were the city's diverse activist community could inform itself . tion, which does mirror the evolution of the movement." about coming protests and events. Stories about police brutality or unfair housing In response, the collective came up laws appeared side-by-side with leftist with a compromise of sorts-a hidden political analyses of the war on terrorism. folder where all unacceptable posts could But the site was also deluged with posts that be dumped without being erased. had nothing to do with the people's strug- Eventually, a policy emerged that defined gle-anti-Semitic rants, racist caricatures, what was prohibited. This was a painful and pornography all competed, democratiprocess, since it seemed to highlight the cally, for space on the wire. Although an tension at the heart of the Indymedia editorial board of volunteers decided what experiment: Was the site a place for free stories to highlight in the center column, the speech or was it a place to express the wire itself became almost unusable. "That views of the antiglobalization movewasn't what Indymedia was set up for," ment? "It is maybe a slippery slope when Tarleton says. "Many people stopped using you start hiding posts," says Tarleton. us as a place to post."

"But we are already heading down a slippery slope when we turn our newswire Because the network had grown so fast, over to crackpots." there was no process or editorial principle In the end, a piece of the democratic to mediate what went on the newswire. ideal had to be discarded to save the rest.

"Personally, I started out as a total freespeech libertarian," says Chris Anderson.

But it is a shift that many watching "My thoughts were that people were Indymedia from the sidelines saw as smart enough to know what's trash and inevitable. Robert McChesney, author of

Blog heaven: at the top of the Fleet Center in Boston, at July's Democratic National Convention, bloggers covered a national political convention live for the first time in history from their own "Blogger Boulevard. " They joined approximately J 5,000 mainstream journalists recording the action.

LAUREN BURKE/ŠAP-WWP

Rich Media, Poor Democracy, says he always believed that "the Indymedia movement is not obliged to be a movement for every viewpoint under the sun.

They need to make tough editorial decisions, and that's not something to be despondent about. The problem is not that you have to make decisions. The important thing is that you make them based on principles that are transparent."

A similar clash of values came in the middle of 2002, when the global Indymedia network, desperate for funds to maintain aging equipment and to help local collectives pay rent, was awarded a $50,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in response to a proposal submitted by a few volunteers. What should have been a boon to a struggling organization was a cause for consternation among Indymedia activists. There was no process yet for reaching a consensus on whether to accept the money and, if it was to be accepted, how to distribute it. To some extent, the global network-run by a committee comprised of at least one volunteer from each collective who communicate via list serves in more than a dozen languageshad outgrown its founders. As with the creation of the "hidden folder," process generally followed crisis. Now the network was on the verge of receiving muchneeded resources, and the only decisionmaking method available was one of passive consensus, where if no one disagrees, it is assumed everyone agrees.

To build something truly alternative and useful will require discipline along with the creative joy.

Suddenly, the democracy so treasured by the network-now grown to at least 5,000 volunteers-became its greatest handicap. A number of IMCs outside the United States, including Brazil, Italy, and Argentina, were opposed to taking money from the corporate world. Although many of the American volunteers thought the collective should take the money as long as no strings were attached, the bitter arguments became too much for the network to bear. In the end the grant had to be returned because no consensus could be reached and the debate threatened, as Sascha Meinrath, a volunteer at the Urbana-Champagne IMC, put it, to "create fissures in the network that would take years to fix."

Slowly and carefully, Indymedia organizers are beginning to deal with the internal tensions that made this crisis inevitable. A consensus seems to be building that Indymedia will survive and grow only if it becomes more Qrganized, efficient, and useful for the activist community. In the sticky domain of financial issues, Meinrath has helped form a fundraising group called the Tactical Media

Fund, independent from Indymedia and able to make decisions without a networkwide consensus.

For the news wire, new technology is being developed by the tech geeks to make it easier to sift through the information and find the news a reader is looking for. Instead of deciding which posts are acceptable and which are not, Indymedia volunteers can be librarians, categorizing posts so that at a click one can find everything having to do with bioengineering, for example. The idea is to make the sites easier to use. The next step is to create themed Indymedia sites (about the economy, Israel-Palestine conflict, environment, etc.) that would include all related stories funneled from local sites.

There is a surprising amount of talk about the need to expand the rules and processes and guidelines that govern Indymedia. "The ideal has not been abandoned," Chris Anderson insists. "But the great thing about Indymedia people is that they are not ideologues, they are pragmatists, not hung up on things. They have ideals but are also very practical."

This flexibility will be necessary to confront the challenges that lie ahead.

IMCs continue to multiply. A group of young Iraqis are trying to set up one in Baghdad. They have begun work on publishing a newspaper, and British activists are helping the Iraqis with their Web site.

A radio station in Amman, Jordan, has sent people to get them started in that medium. All this would have been impossible a few years ago.

But to build something truly alternative and useful will require discipline along with the creative joy that was so manifest that winter in Seattle. Sheri Herndon, who . has observed Indymedia's evolution, was refelTing to the content as much as the attitude that drives the network when she said, "Ultimately, it's not enough for us to talk about what we are against. We have to articulate what we are for. It's not enough to slow the rate of destruction. We have to increase the rate of creation."

0 About the Author: Gal Beckerman is an assistant editor at Columbia Journalism Review.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

Copyright © 2004 Mike Baldwin.

Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.

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t's often said that Thomas Edison's finest invention wasn't the light bulb or the record player; it was the concept of an ongoing industrial innovation and development process. Corporations from Edison's own General Electric to Ma Bell, Corning, and Kodak took his idea and ran with it, setting the stage for the modern R&D lab.

While independent inventors were once the main source of patents, since the 1930s, corporate labs have been the dominant wellspring of invention. For decades, these organizations drove corporate growth, and they developed many of,the fundamental inventions that run modern life: Bell Labs and the transistor, RCA and color television, GE and MRI technology.

In the process, R&D has become the ultimate corporate sacred cow. Until recently, corporate gospel has been that sustained high investment in research will lead to a boatload of insanely great products that will carry a company to a new level, driving growth in profits and staking out vibrant emerging markets. But it's time to ask some hard questions: Does corporate research and development really work?

And if it does, why are so many prestigious and supposedly well-run firms continually blindsided by competitors?

The answer is, at best it's not working well, and perhaps it just doesn't work at all anymore. Corporations need to take a closer look at their devotion to internal research. We're entering a new era of invention, and big companies must adapt and begin practicing invention triage-keeping only what works, fixing what can be fixed, and throwing out the rest.

IBM, for instance, employs 3,000 fulltime researchers yet has rarely been a market innovator. It spent $5.1 billion on R&D last year-six percent of its revenue and $16,000 per employee. Yes, Big Blue does make $1 billion each year licensing the technology these inventors create to other firms. But look at the companies that are whopping IBM: Cisco, EMC, Oracle, and Sun, among others. These companies spend far less on research than IBM. Oracle, which long dominated th~ rela-

tional-database market, took the idea right out of a paper by an IBM researcher! In external computer storage, EMC, a relative newcomer, has 19 percent of today's $13 billion market to IBM's 15 percent.

Fifteen years ago IBM had 80 percent.

And IBM is not alone in its R&D failures.

Look at Apple. It invented the personalcomputer industry with the Apple II in 1977, popularized the graphical user interface, and pioneered intuitive softwareand became the first personal-computer company to reach $1 billion in annual sales. But once Apple made it big, it stalled. Today the company has only 2 percent of the $180 billion personal-computer market. Apple spends $471 million a year on R&D, a full 7.6 percent of its revenue. I defy you to name me another company so innovative with so little to show for it.

How about Xerox? Okay, you win.

Xerox makes Apple look like a stellar success story. Picture a corporate meeting back in 1970. Xerox is getting filthy rich.

It wouldn't even sell you a copier: you rented the damn things and paid for every copy you made. Research leaders convinced management that it had to plow back millions into research-without offering any guarantee that anything worthwhile would come of it. They hired the smartest people and built Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC researchers in vented the Ethernet, windowed computer applications, screen icons, and laser printers. Of the 10 most important developments in computing, Xerox PARC birthed at least half of them.

And how did Xerox management handle this windfall? They blew it. Choked.

Perhaps the biggest screw-up in technology history. Almost every other company in Silicon Valley benefited from PARC's innovations, but the only one Xerox managed to cash in on is the laser printer. And though printers now form a serious chunk of the company's business, even in that space, Hewlett-Packard is the clear winner. Xerox still spends almost $900 million in R&D annually, almost six percent of its revenue. And do they have any knock-your-socks-off products to show for it? Nope. Can you think of a worse-run company over the last 20 years than

Xerox-a company that did everything it was supposed to do to build internal innovation and has still failed spectacularly?

So what should the criteria be for seeing if R&D dollars are well spent? Number of patents? Patents per research dollar?

Market share? Or market share of technology developed in-house? It's kind of like a major-league baseball team seeing what percentage of its starting lineups has come from its farm teams. One winning metric: revenue growth of 15 percent to 20 percent a year, driven by internally developed products.

But few companies can claim such success. We have been evolving over the last few decades toward an age in which corporate R&D just doesn't work. There are three reasons why.

Clayton Christensen delineated the first brilliantly in The Innovator's Dilemma.

Any new technology threatens to cut the profit margins of the bigfoot products that carry the market leader. Why would RCA or GE push solid-state technology when the profits from vacuum tubes were so high? Why would Kodak push for digital cameras when its real money was made in film? All eventually entered these markets, of course, but late, and only when change was inevitable. Major corpora路tions much prefer "just-in-time" innovation-innovation that peaks just as older products are on the back half of their life cycle. But innovation does not choreograph so simply; it comes in fits and starts, defeats mixed with occasional breakthroughs.

The second reason: us venture capitalists. We have about $100 billion just sitting on the sidelines. We often will pick out the best research teams and set them up as independent companies-something a big firm is loath to do. And we can make company founders rich beyond belief (at least that's what we tell them). We will steal the best researchers-those with a sense of urgency and a track record-and beat the big guns to market. That is our job, and we do it well.

The third reason we're heading for a new model of corporate invention is execution.

Every company likes to innovate; very few companies want to execute the plan to take

a development and productize it. That's hard work. Part of the problem is the internal barriers that corporations put up, but that isn't the real key. Show me the internal compensation system for a company's general managers, and I will show you why its execution is just plain awful. Companies reward managers for making their numbers, not for building new businesses. Who wants to risk her bonus for an upstart technology that threatens the cash cows?

Corporate R&D spends 80 percent of its time and talent on "product improvements" and 20 percent on really new stuff.

Last year my friend Kenan Sahin, a former vice president of software technology at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, addressed this issue a different way. Kenan bemoaned the shrinking amount of research-and more importantly, commercialization of research-done by our largest companies and suggested that we reverse this trend. Let's look at it another way: since corporate R&D departments do so little with all the money they get now, shouldn't corporations spend less on research?

CEOs ride a perpetual roller coaster.

Outsource R&D or bring it back in-house?

Invest in venture capital funds to get a "window on technology" or suck up to the major research universities? O~tain tech-

nology by acqmnng upstarts or make strategic investments in younger firms?

Sign a codevelopment contract or build a distribution agreement? All are efforts to make this damn thing called R&D work.

When did financial engineering replace real engineering?

One way to look at the research and development universe is to divide the world into two groups: attackers and defenders.

The defenders are all the companies you know-AT&T, IBM, Wal-Mart. Once these giants were young and aggressive attackers-when the defenders were Western Union, National Cash Register, and Woolworth. But now they are the kings of the mountain. The defenders have markets and customers and capital and hired expertise. They believe in an orderly R&D process, and they're generally driven by financial concerns. In any market, every defender must protect its best products and customers and also attack the adjacent markets. It can either take its existing products and retool them for new markets or take its existing customers and find other products or services to sell to them. Or both.

What innovators from the defender side want to do is to keep the status quo-although they firmly deny that. But if they can keep their margins and their market share relatively steady, the results are fine.

The stock will appreciate 10 percent or 15 percent per year, and senior management's stock options will make them wealthy by retirement time. Yes, they talk about "attacking"; they use every war and football analogy known. But when all is said and done ...they want to sleep well at night.

The attackers are companies you've probably never heard of-Alkermes and A123Systems and Kubi Software. The best way to describe them is as true samurai, aggressive warriors. The attackers have no market share, no customers, and sometimes no clue. What they do have is an open field. Innovators from the attacker side want to topple the big boys and become defenders themselves-or at least to attain a version of success by selling out to defenders. And they throw all their energy into inventing new technologies to realize those goals.

The defenders, meanwhile, see these new technologies and go through a few predictable phases-not unlike those popularly associated with grieving.

Denial. "This new technology won't work (or is dangerous or doesn't conform to standards), and our customers don't want it!"

Anger. "How dare our good customers (friends, fellow members of the club) give even a little of their business to these interlopers! Don't they appreciate the great service and support we've been giving them?"

Reluctant acceptance. "Okay, there is some merit to the technology. So let's make it available-but only to those customers who want it and whom we might lose anyway. And let's tell them why they really don't want it, even though they think they do-and keep trying to sell as much of the older, more profitable product as possible."

Capitulation.

"Look-the market is moving away from us faster than we thought! Our own R&D is horribly late again; when they finally get the product ready it will be so hobbled as to be worthless. So let's invest in (or buy) the damn competition now, before they get too big."

Which brings me back to Edison. His model is expensive and probably did the job as long as companies had virtual monopolies in their areas. But with the advent of venture capital, the model began to change. Now "the competition" is rarely a bigger company but a smaller, focused one. Companies such as Motorola and Kodak and Boeing are finding themselves whipped by upstarts with specialized technology and faster feet.

The old model of the corporate R&D lab as the engine for invention lasted 70 years. What every company needs now, regardless of size, is the single-mind edness and sense of urgency of entrepreneurial firms.

The old model is dead. Time to build a new one.

D About the Author: Howard Anderson is the founder and senior managing director of YankeeTek Ventures and the William Porter Distinguished Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

M. SPENCER

Wife Michelle, also a Harvard-educated lawyer, and daughters Malia (right) and Sasha (left) join Barack Obama in celebrating his victory in the primaries.

Vickerman (himself a Jamaican immigrant) wrote in an article published in the 2001 anthology New Immigrants in New York, which drew on work he did in the 1980s. "Jamaicans assert their ethnic identity to show that they are different from African Americans." A similar dynamic appears to apply to African immigrants.

The point is that, once voters saw Obama's ads and realized he was not, in fact, an Islamic fundamentalist, Obama's name-or at least its provenance-may have actually helped him, by distinguishing him from other African Americans.

At least that's the implication of the way the race played out. The TV blitz the Obama campaign unleashed in the Chicago metro area during the last three weeks of the race-and downstate in the last six days-paid huge dividends among white voters, particularly in the collar counties, where Obama had done little campaigning. Obama ended up carrying 50 of blue-collar Joliet's 52 precincts.

Likewise, he managed to win pluralities in several white ethnic wards in Chicago, the kinds of places Harold Washington lost by huge margins in 1983. And Obama managed to attract white voters without eroding his standing among his core supporters. Indeed, the impressive margins among working-class whites paled in

comparison with his margins among African Americans (about 90 percent or higher in 10 heavily African American wards in Chicago, where turnout was up as much as 30 percent over recent elections).

Obama performed so well among all demographics that one is tempted to conclude that working-class whites are simply more open to voting for black politicians than they were even five or 10 years ago. But that would be a mistake. Anita Dunn, who worked for Hull and sat in on that campaign's focus groups, notes that the only time suburban and exurban white voters ever responded negatively to Obama was when he was associated with more conventional black politicians. "We [showed voters a sound] bite from Jesse Jackson Junior," says Dunn, referring to a video clip of the Chicago congressman praising Obama.

"Collar-county voters didn't like that."

The power of Obama's exotic background to neutralize race as an issue, combined with his elite education and his credential as the first African American Harvard Law Review president, made him an African American candidate who was African American. not stereotypically "[Obama] is not stereotypically anything," says Mark Blumenthal, the pollster who ran Hull's focus groups. "He's different. He's different because he's biracial. He's a different generation. He's different in terms of qualifications than nine out of 10 people who run for office." Free of the burden of reassuring culturally moderate whites that he wasn't threaten-

ing, Obama could appeal to their economic self-interest while also exciting his African American and progressive white base.

If Obama can replicate his strong showing in Chicago and hold his own in the collar counties, as the primary results suggest he can, Ryan will have to win upward of 75 percent of the downstate vote even to have a chance. "Obama will come out of the city with 75 percent ofthe vote, minimum. Maybe 85," says one Obama aide. "Ryan GREEN/Š AP-WWP will have to get 50 to 60 percent in the collars, then sweep us downstate in a landslide." Should Obama so much as win one of the big collar counties like Will (where his vote total exceeded Ryan's in the primary) or make a reasonably strong showing downstate (where he got 24 percent of the vote in the primary), there's almost no way Ryan could win.

In late April, I accompanied Obama to a fund-raiser for Representative Jan Schakowsky at a downtown Chicago hotel.

Some 1,500 supporters-the vast majority of them white women-filled an ornate banquet hall for an annual event dubbed -the "Ultimate Women's Power Lunch."

Even so, the whoops and cheers that accompanied Obama's introduction were an order of magnitude louder than polite applause for the most prominent woman in the room, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm.

Were Obama to win in November, he would instantly become the de facto political leader of the country's African American community. Better still, his intelligence, savvy, and sheer force of personality would quickly make him an important player on Capitol Hill. From his perch in the Senate, he's likely to become a perennial possibility for a spot on a national Democratic ticket. Which is to say, while it's a shame there aren't more candidates like Barack Obama, for the moment, one may be enough.

D About the Author: Noam Scheiber is a senior editor with The New Republic.

Kerry Conran was a tech-support nerd with a dream: to make an entire science-fiction movie, with real actors, inside his home computer. The surprise ending?

He pulled it off.

I

to Hollywood erry Conran is not what you would call descript. He has very short, tancolored hair, usually covered with a clean, logoless baseball cap. He is 37, somewhat baby-faced and often quiet, with a smile in the comer of his pale blue eyes that suggests he is observing you from a far-off world of his own. And while he can be genial and funny, his default setting seems to be self-deprecation to the point of self-erasure. The second thing of any note he ever said t? me was "I

am basically an amorphous blob of nothing." The first thing was 'Tm shy."

This was on the set of his movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. You might expect a little more brio from a writer-director who is making a summer blockbuster with almost unlimited creative control. Set in 1939, the movie stars Jude Law as the daring flying ace Sky Captain, who teams up with his former flame, the intrepid reporter Polly Perkins, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as they track

down a mysterious mad scientist named Totenkopf. It is in part a nostalgic homage to the movies of the 1930s and '40s: the hammy fisticuffs and golly-inspiring proto-technology of sci-fi cliffhangers like Flash Gordon alongside the snappy patter (and even snappier clothes) of the era's noir thrillers.

But like the old serials it emulates, Sky Captain is mainly preoccupied with the strange promises of the future. The astonishing things you will see in the world of

tomorrow include: an immense, silvery zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building; an elephant that fits in the palm of your hand; a troop of giant robots marching down Sixth Avenue and the carpet at Radio City Music Hall. None of these things actually exist, though. Conran has not constructed a single set or miniature. Rather, they are computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank "blue-screen" background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a ro.bot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia).

The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.

"The goal was to make a live-action film, but to use conventions of traditional animation," Conran said. The reason? "First and foremost, to do it cheaper." It's a model that would appeal to anyone who, like Conran, does not seem entirely comfortable spending other people's money; to anyone who might dream of shooting in Nepal or Paris (or in the 1930s) but doesn't have the means to get there; to anyone who is shy.

For Conran, the question, as he put it, was "Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?" And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.

At first, he was a mystery. Word of Sky Captain began to spread around the Interuet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring-extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them. Even then, no one knew who Kerry Conran was.

Google couldn't touch him. He was so undocumented in the world of Hollywood that I briefly wondered, when I began pursuing him, if perhaps he was just a front for his producer and partner and mentor Jon Avnet, who is well known for producing Risky Business and directing Fried Green Tomatoes but who is not so well known for retro-science-fiction summer,

time blockbusters, and who unlike Conran seems to have been photographed at least once in his life. I don't think Conran would mind that I doubted his existence.

In fact, for a long time, that was the plan.

Conran grew up in Flint, Michigan, in a pre-cable, pre-VCR period when the Sunday afternoon television crackled with old movies. Kerry and his older brother, Kevin, made capes out of towels and pretended to be superperoes. They steeped themselves in science fiction serials and film noir and the Universal monster movies. After high school, Conran moved to Los Angeles to attend the CalArts liveaction filmmaking program, but he mainly hung around with the animators, because they were doing what he wanted to do: they were building worlds. Even as students, they could create anything, go anywhere.

"If you wanted something gigantic," he said, "they could do it. Just draw it."

r didn't

want to be an animator, but he wanted their freedom from earthly concerns like budgets and 'reality. His student film tried to fuse ~raditional animation and live action in an interactive way he hadn't seen before. He does not like to discuss the film, called That Darn Bear, except to say that it involved a bear and that it remains, for him, a "deep gaping wound."

"I was, like, a year into it, ifnot a yearand-a-half, and this film called Who Framed Roger Rabbit was announced," Conran recalled. "And it was exactly what I was trying to do, but on a scale that, for me, was unimaginable. I filmed it for three years, and never ultimately finished it. It was just, at that point, demoralizing."

After this, Kerry Conran went into his apartment in Sherman Oaks and pretty much stayed there. A self-trained computer "nerd hobbyist," he supported himself with various custom-software and techsupport jobs. Then in 1993, Jurassic Park took photo-real computer-generated effects into the cinematic mainstream. At the same time, the first home computers powerful enough to emulate those effects were becoming available. Conran immediately began to experiment with ways to bring film into his Macintosh. He drove around

with a camera, filming the sky with a purposefully shaky, home-movie hand, and then he went home and dropped a computer-animated UFO into it-a hoax.

As the digital-effects industry grew more sophisticated, so did he. He realized he could build whatever he wanted, and what's more, it could be gigantic. Rockets that dwarfed skyscrapers.

Airplane hangars so large that you could not see someone on the other side. Because, he explained, "what does it cost to hit the scale button and make something enormous? Nothing."

And it didn't matter whether the actors were on a big expensive sound stage or in Conran's tiny apartment. By 1994, he had struck upon the idea of filming an entire movie by himself, at home, with a blue screen set up right in his apartment. He began to create what he was calling "the World of Tomorrow."

The title was borrowed from the 1939 World's Fair, along with that period's sleek aesthetic and brash optimism. Conran recalls how moved he was when he saw, in the 1933 King Kong, that the Empire State Building had at its top an actual zeppelin mooring mast. "This is why you have to like these people in the 路1930s and ' 40sbecause they actually thought they could 'dock a zeppelin atop the Empire State Building," he said. "And when the math wasn't quite up to snuff, they still said, 'Let's give it a whirl!' They just had these lunatic ideas and acted on them."

From one of his jobs he had scored a Macintosh IIci, and its hard drive became his sound stage. By today's standards, it was mind-numbingly slow. Every limb of every giant robot had to be rendered separately in advance and reassembled later.

Each leg took 12 hours. Each robot had two legs. There were 20 robots.

"I would wake up, and I wouldn't even go to the bathroom," he said. "Frequently I'd sit there and suddenly say: 'Oh! I'm really thirsty!' It would be 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and I hadn't moved. I was a slave to this thing."

He briefly played with the idea of another hoax: to present the film as the remnants of a never-completed adventure movie by a fictional protege of Frank Capra. "But I was going to do it in such a way that a few of the

shots would have been impossible to achieve," Conran explained. After people saw it, he said, "they would be staggering.

They wouldn't know how he did it." He decided he would be satisfied if he could create between 20 and 30 minutes of footage this way. After four years of working on it every day, he had six minutes.

But then, as typically occurs when things look darkest in the kind of movies Conran loves, a hero came along to save the day. A friend of his brother's wife came to dinner, a woman named Marsha Oglesby, who happened to be a movie producer. She had been hearing about the short for some time and was eager to see it. Conran protested: he wasn't ready. But she insisted., Six minutes later, she didn't know what to say.

"Can I see that again?" she asked.

The next day she showed it to her boss, Jon Avnet, who was so impressed that he agreed to finance the movie himself until they could find a studio or investor. Avnet showed it to Jude Law, who then read the whole script and quickly agreed to star and be a co-producer. Avnet and Law then turned to Gwyneth Paltrow, and once she was on board, they decided why not get Angelina Jolie as well, to play the eyepatched rogue known as Frankie? And so they did. Now the film is a major summer release for Paramount, that opened June 25.

Like most overnight success stories, this one took about a w ~ decade. But now Conran tl is here, directing movie ~ stars, responsible for a~~ staff of nearly 100, the ~ scale button pushed to ~ enormous. He is visibly amazed and happy to be here. And by all accounts (except his), he has handled the transition from recluse to Hollywood diGwyneth Paltrow plays reporter Polly Perkins in Kerry Conran's computer movie Sky Captain. She and a flying ace played

by Jude Law track down a mad scientist.

rector gracefully. "He was thrilled and touched that people were willing to realize his vision," Jude Law told me by phone.

"He's really a sweet-hearted man. But he's certainly no pushover. He knew exactly what he wanted."

Still, it's hard not to sense a certain wistfulness, too, as Conran speaks about the old scheme: a phantom man directing a film that wasn't there. "It would have been cool," he said.

In 1939, RKO gave a young radio writer from New York named Orson Welles a contract to write and direct anything he wanted. Jon Avnet wanted that kind of latitude for Conran, but he couldn't find a studio that would offer it. So Avnet built one. He spent nearly a quartermillion dollars to turn a former printing press in industrial Van Nuys into Sky Captain's headquarters, lining nearly every inch with computers and constructing a complete digital-effects house from scratch, with a small blue-screen stage in the back. "At one point," Avnet told me, "I spent way too much money." He estimates he spent about $1 million to develop the film, through his company, Brooklyn Films. Eventually, the Italian producer Aurelio De Laurentiis came in to complete financing, and then in June 2003, Avnet sold the domestic rights to Paramount, for a reported $40 million.

He walked me through a series of three large, dim rooms full of terminals manned by computer modelers, animators, lighters, compositors. Some were touching up artificial clouds and fake skylines. Some were working on snowflakes.

Another stared into the watery light of the monitor and slowly ate a leaf of lettuce.

They can do anything here. When one of Paltrow's arms was cut out from a shot, they copied the other one, flipped it and pasted it back in. Since all the lighting was being done on the computer, they could paint the frame with light and noirish shadows, erase it all and then start again.

Stephen Lawes is the compo siting supervisor, in charge of combining the real photography, which is all shot on highdefinition digital videotape, with the computer world. He showed me how they build a scene, first in black and white, dropping Paltrow into a photograph of an actual deco-period elevator in a municipal building across town. He demonstrated how he tweaked the color until it took on the lush, antique look of the period, and then married it to a virtual film stock to give the movie some of that classic graininess Conran was looking for. The final product was painterly, stately and somewhat uncanny. Avnet said that the approach has allowed the filmmakers to make digital video truly look like physical

film, and it does-but it's a curious kind of verisimilitude, one that imitates the technical limitations of the past, the artful phoniness of the old films it emulates, while adding massive underwater battles.

"We have the ultimate latitude to reframe, play and change," Lawes told me. "It's pretty much like playing God." It is the flexibility of the setless, all-digital, centralized production process that, according to Avnet, has allowed them to make the movie for about half what it would have cost to make it traditionally. Still, at a reported budget of $70 million, it's not cheap.

And despite Conran's emphasis on the economy of the technique, it is also clear that it affords him other rewards too. .

Among Conran's first official hires was his brother, Kevin, his longtime collaborator since the days they shared a bedroom and wore capes. He is a professional illustrator and was the film's production designer. Together, Kerry and Kevin filigreed the film with cathedral-like touches that only they and the angels will see: the ship that carried King Kong in the 1933 movie, lying on the ocean floor; a line of deactivated robots, leaning against a wall in the exact same positions the Fleischer brothers had them in their moody 1941 Superman cartoon, The Mechanical Monsters. You will not know unless I tell you that the smudges in the zeppelin cockpit are real actors, because even though you can barely see them, Kerry decided that he would not computer-generate a human being. But he was determined to computer-generate everything else. Even in the briefest close-ups, say, of Polly reaching to retrieve a blueprint from the floor, the carpet at Radio City is an effect, a computerized image based on a photograph of the actual carpet, which Kerry has never seen in person. (As much money as they have supposedly saved, 1 still wonder if perhaps it wouldn't have been cheaper, at least for this scene, to just buy a rug sample.)

These are the types of details, superfluities and in-jokes that make up the secret language that the Conrans have been speaking since Flint, and it is, in large part, Jon Avnet's to decode. "I am a non-nerd channeler of Kerry's vision," Avnet s,aid.

His pride and affection for Conran are apparent, and he expresses them restlessly, constantly-though he also reminded me, and himself, that the movie must be more than what he calls "boys with toys." "After all this incredible technological breakthrough is said and done, how's the story?" he asked. "People may be impressed that it was made, but they're not going to substitute being impressed for being entertained."

In some ways (especially with a deadline looming), the technique offers the di-

eager, young, lettuce-munching dreamers, and 1 wondered what worlds they were constructing in their spare time between snowflakes. On the screen, Sky Captain flies to the rescue. I happen to know from Kevin that it's Kerry himself behind the goggles. Naturally, he's masked.

The short ended. Conran blinked a little and smiled. "Wow," he said. "That was embarrassing. " Both Avnet and Conran are convinced that Sky Captain will usher in a new kind of filmmaking. And perhaps this will indeed

ike most overnight success stories, this one took about [ ] a decade .... Both Avnet and Conran are convinced that Sky Captain will usher in a new kind of filmmaking. rector too much flexibility, too much opportunity to haggle over every anxious shadow. As Avnet put it, it is the "world of pure choice." Conran admitted that he might have been working on the movie for 20 years had Avnet not pulled it out of him. "We joked," Avnet said, "that after the film goes in the theaters, he'll finish it again for DVD, and then five or six years later, he'll have one-quarter of the film finished the way he really likes."

Conran walked into Avnet' s office in a plain black T-shirt, looking a little apprehensive. He had agreed to watch the original six-minute short with me and Avnet, and it was clear he wasn't looking forward to it.

It opens with a black-and-white version of the film's signature shot, a zeppelin docking at the Empire State. 1had seen this sequence in one form or another perhaps a dozen times in the last three days. I can't begin to guess how many times Conran has seen it: airship and skyscraper, two antique promises of progress meeting to announce our final liberation from earthly concerns.

The short was rudimentary compared with what I'd seen, to be sure. And Conran grimaced throughout. But I was stunned when I considered the painstaking labor with no promise of reward, or even end, in sight.

And I thought of all the computers in just this building, each one thousands of times as powerful as a Mac IIci, in the hands of

change the economics of the summer blockbuster. In effect, it's an indie giant-robot movie, taking the digital-video revolution to people who, like Conran, like to push the scale button up to enormous. And you get the feeling that this is what Conran wants the movie to be judged on first--even more than how much money it makes at the box office, or how real the robots look.

It may be a newfangled movie technique, 'but it is a very old-fashioned movie story: a fiercely protective producer offering an unheard-of chance to a kid out of nowhere. In the end, it seems to me that this movie is not so much about ushering in the world of tomorrow as it is about realizing "the World of Tomorrow," the vision that has haunted Conran, and now Avnet, for so long.

When it is done, Kerry Conran may make a sequel or go on to other projects, or, as Avnet suggested, he may just want to keep working on this one. When I asked Conran what he would do on opening day, he shook his head. "Almost my entire adult life has been leading up to this," he said. "I just don't know. I only knew 1 wanted to do this for a long time."

D About the Author: John Hodgman is aformer professional literary agent who lives in New York. He writes for The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, React (a website for teens), GQ, and Men's Journal, where he is a contributing editor.

drugs and mosquito resistance to the poisons-not to mention distribution costs and logistics-mean that far too often these strategies fail. Essential to the battle is finding a way to prevent the disease despite infective bites. "A vaccine is really badly needed," says Marcel Tanner, director of the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel. An effective vaccine could be cheaply and easily integrated into existing programs to immunize infants in malariainfested regions against common childhood diseases. And in fact, researchers are working on almost 90 different versions of a malaria vaccine, 17 of which have started human testing.

immune system to fight invaders directly, the malaria microbes' exceptional elusiveness has made vaccine development maddeningly frustrating.

But new hope is emerging from an unlikely source: the sugar responsible for the disease's devastation.

Instead of prompting the immune system to fInd and kill the malaria parasites, a new vaccine seeks to prime the immune system to attack the toxin that causes the most lethal aspects of the disease. The result of a collaboration between immunologist Louis Schofield of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and chemist Peter Seeberger of the Swiss

"One of the toughest things with malaria is going to be getting a way to finance the work," says biotech entrepreneur Carmichael Roberts, Ancora's cofounder.

Seeberger is blunter. "Hell would break loose if 40,000 people died in the U.S. in a month," he says, as has happened in some malaria-ridden regions of Africa.

Many experts doubt that the sugar-based vaccine will be the sole answer to malaria, but if it works, it could be a vital piece of the strategy for combating the disease.

Because the vaccine comprises a sugar, it has advantages over other vaccines being tested: it does not require refrigeration, and it could be more robust against parasite resistance. And that could help it save lives and ultimately boost the economies in many developing nations. "If we could reduce malaria by 10 percent, that would be enough for me," Seeberger says. "You're talking about millions of people."

Target: Toxin

Ancora Pharmaceuticals cofounder Peter Seeberger (right) with a graduate student in their Cambridge, Massachusetts, laboratory.

Despite decades of effort, however, scientists have yet to produce a vaccine that works. "There has been a lot of technical failure," says Marie-Paule Kieny, who coordinates the World Health Organization's funding of malaria vaccine research. The main reason is that the parasites make slippery targets, routinely changing their appearance as they mature and spending much of their lives inside human blood cells, where the immune system has a hard time tracking them down.

Since most vaccines work bY,training the

Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the vaccine consists of a synthetic version of the malaria toxin-a sugar molecule that Schofield first identified in the late 1980s.

So far, tests of the vaccine have yielded promising results in animals.

To commercialize the vaccine, Seeberger and Schofield have helped start up a company, Ancora Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the right funding, Seeberger says, the team could be ready to start human tests by the end of the year; but that funding has yet to materialize.

The problem is in many ways endemic to malaria research. And the cause is simple: the disease afflicts mainly poor countries that have little political or fInancial clout.

You can excuse Louis Schofield's impatience to begin human testing.

His search for an effective malaria vaccine is now in its third decade. His quest began in the late 1980s, when as a postdoc at New York University, he went hunting for the malmia toxin.

His idea, even then, was that vaccinating against the toxin rather than the parasites could prevent the actual disease-the fever and uncontrolled inflammation that are the deadly hallmarks of malaria. Unlike the pm路asites, Schofield reasoned, the toxin exists outside the blood cells and should be readily accessible to the immune system.

In general, vaccines work by inciting路 the immune system to produce proteins called antibodies; each antibody specifically reacts with one particular molecule-say, a protein on the surface of a parasite. This interaction typically focuses the killing effects of the immune system on the invader. But the antibodies recruited by an antitoxin vaccine like the one Schofield has in mind simply bind to the toxin, neutralizing it. The concept is not unique: two of the world's most successful vaccines, against diphtheria and

Fight Against Malaria ccording to recent data from the World Health Organization,malaria kills about three million people a year-about the same number that died of AIDS in 2003. While malaria has remedies that AIDS, so far, does not, its treatment is complicated by drug-resistantstrains that have evolved over past decades. This huge death and infection toll-an estimated 300-500 million are infected annually-affects economic growth in hardest hit countries.

For this reason, not only health organizations, but businesses are getting involved in the fight against malaria. Exxon/Mobil has pledged $1.3 billion for accelerated development of malaria drugs and vaccines.

GlaxoSmithKline supports pediatric vaccine trials in Africa. The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), through its collaborative Indo-U.S. Vaccine Action Program (VAP), is funding development of a candidate vaccine by the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in New Delhi. Also funding work at ICGEB is the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI), an international organization created with a 1999 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. MVI is wholly dedicated to preventing malaria by finding a vaccine that works, and has vaccine development partners in countries most affected by malaria, like Africa and India.

Their goal right now is to identify the most promising vaccines and explore delivery strategies that will make a vaccine widely accessible once it is developed. Meanwhile, USAID gives partial funding to malaria field study run by the Malaria Research Centre in Jabalpur.

Malaria is a big concern of the U.S. military.It struck down more combatants during the VietnamWar than battlefield encounters, and the same was true in Somalia. For this reason, the U.S. military is at the center of

A

tetanus, are such antitoxin vaccines.

But to create an antitoxin vaccine, you first have to find the toxin. Much of malaria research has focused on proteins, but Schofield took a different tack, going after a suspicious molecule, a carbohydrate studded with fats, found on the parasite's cell surface. He thought that this molecule could be the villain causing the inflammation problems characteristic of malaria.

"That turned out to be a good guess," he says. Over 18 months, at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, he painstakingly extracted the toxin from malaria parasites. Once he had enough of it in hand, he injected it into mice; the rodents grew sick, experiencing a slew of symptoms-"pretty much those that you see in people sick and dying of malatia," he recalls. He had found the malaria toxin.

But a tremendous hurdle still remained.

Without a way to make a completely pure version of the toxin's carbohydrate backboneand do it relatively quickly---Schofield could not prove it would make an effective vaccine, much less produce it commercially.

The technological breakthrough, came

vaccine research and trials. In fact, according to researcher Stephen Hoffman,former director of the Naval Research Institute,all malaria drugs licensed and used in the United States and much of the world were developed by the Department of Defense. The Naval Research Institute researched a new DNA vaccine technology."We used malaria as a model system to test this exciting new technology,because it is the most important infectious disease threat to our operating forces," Hoffman said after successful trials in 1998.After joining Celera Genomics, Hoffman led a team that successfullysequenced the genome of the mosquito responsible for most transmission of malaria in Africa, Anopheles gambiae. The research is promising,but adequate funding remains a problem.

Earlier this year U.S. researchers met their Indian counterparts at a symposium in Bangalore, specifically to chart future collaborations on cures for a variety of infectious diseases endemic to India. U.S. Army Surgeon General, Lt. General James Peake was among the 200 attendees and said, "Our world is getting smaller, and the importance of building coalitions and having good medical linkages and partnership has, to my way of thinking, never been so important." The intent is to find solutions that benefit everybody: the people of India, the military and the traveler. Unfortunately, large pharmaceutical houses don't see cures to these diseases as money spinners so research is neglected. But groups such as the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health and the military are forging ahead. They are optimistic, based upon past fruitful collaborations: one of the anti-malarial drugs now used, tafenoquine, came from joint research by India and the Walter Reed Army -L.T. Institute of Research.

several years later from research being done in Cambridge. Then at MIT, chemist Seeberger, working with graduate student Obadiah Plante, had invented a machine that automated the laborious and time-consuming synthesis of sugars. Seeberger's machine tantalized Schofield: it could churn out large quantities of a pure version of the basis for a vaccine cheaply and quickly, possibly within weeks or days.

Optimistic and determined, Seeberger took on the project-and a partnership was born. "He undertook to do the synthesis on the strength of my conviction," Schofield says. Seeberger first made a strippeddown version of the toxin. Though the process initially took 10 months, he soon had it down to a matter of hours. Then, in Schofield's lab, researchers infected mice with malaria parasites. Normally, almost all of the animals would have died within a week. But injection with a prototype vaccine based on Seeberger's molecule apparently negated the effects of the toxin, raising the rodents' survival rate to between 65 and 75 percent. "The results were very clear," Seeberger says.

Ancora's Answer Based on these results, Seeberger and Schofield decided to make malaria an early target for the type of sugar-based . vaccines and drug treatments they planned to develop at their new company, Ancora Pharmaceuticals. On a recent visit to Ancora's lab in Beverly, Massachusetts, Seeberger-who flies in from Switzerland every four to six weeks-showed off the technology that he hopes will help make the malaria vaccine a reality.

Tucked into a corner of a large, nondescript office park, Ancora sublets its space from another startup: one long, narrow room that serves as an office area and a couple of work counters in a lab. It could be any other fledgling company short on money-except for the pair of boxy, automated sugar synthesizers that sit sequestered behind a closed door. While not quite the heart and soul of the tiny firm-those would be its founders-you might call these machines the company's backbone.

Crowded into the office with three of Ancora's four full-time employees, Seeberger explains the significance of the

synthesizers. Sugars play a number of important roles in the body, including mediating interactions between invading microbes and the immune system. And sugars are remarkably complex. Before Seeberger's invention, researchers took months or even years to make a particular sugar molecule.

The automated synthesizers have changed all that. Each occupies a large countertop and holds banks of small glass bottles that contain specially designed carbohydrate building blocks and other chemicals needed in sugar-producing reactions. Run by a computer, the machines automatically pipe the building blocks into a rea~tion vial in the proper order and with the right timing. The final result: perfectly synthesized sugar molecules.

An effective malaria vaccine is not the company's only focus. ''Throughout infectious disease, there are opportunities for carbohydrates," says Seeberger. "It's a matter of picking the diseases and focusing on the right sugars." One potential candidate is tuberculosis. The only available vaccine is hardly effective: it has been estimated to prevent only five percent of potentially vaccine-preventable tuberculosis deaths. And scientifically, it turns out to be a short hop for Ancora. "For malaria and TB, the building blocks are not so different," Seeberger says. Nor does the hope for carbohydrate-based vaccines end there; labs around the world are testing carbohydrate molecules-some natural and some synthetic-as vaccines against several other parasites and bacteria, and even against cancer.

With the basic technology in place, Ancora's biggest challenge in developing and testing a malaria vaccine is funding.

The company is bootstrapping the project for now, with money from angel investors and U.S. government grants. A grant from the National Institutes of Health has allowed the researchers to begin scaling up production of the malaria sugar to amounts that could be used in human tests of the vaccine. Funds for vaccine test trials, however, have yet to turn up, says ,Seeberger.

Waiting Game Coming up with a new malaria vaccine is a risky business-and plenty of researchers are skeptical about Ancora's novel approach. While Schofield's mice survive, immunized against the toxin, they still have high parasite levels in their blood.

Experts voice concerns that those microbes might eventually cause trouble on their own. "The question is, at what point would [the mice] just continue to go on and develop complications," becoming sick from uncontrolled parasite growth despite the neutralization of the toxin, says Lee Hall, ,tjEMANT BHATNAGAR

much-provided the toxin is taken care of," he says. Studies in Papua New Guinea, for instance, have shown that inhabitants can carry high parasite burdens in their blood but exhibit no disease. "I've seen it," Schofield says. "You see kids in the first year of school playing football in recess, attending class-you do a survey on them, and some of them have got pretty high parasite levels. If you saw that in you or me, we'd be at death's door." Schofield suspects that these children may, in fact, be immune to the toxin, but not to the parasite.

In theory at least, a synthetic sugarbased vaccine has numerous advantages over protein vaccines. A synthetic vaccine is easier to manufacture to strict ,. pharmaceutical standards than one pro- duced biologically, as protein-based vaccines are; this should make it easier to meet safety requirements. Sugars are also more stable than proteins, which â&#x20AC;˘ would make a sugar-based vaccine easier to store and distribute, especially in Africa, where the refrigeration required for proteins is scarce. And a sugar-based vaccine might be less susceptible to parasite resistance than a protein-based one.

Of course, no one can really know how effective Schofield's vaccine will be until it is fully tested in humans. But if he and his collaborators prove right, and if all this theory translates into a widely distributed vaccine, entire regions of Africa and Southeast Asia could be transformed: tens of millions would never become sick, and hundreds of thousands would not die from malaria. Whole economies could be rejuvenated. "All I want to do is to see this tested in humans," Schofield says. "I don't think there's anything wrong with skepticism-it's easy to' make grandiose claims. The only thing I regret is that at the moment, we need the resources to be able to test this properly."

If that doesn't happen, the real losers in the waiting game won't be Schofield or Seeberger or Ancora, but the millions of men, women, and children sick and dying each year, caught in malaria's cycle of tragedy. D

â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ "l

A home fit for mosquitoes: when asked about thefamily's health, mother Naghma Khatoon replied, "We are all sick. " Better sanitation and a vaccine could all but eradicate malaria deaths, but both are still in the future. Abul Fazal Enclave, New Delhi.

chief of malaria vaccine development at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.

Still, Hall explains that the sugar-based vaccine could be useful--especially if used in combination with antiparasite vaccines.

Schofield, however, believes that his vaccine can stand on its own. "I think toxin is bad for you; parasite doesn't matter too

About the Author: tributing

editor

Erika Jonietz is a con-

with

based in Houston, Texas.

Technology Review

he battle between sin and salvation, between Saturdaynight revels and Sunday-morning sanctity, rages at the heart of American popular music. But for Ray Charles, those combating urges were one and the same, and he made the music to prove it. Beginning in 1954 with his R&B hit "I've Got a Woman," Charles set tales of desire, longing and lust to the propulsive rhythms of gospel, breaking the ground for what would soon be called soul music. A simple change of lyrics-from "this little light of mine" to "this little girl of mine," for example-often made all the difference.

The impact was immediate and cataclysmic. While audiences thrilled, the religious community was horrified. "People said it was sacrilegious," Charles said in 1991.

"I got letters from preachers saying I was bastardizing the hymns. Then the next thing I know, four or five years later it became soul music, and everybody was doing it."

That boundary-shattering breakthrough Copyright Š 2004 by Rolling Stone LLC. All rights reserved.

alone would have warranted the innumerable distinctions earned

by Ray Charles, who at 73 died of liver cancer on June 10th at his home in Beverly Hills. Charles was among the inaugural inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986. Among his many other honors were 12 Grammys and a Presidential Medal for the Arts.

Such accomplishments are all the more remarkable given the crushing poverty of his childhood and the blindness, seemingly caused by the glaucoma he contracted at age six. Born Ray Charles Robinson in Albany, Georgia, in 1930, he grew up in Greenville, Florida. His mother insisted that there was nothing he could not do if he set his mind to it, telling him, "You're blind-you ain't stupid." She sent him to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine. The vicious racism of the segregated South did not escape him there. "Imagine

Soul pioneer and American original, he reigned as the genius lor 50 vears, and his music knew no boundaries.

separating kids according to color when we couldn't even see each other," he said later. "Now ain't that a bitch!"

Using Braille, Charles learned to read and write music at the school, and he became proficient on piano, clarinet, trumpet and saxophone. In 1945, Charles left St. Augustine and began his quest to become, as he put it at the time, a "great musician." He made one promise to himself: "No dog, no cane, no guitar. I associated those things with helplessness and begging." Soon he was a fixture on the Florida club circuit, with a style that drew heavily on Nat "King" Cole and Charles Brown.

Florida could not contain Charles' ambitions, however, andafter asking a fellow musician which American city was the farthest from Tampa-he lit out for Seattle. He got a recording contract there and released his first single, "Confession Blues," in 1949. Atlantic Records signed him in 1952 and offered Charles the freedom he needed to develop his sound, allowing him to produce his own sessions and to work with top-flight musicians.

"I realized the best thing I could do with Ray Charles was leave him alone," said Jerry Wexler, one of the heads of Atlantic, in his memoir Rhythm and the Blues. Wexler's faith proved wellplaced as Charles unleashed landmark recordings such as "I've Got a Woman" and "Drown in My Own Tears." Continuing to refine his approach, Charles added female background singersthe Raeletts-as a sassy counterpoint to the knowing masculinity of his baritone. He had once again borrowed from gospel, this time charging the call-and-response vocals of church music with erotic tension, a technique that attained its electrifying apex on his 1959 single "What'd I Say." The song, which mimicked what Charles called "the sweet sounds of love," generated outrage among the prudish-and became the singer's first million-seller.

Charles left Atlantic in 1959 when ABC offered him a $50,000 annual advance and eventual ownership of his masters-an extraordinary deal at the time. His rendition of Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia On My Mind" reached Number One in 1960. Released in 1962, his two volumes of Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music included masterful versions of Hank Williams' "Your Cheating Heart" and Eddy Arnold's "1;'ou Don't Know Me" and, in yet another liberating strokel obliterated the lines between country, pop and R&B. A 1964 arrest for possession of heroin provided the low point of his career. lIe took a year off to kick his habit and rarely discussed it afterward.

Charles remained consistently active after that epic period, onstage and in the studio. But having helped draw the map of contemporary music, he seemed content to take a comfortable place within it. His influence on subsequent generations of singers-including Van Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Joe Cocker and Billy Joel-had been decisive. He recently finished an album of duets with the likes of Norah Jones, James Taylor and Willie Nelson, and a film about his life, starring Jamie Foxx, is headed for release. Twice divorced, Charles is survived by 12 children, 20 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

In 1991, Charles was asked what he would like listeners to take from his music. "What would please me," he replied, "is if people would say, 'One thing about Ray's music, it's sincere.

You may not like everything he does, but it's real. It's always genuine.' If I got that kind of accolade for the rest of my career, or even after I'm dead, that would please me very much."

0 About the Author: Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor with Rolling Stone.

er Jerrv Wexler he first time I met Ray Charles, he was preparing a session with Ahmet [Ertegun] at the Atlantic studio.

It was a rehearsal exercise: Ahmet was teaching him the song "Mess Around," which Ahmet wrote. But Ray was also, amazingly, singing these country songs like "Missouri Waltz," then dashing off the most highly evolved bebop piano you'd ever heard.

The definitive Ray Charles session for Atlantic was in Atlanta in 1954, the first with his own band. Before that, we had recorded in a standard studio manner. He came in, we went over songs, we had the arranger-usually Jesse Stone-and we'd record him with sidemen. These were not bad records, such as "Sinner's Prayer." But this time, it was as though he had sprung fullblown, like Minerva from Jupiter's head. He called Ahmet and me to Atlanta. We had no idea what to expect. He was staying at the Peacock hotel. Across the street was the Royal Peacock nightclub.

He ran down the stairs from the hotel, across the alley, up to this mezzanine-when Ray knew his territory, we could barely keep up with him-and there was this seven-piece band, with instruments ready: four horns, three rhythm players, no guitar. And they launched into "I've Got a Woman." Ray had finally found his own voice in this band. It's ironic that Ray Charles, who is surely one of the precursors of rock & roll, which is defined by the guitar, created this sound without one. A guitar would have gotten in the way of those spaces,

where the horns came in.

We did the session at WGST, the campus radio station at Georgia Tech. He did "I've Got a Woman," "Come Back Baby," "Greenbacks" and one other song. There was this elderly engineer who didn't know a damn thing about what he was supposed to do. It was three hours before we could get the sound right in the studio. Then we had to stop every hour so they could broadcast the news-the control room was the newsroom.

But out of this, we got those songs, the definitive beginnings of the Ray Charles.

The last time I spoke to him was just before he gotsick. We had a wonderful conversation. It was joyous. I never tried to impose a lot of phone calls on him. We talked once every few years. But I was very happy this time when he said, "Pardner"-he always called me that-"those were my best years, with you and Ahmet." But when people say, "You and Ahmet produced Ray Charles," put big quotation marks around produced. We were attendants at a happening. We learned from Ray Charles. My dear friend [writel'] Stanley Booth once remarked, "When Ahmet and Jerry got ready to record Ray Charles, they went to the studio and turned the lights on.

Ray didn't need them."

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Billv Joel Singer

nthe mid-1980s, I got a call from Quincy Jones saying, "Ray Charles would love to do a song with you." This is when I was in a prolific period and much more arrogant and I actually thought I could write.

When it came time to write the ~ong, I said to myself, "What

I

Ray Charles, backed by his band and the Raeletts in the mid-1960s, at the height of his success. His 1966 hit single "Crying Time" won two Grammy Awards. Other Charles classics: "Hit the Road Jack," "I Can't Stop Loving You," and "What'd I Say." His rendition of "Georgia On My Mind" was declared the official song of the State of Georgia in 1979.

do Ray Charles and I have in common? He's black, he's blind, he's from Florida, he's got soul. I'm this little white schmuck from Long Island who writes pop songs. But we both play the piano." So I sat down at Burt Bacharach's restaurant here in New York, and I wrote a song called "Baby Grand." Ray loved it, and we recorded it together.

When he walked into that session, it was like the Washington Monument just walked in the room. He looked exactly like Ray Charles was supposed to look: He had the glasses, the hair and the smile. He was tough, though. If the drummer dropped the beat, he could be scary as crap. You didn't want to make a mistake around Ray Charles, because you could feel this glare coming from somewhere behind those glasses. He was very generous with me. I was awkward and

shy, singing with my idol. But we met on common ground as piano players. I played the basics, and he would riff on top of my chords. I ain't gonna try to outriff Ray! Steve Winwood is who brought me to Ray Charles.

When Winwood was with the Spencer Davis Group, I was playing in these garage bands, and I thought he had the greatest voice-this skinny little English kid singing like Ray Charles. The singer of Procol Harum sounded like Ray Charles. When Rod Stewart was singing with the Jeff Beck Group, he was trying to sound like Ray Charles. Even Robert Plant wanted to sound like Ray Charles. There were so many people copping on Ray, and I'll be the first to admit I was trying to sing like Ray Charles, too.

The last time I saw Ray, he inducted me into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. I was awed. It was like God him-

allow him to use the restroom, he'd tell them to stop pumping the gas right away.

We had some gruesome days playing the theater circuit, places like the Apollo in Harlem and other theaters in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. You would start early in the day and you wouldn't finish until around midnight. It was six or seven shows a day. They'd show movies in between some of the shows, but we'd be at the theater all day. This would be in the late 1950s, till about 1960. is Backstage we'd play cards, ~ dominoes. Ray and I were very close. I taught him how to play ยง chess, how the pieces moved.

From that point on, I was never Charles in a dressing room able to beat him. He had them in the 1960s. "This may sound build him a special chessboard like sacrilege, " says singer where the pieces had prongs so Billy Joel, "but 1think Ray he could tell where they were Charles was more important located. I asked him once why than Elvis Presley. " he could always beat me. He was a strict leader and a strict said, "I don't have the distracdisciplinarian. He has been a tions that you have." He thought person from whom I've learned maybe I was looking at girls. a great deal about how to make a record properly.

Ray Charles is a man who suffered a great deal in his lifetime. You feel a lot of that, in hen I was 17, I was on a his playing and his singing. But locked ward in a mental there is also a lot of joy in his hospital in Boston called playing and singing. And he's McLean Hospital. That's a brought an incredible amount whole other story, of course. of joy to millions of people all But Ray Charles was checked over the world. in for a few days every six months, probably as a result of some drug bust. One way or the other, my idol was suddenly dropped onto this insane asylum, in my building-North Belknap. When I went to dinner nthe beginning, when I was one evening, he was eating rubtouring with Ray, we had to bery chicken with the rest of deal with segregation. There the inmates. I couldn't tell if I were signs for colored and was hallucinating or not. He white everywhere down South. was clearly deeply brought We couldn't stay in white down to be there. There was a hotels. Ray didn't say much piano there and he played a litabout that; the only thing about tle bit. It was like some kind of it he would rebel against was a visitation. when we'd stop to get gas. He Ray Charles has made the would be filling up all of our greatest individual contribution vehicles, and if they wouldn't to American music in my life-

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self came down and said, "OK, you're in."

This may sound like sacrilege, but I think Ray Charles was more important than Elvis Presley. I don't know if Ray was the architect of rock & roll, but he was certainly the first guy to do a lot of things. He was not a snob about style. Who the hell ever put so many styles together and made it work? He was a true American original.

Co-founder and chairman, Atlantic Records

ay Charles had a refinement of spirit that prevented him from ever singing or playing a false note. He was always, always right. And he was an incredible influence on all the rock & roll artists: on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck. They were all Ray Charles' friends.

He had a great patience in getting things done correctly in the studio. And he had also a great humility; he had a great deal of concern for everybody else working with him. He was truly a gentle person, but he

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time. There are dozens and dozens of tunes that he recorded that nailed the tune: "Baby It's Cold Outside," "Hit the Road Jack," "Drown in My Own Tears," "What'd I Say," "I've Got a Woman." He never missed, and his versions were always the quintessential versions. He was a genius. He was the one.

here was music before Ray Charles, and there's music after Ray Charles. It's that stark a difference. I don't think anyone did more to bring soul music into popular American music than Ray Charles did.

When I was 11 or 12, a family friend gave me a whole box of Ray's music-his entire catalog. It was a windfall-that was back in the day when you'd get one record for Christmas and decided between the new Dylan or the new Joan Baez. So all of a sudden I'm given this extraordinary gift, and it really changed my life. People always say, "How did you get to be such a soulful singer?" and I can't help but think that it has a lot to do with being exposed to that box of Ray's music at an impressionable age. I guess I learned from the best.

I got to record with him for his duets project. It was the first time I met him. He was in poor health when we did the project, and his energy was limited. But he was still sharp as a tack. He was very kind and generous and appreciative-very present. And when I heard that voice and that piano coming out of the headphones, well, that was the pinnacle of my career-along with singing with John Lee Hooker and my dad. I sung with some amazing people, but that was truly chilling. My only regret is that he didn't live to see how this record was received.

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u.s.

Above: sprinter Justin Gatlin (center) won the gold in the men's JOG-meter event in 9.85 seconds.

Below: Visually disabled Whitly "Collyn" Loper won the gold in trap shooting.

The 17-year-old medalist was born blind in her right eye.