SPAN: November/December 2004

Envoys wo American basketball players, Omari J. Faulkner and Courtland B. Freeman, regaled spectators at the Laxman Public School grounds in Delhi on October 6 during a friendly game between youngsters from various city schools. Faulkner and Freeman dribbled the ball up and down the court, constantly looking for a pass, before finally sinking the ball in the net.

The young American players, cultural envoys under the auspices of U.S. State Department's Culture Connect Program, freely interacted with Indian students, including mentally challenged players. "It's amazing being here. I had a lot of friends in Georgetown who were from India. I had never ever left the country. This [becoming a cultural envoy] was a rare opportunity for me to connect with different cultures," said Faulkner.

For schoolchildren, the event provided a rare opportunity to learn a few tips from Amelican players on techniques such as dribbling, man-to-man offense, picking, attacking the basket and shooting. Faulkner and Freeman, both in their twenties and more than 6'5" tall, thorougWy enjoyed their interaction with schoolchildren and coaches in Delhi. Calcutta and Mumbai.

Basketball is not as popular a game in India as cricket or soccer, Freeman noted, saying, "Students who interacted with us were very passionate and enthusiastic about basketball. Passion for the game, not height, is the deciding factor, because in the National Basketball Association (NBA) there are many players under six feet who dominate the game." The young cultural envoys are optimistic that some day basketball will grow as a major sport in India.

-D.S.

I

Courtland B. Freeman (right) and Omari J. Faulkner during a friendly match with students at Laxman Public School in New Delhi on October 6.

Above: (from left) Freeman; Robert Blake, Deputy Chief of Mission of the American Embassy in New Delhi; Jennifer Greisen, wife of Troy Greisen, acting managing director of Special Olympics Asia Pacific; Usha Ram, principal of Laxman Public School; Faulkner; and Air Marshal (Retd.)

Denzil Keelor, chairman of Special Olympics Bharat.

Left: Freeman with students at Vasant Valley School in New Delhi.

November/December 2004

SPAN VOLUME

XLV

NUMBER 6

Woodstock at 150

Publisher Michael H. Anderson

By Daniel B. Haber

Editor-in-Chief

Daniel Libeskind

Gabrielle Guimond

Ambassador Architect

Editor

An Interview by A. Venkata Narayana

Lea Terhune

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

Ten Technologies that Refuse to Die

Hindi Editor Govind Singh

By Eric Scigliano

Urdu Editor AnjwnNaim

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

Editorial Assistant K. Murhllkwnar

The Mop-Up

By Atul Gawande

In Tune with Steve Jobs An Interview by Jeff Goodell

Art Director Hemanr Bhamagar

Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

Printing Assistant Alok Kallshik

Business Manager R. Narayan

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Tracing Women's History

By Romain Maitra

The Case of the Missing Carbon

By Tim Appenzeller

Solar-Cell Rollout

By Peter Fairley

Mixing Pragmatism and Principles

By Jay Tolson

Pro Cricket

Front cover: Flaming logs liberate carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere and is absorbed by trees, crops and phytoplankton for growth. It's an elegant and essential mechanism of the carbon cycle that is now being affected by human activity.

Photograph courtesy Jon Sullivan, pdphoto.org.

Yanks on the Pitch

By Ashish Kumar Sen

Island Hopping to a New World

By Alex Markels

On the Lighter Side

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscri pts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

Erratum: In the September/October 2004 issue, the credit for the photograph on page 14 should read "Courtesy Arkansas Democrat-Gazette" and for the one on page IS should read "MARK WILSON/Š AP-WWP." The error is regretted.

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11000 I (phone: 23316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Ajanta Offset & Packagings Ltd., 9S-B Wazirpur Industrial Area, Delhi 110052. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessmily reflect 'the views orpolicies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For pem{ission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 125; single copy, Rs. 30.

USEFI Answers Questions from Indian Students Are CDs Rotting?

By Steve Knopper

A Vaccine for Your Phone

By Patrie Hadenius

Getting Directions from Your Phone

By Wade Roush

Brando's Lives

By Stanley Kauffman

Branda India Tour

By Vishnu Khare

A LETTER

FROM

A s evidence of the effects of global warming .1lJnounts, from melting of glaciers to devastating inundations of water in low-lying regions of the world, scientists are wor~ing overtime to understand and find solutions to this potentially catastrophic problem. A key element in the depletion of the ozone layer is carbon. Our cover story, "The Case of the Missing Carbon," by Tim Appenzeller, considers what the planet does with the eight billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere every year.

Another global issue of concern to everyone is public health.

The fight against communicable diseases goes on around the clock. Polio is one disease that is near eradication, yet cases still appear, some recently in India. In "The Mop-Up," Atul Gawande tells the story of what steps are taken when a polio case is discovered in a village in Karnataka, and the uphill fight to eradicate the disease through immunization efforts.

Rebuilding Ground Zero is no ordinary project for an architect. New York architect Daniel Libeskind won the contest to build the Freedom Tower and a memorial in honor of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. A. Venkata Narayana met with Libeskind during his recent visit as a goodwill ambassador to interact with young Indians and got his views on what it meant to work on this special project.

Technology plays a part in efficient disease control, environmental management and just about every aspect of life these days. Some technologies were predicted to fade away, but didn't. See "Ten Technologies that Refuse to Die," by Eric Scigliano, to find out why vacuum tubes, analog watches and, yes, typewriters still have a place in the scheme of things.

Other technologies may protect new technologies. "Are CDs Rotting?" by Steve Knopper, looks at CD preservation, while other articles review vaccines for your phone and why Global Positioning System receivers in cell phones may be the next new thing for getting directions.

Steve Jobs is among the most significant technology gurus of the past century, having created the user-friendly Macintosh computer operating system that Microsoft has imitated but not surpassed. Most recently he's changing the music business with the phenomenal success of the iPod

THE

PUBLISHER

portable music player. "It is corrosive to one's character to steal music," he says, and offered the alternative. Read his interview by Jeff Goodell.

Cheap, flexible solar cells could help avert the world's energy crisis if a handful of startups and established companies are able to develop printable devices from plastics and nanomaterials. "SolarCell Rollout," by Peter Fairley, has the story that could revolutionize the power sector.

Americans playing cricket? Yes, indeed. "Yanks on the Pitch," by Ashish Kumar Sen, surveys cricket in America.

Interest in the game is growing. Although traceable to colonial times, cricket really became established in the United States after traveling the information highway with South Asian techies during the past two decades.

Woodstock School turned 150 this November, and Daniel B. Haber recounts some of the history of this venerable Mussoorie boarding school, which is considered one of India's top schools.

Staying on the topic of education, "USEFI Answers Questions from Indian Students" about studying in the United States.

U.S. foreign policy has remained "remarkably consistent for 200 years," says Jay Tolson in "Mixing Pragmatism and Principles." Contrary to conventional wisdom about American "isolationism," Americans have always had a lively interest in foreign policy.

Archivist Geraldine Forbes is an American whose interest in India led to her developing a new way of assessing women's history. From the photo albums of grandmothers she has developed a digital archive to catalog important contributions Indian women have made that are frequently left out of the history books.

In "Brando's Lives," film critic Stanley Kauffman, who followed Marlon Brando's career from the beginning, recalls key turning points in the actor's life. Vishnu Khare writes about the legendary actor's connections to India.

We hope you enjoy the issue and have a happy holiday season.

he sign outside the Bata shoe store in Mussoorie's Picture Palace bazaar advertised hefty discounts. So I went in and ended up buying two pairs of shoes. When the friendly salesman asked me what I was doing in Mussoorie I informed him that I was here to do a story on the 150th anniversary of Woodstock. "Great school," he informed me, "but their students never shop here."

"Why not?" I wondered out loud. "Because," he rejoined, "they don't wear uniforms like other Indian schools."

When I visited the Woodstock campus the next day, strolling around the Quad I could see that he was right.

Like a typical American high school, no uniforms in sight.

"But we do have a strict dress code," informed Pete Wildman, the school's director of public relations who was taking me around.

For my generation, the name "Woodstock" is more famous as a rock concert that was one of the defining moments of the permissive, hippie-era 1960s and the name still connotes free love and music. So it may come as a surprise to some that Woodstock School was named and founded by Protestant missionaries.

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"That was back in 1854," explains Wildman in a Liverpudlian accent as he hands me a hefty souvenir book, Woodstock School Celebrates 150 Years. Among other things, the book chronicles the school's history beginning roughly 30 years after the arrival of the first British visitors to Mussoorie, founded as the nearest hill station to Delhi, when a company made up of British officers and two American missionaries, concerned for the education of Protestant girls in India, set up the Protestant Girls' School in Mussoorie. Within two years of its opening, the institution became known as Woodstock School.

When the fIrst board of trustees met in 1867, their chief interest was to "carry forward the great work of female education." A typical Victorian girls' education meant instruction on the basics-the three R's (reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic), with Students during a break at the Woodstock School additional emphasis on sewing, in Mussoorie. The student embroidery, knitting, music, drawbody consists of 47 ing, lady-like deportment, morals, percent Indian, 33 catechism, and etiquette. percent other Asians, and In 1871, poor administration 20 percent European, and the inability to secure teach- Australian, African and ing staff caused the school to be from the Americas.

put up for sale. At the time, one Rev. Woodside, who had helped raise funds for the school earlier, and Dr. S.H. Kellogg, a Protestant missionary, sought support from the Presbyterian Women of Philadelphia and Chicago. On June 30, 1872, a cable arrived from America. It said simply: "Buy Woodstock."

When Woodstock reopened on March 1, 1874, it did so under the patronage of the Board of Foreign Missions of Presbyterian Church in the United States. Hence the school moved gradually to its role of providing education for the children of American missionaries. It also accepted boys as day scholars up to the age of 12, foreshadowing the coeducational institution that Woodstock would become.

In the 1920s the Board of Management became interdenominational Protestant, and not just Presbyterian. At that time, when Rev. Allen E. Parker and his wife served an 18-year term as coprincipals, Woodstock was recreated into an interdenominational, coeducational boarding and day. school-one which placed increasing emphasis on its multiracial, international components.

Other innovations at the time-unusual for India-included a student government and a PTA (Parent-Teacher Association). By the late 1920s the school's academic program-which was envisaged as college-preparatory-concluded with either Senior Cambridge credentials or the equivalent of an American high school diploma. Construction during the Parkers' tenure included high school departments and laboratories, home economics facilities, a well-stocked library (now numbering over 30,000 volumes), a playground, an auditorium and a boys' hostel.

During World War II, enrollment increased dramatically because British parents could no longer safely send their children to England for schooling. The war in Asia also brought an influx of Burmese and Chinese students, the first of many groups of Asians outside of India. During these years, Woodstock took in orphaned missionary children, and even educated a number of children released from prisonerof-war camps.

In 1959, Woodstock became the third high school outside North America and the first school in Asia to receive U.S. accreditation through the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools (MSA). Another noteworthy event that year was the first visit of the Dalai Lama who was then living in Mussoorie before shifting to his new government-in-exile headquarters at Dharamsala. After that, a number of Tibetan exile students began to enroll.

From the late 1960s through the '70s, while Rev. Robert C. Alter served as superintendent, Woodstock experienced a period of rapid change prompted by a decline in the number of expatriate missionaries stationed in the region. Along with Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu-a sister affiliate that had also served educate missioml~y children-Woodstock began to

rethink its composition, purpose and philosophy as an institution.

Over the next two decades, the school shifted its objective from that of a missionary school to one with an eclectic international student body, staff and curriculum-with a strong Indian cultural component. Children of Iranian and Afghan refugees also enrolled, as did a large contingent of Korean students-which explains the appearance of Korean instant noodles in Mussoorie's Landour Bazaar food shops.

Indian music classes were introduced, as were cross-cultural courses in social studies, literature, art and religion. As a result, Indian universities became more accepting of the Woodstock diploma as equivalent to the Indian School Leaving Certificate. During the 1970s, the school also saw a marked rise in the entry of students for whom English was not a first language. English as the second language was introduced for students of class 1 to 11.

The 1980s also saw the first grant from the American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) for the school's first 30 computers. A recent tour of the school with its state-of-the-art equipment, revealed the old computers in boxes ready to be recycled. The present Media Center (which bears a plaque that the facility was "provided by the people of the United States of America") houses the computer classroom, a language lab, art room, journalism room and a small theater. The day I visited-which was the day before the new term began-the computers were humming with new students e-mailing home to their parents that they had arrived safely.

Since the 1998 arrival of Principal David Jeffrey, Woodstock has continued to strengthen its academic program that resulted in an increase in the number of U.S. Colleges Advanced Placement examinations taken by seniors.

In December 2002, Woodstock was ranked as the second best residential school in India by Outlook magazine, following a poll of schools across the country. As Jeffrey puts it, "Our mission statement places right at the center the aspiration that Woodstock should provide a 'world-class education.' This means that we desire to be measured against the best not just in India, but around the world." .

"Secondly, Woodstock's education is 'international.'

Our teaching staff is international in its composition. Our students, likewise, come from all parts of the world. Woodstock encompasses staff and students from more than 20 nations. The majority of our students are nationals of India, Nepal, Bhutan, Korea and other Asian countries-some come as nonresident Indians to study. In 2003-2004, we have around 220 students from India, 160 students from the rest of Asia, 95 from the rest of the world (Europe, North America, Australia, and South Africa). Eight major religions are represented; nearly half the students are Christian, with large groups of both Hindus and Buddhists. In terms of staff, half are Indian and half expatriate," says Jeffrey.

Woodstock has the resolve to make a difference to the young men and women who not only gain knowledge, but begin to exercise wisdom and promote "education for World Citizenship."

The 150th anniversary book is full of ads from individual alumni and Woodstock Old Students Association (WOSA), many revealing their U.S.-India connections. Examples are the full-page ad from Pizza Hut, and another from the American Soybean Association, highlighting its work in India since 1996; or the Maryland-based Winterline Foundation, founded by Mahendrajeet Singh, which promotes "education for World Citizenship," Ohio-based sculptor James Havens (Woodstock class of ' 57) whose sculpture of the ancient Babylonian cuneiform symbol for peace was presented to the school as a gift for its sesquicentennial.

On my visit on the day before school opening, I was impressed by the myriad sounds emanating from the music department, where I counted some 25 or more pianos in the practice rooms-":" and this for fewer than 500 students.,Being an ex-English teacher

myself, I was invited by Kathy Hoffman, the head of the English Department and Academic Dean, to sit on the school panel on contemporary Indian English literature. The curriculum includes works of authors such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. I recalled that when I was in high school, the only literature I read on India was Hermann Hesse's novel, Siddhartha, that romanticized mystical East. And that was a few years before the legendary Woodstock concert of 1968 which eventually brought me as a spiritual-seeker to India. These f0l1unate, multicultural Woodstock kids would live in, study-and go on field trips in the real India.

And as they say, "Woodstock's Cool!" Woodstock celebrated its 150th Anniversary in October in both Delhi and Mussoorie.

D About the Author: Daniel B. Haber is a freelance Kathmandu.

writer based in

aniel Libeskind, the renowned American architect, visited India recently as a goodwill ambassador under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State's Culture Connect Program. During his trip, he spoke to some 1,600Indians at various gatherings and visited some of India's rich architectural heritage sites, both modern and medieval, in Mumbai, Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. In addition to gaining firsthand glimpses of some of India's architectural wonders, Libeskind also spoke with faculty and students from various architectural schools and exchanged views with NGO representatives and professional architects.

At the American Center in New Delhi, Libeskind delivered a lecture entitled "Breaking Ground" to a packed room of architecture students, faculty members and professionals and spent time answering questions on not only the Ground Zero project, but his personal views on everything from terrorism to his experience as a Polish-born Jewish immigrant. SPAN caught up with the master planner and got his thoughts on architecture and the Ground Zero plans.

What did you perceive initially when you started this project?

Originally, I did not take part in the competition. As a matter of fact, I was invited by the Port Authority of New York to become a member of the jury to judge the competition. I was so proud of their offer because how many times does an architect get the chance to select a design for a project of this magnitude and importance? Subsequently, I found out that there was a conflict. When I looked up at the sky from Ground Zero I got a physical pulse, hit an idea. I immediately called my office from the site and told them to drop what they were doing. I had a completely different view of what should be done at the site. We couldn't do everything on our own in such a short period of time, but instead led the development of a master plan. It's not the end in itself, but the beginning. That is how I perceived the project initially, without imposing my thoughts on the site. We need a new kind of effort to build the city, not an old-fashioned traditional way.

This is no ordinary architectural pro-

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ject. A lot of other factors, such as history and the trauma and suffering of people are involved in the Ground Zero project.

How are these other factors depicted in your drawings?

I started with obscure and abstract drawings because of the lack of time.

After all, I was not working on the blueprint of a villa or fantasy city. We must understand that architecture is not merely about simulating a plan on a computer, but about communicating to people.

Architecture is about the individual, the treasures of the earth and light. You have to employ any method that gets you to the point where people have faith. So I tried to make the drawing communicative. I believe that architecture is unlimited and remains when everything else is gone.

You "married" various kinds of inputs for your plan, and your drawings have tremendous clarity, a high-level of visibility and complex layers. How did you achieve this?

There is one chapter in my book Breaking Ground called "Forced Marriage" which addresses this. Well, I was forced to "marry" another architect and another investor who had very little interest in what I was doing. Sure, we needed to incorporate several layers because we wanted to provide balance to the site-build a memorial where people think about the past, as well as construct an inspiring building that evokes people's aspirations. Architecture is

Rebuilding Ground Zero wo years after the terrorist attacks, New York City officials seemed nowhere near a decision on how to rebuild the site of the devastated World Trade Center (WTC). A debate raged over how to go about it, as some people wanted more commercial property developed in the area, others demanded residential units, and some thought the entire site should be converted to a memorial for those who died there.

Then the Port Authority of New York (the owners of the WTC site) launched the Ground Zero rebuilding competition and hundreds of professional architects from America and abroad submitted their entries. Yet, the thousands of New Yorkers who reviewed the designs and the millions who viewed them on the Internet emphatically rejected the proposals. Never before had people had such a passionate reaction to an architectural

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project and thought of it as their own.

One New York-based architect and master planner, with very little experience in major commercial ventures and with hardly any background in designing skyscrapers, was selected by the Port Authority to complete the task of rebuilding Ground Zero. Daniel Libeskind, christened by his colleagues as a "monuments and memorials" expert because of his background as designer of projects such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Osnabruck's Felix Nussbaum Museum at Osnabruck, Germany and the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England, won the honors. This master architect incorporated several unique features into the design, including a distinctive profile for the Freedom Tower; sanctity to the memorial at the towers' footprints; provisions for commercial and retail space,

"It is a beautiful monument not just about steel and cement and glass. Through designs, we have to inspire people and make them realize that this is their project too.

Did you conceptualize additional security features for the Ground Zero project?

A project of this nature and scale obviously require thorough security considerations. With massive infrastructure and a huge underground mass transit system used by several thousands of people every hour, security undoubtedly comes first in any plan preparations. However, we can't convert New York City into a fortress. Therefore, invisible security is important.

How much control do you have in the shape of Freedom Tower?

The master plan is just about squares, vertical sections and expressions-in totality about the placement of shapes, the collectivity of function and the relationship of the building. The control of the tower is not in my hands alone. In music, you create a symphony with a score and the conductor or composer is not responsible for everything. Similarly, the master planner does not control every aspect of an architectural project.

a new street grid, a central transit center, venues for cultural events, a museum, a performing arts center and open spaces for public access.

"The country, of course, cannot accept a design without remembering what happened there. We commemorate not only the' physical restoration of the site, but we also celebrate the strength and resilience of the human spirit. I feel that the Freedom Tower would provide a true balance to the memorial. For me, both the memorial and the Freedom Tower are not two different activities but one continuum. They have to relate to each other in an interactive way so that the entire site provides a liberating, optimistic and inspiring setting for the memory and for the future. The magnificent Freedom Tower will inspire not only every New Yorker, but every citizen in the world because of the ideals of liberty and democracy it symbolizes," says Libeskind about his design.

David Childs, the chief architect of Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of WTC, echoed similar sentiments: "The plan is iconic, simple and pure in form that would proclaim the resilience and the spirit of democracy." The blueprint for Ground Zero was finalized after months of negotiations between Libeskind and Childs, and in the end many features of Libeskind's original plan were retained.

Libeskind designed the Freedom Tower as the world's tallest building with a height of 1,776 feet, symbolic of America's freedom and the signing of the Declaration of

Independence. The construction formally began on September 11,2004 and is expected to be completed by 2008. The building will provide 70 floors of office and commercial space to a height of 1,150 feet. Perched above the top floor, wind-harvesting turbines will take the height to another 350 feet and will provide 20 Right: Below, plazas Lower

The design of the performing art center at Ground Zero. right: The view of Path of Heroes, commercial are in background. Below: The view of New York's Manhattan skyline with proposed Freedom Tower.

that is beyond words to describe. Its impact is magical."

Architecture students interacting with Libeskind at the American Center in Delhi.

How important is the personal side of architecture to you? Is it represented in your projects?

You have to have emotion and passion to conceive a project. I think you have to bring your own self into the project, so that you communicate and represent your ideas. Take the case of music. It is one of the most individual things that can exist in the world, and yet it is one of the most universally communicative arts.

Is this your first tour to India? Which architectural sites would you like to visit during this short tour?

My head is full of great religious and architecture sites, but the most interesting thing I am learning about is the people of India. Of course I want to see whatever I can and as much of the architecture that I love.

However, it is the people who are openminded, extremely intelligent and very toler-

ant-qualities that I think make a great society and civilization that impress me the most.

As an architect, what impressions did you form of Taj Mahal in Agra?

It is a beautiful monument that is

beyond words to describe. Its impact is profoundly magical. I think it is not possible to built another Taj again. It embodies spirituality and communicates cultural and social values of the day.

D

percent of the building's energy, the largest integration of power generation in any building in the world. The Freedom Tower will incorporate the highest standards of design, safety, quality and technology. The torqued tower-its east and west sides twist as they rise-and the spire at a height of 276 feet evoke the profile of the Statue of Liberty's arm holding the torch of freedom.

An additional four towers are planned for the expanded and reconfigured World Trade Center site, contributing to the rebirth of Lower Manhattan and enhancing the New York skyline. The centerpiece of Libeskind's design is the spiritual memorial, filled with vertical gardens and waterfalls, which provides a symbolic connection to nature and the environment. "Gardens are a constant affirmation of life," says Libeskind. For the master planner, water is an element of life and sound. "The waterfall at the memorial will act as a buffer from the noise generated by the plying motor vehicles. This will protect the site acoustically and preserve the memorial in a dignified way," says Libeskind. The element of light also holds major significance in Libeskind's design.

"The Freedom Tower gets natural light in such a way that on September 11 every year, the sun will shine down without any shadow between 6:46 a.m, when the first airplane hit, and 10:28 a.m., when the second tower collapsed," he explained.

Libeskind is of the view that even if the Freedom Tower's height is surpassed by another building in future, it will always remain immortalized because of its link to the history and emotions of the American people.

-A.V.N.

TECHNOLOGIES'

THAT Technologies that have survived after being declared outmoded

By ERIC SCIGLIANO

n technology, as in biology, we like to imagine evolution proceeding onward and upward. As new species and technologies appear, their primitive ancestors drop by the wayside, right? Not exactly. Mammals, birds, and flowering plants-all relatively recent innovations-might seem to rule the earth today. But far older designs, from barnacles to crocodiles, are doing just fine in their respective niches, thank you. New species don't always evolve to replace old ones; they also fill vacant niches, which in turn can actually solidify the standing of older species. So it is with technology.

Paper and bytes are the classic example. In the early 1980s, at the dawn of the PC age, high-volume electronic storage and transmission-360-kilobyte floppy disks! 14-kilobit-persecond modems!-were supposed to make paper superfluous and forests safe. Hah. Electronic data just begat more paper copies.

Writers who used to carefully mark corrections on pecked-out manuscripts began printing out one revised version after another. Web surfers started printing out whatever looked interesting.

Having data on-screen didn't stop people from wanting to read it, share it, and store it on paper.

Like paper, the 10 technologies that follow have seemingly been surpassed and superseded at one time or other, written off as road kill on the highway of progress. But reports of their demise have proved greatly exaggerated. All have survived, and some have thrived, in their supposed obsolescence-not as cult artifacts (everything from buggy whips to eight-tracks has its fans and collectors), but because they fill real needs that their more sophisticated successors don't. Consider these venerable survivors in the pages ahead.

also remain big faxers. The rest of us grimace and use it when we have to.

Compared to today's digital timepieces, old-fashioned, sweep-hand watches are pathetic one-trick ponies. Digital-watch wearers can These original impact printers check temperature, altitude, and the time in Tokyo, play tunes and seem as remote as quills to the generation nursed on PCs. But they too games, and send messages. Can wristwatch videoconferencing, Web have confounded expectations: in surfing, and tarot readings be far 2002, Americans bought 434,000 off? But what digital watches can't do, according to sweep-hand proponents, is display the time and context as elegantly and intuitively as an analog model.

Children often start out with the digital bells and whistles, then graduate to a sweep hand; then finally, perhaps, they dispense with electronics altogether and acquire an allmechanical, high-end trophy watch-sales of DAN LOH/Š Ap.WWP which have grown dramatically in word processors and electronic recent years. In the end, how a typewriters, according to the device performs its essential job Consumer Electronics Association. matters more than its extra funcEven manual machines hold their tions. niche. Olympia and Olivetti still make classic machines. Consider the advantages: no viruses to catch, no hard drives or software to get With e-mail and scanners nearly corrupted, no batteries to run down. uni versal, these clunky devices Typewriters do one thing computers should be obsolete: why deal with out printed forms-and paper jams and busy signals? Yet can't-fill are faster at addressing envelopes American consumers bought over and other one-shot jobs that usually two million fax machines in 2002. don't entail revisions. Affection and Fax is still the fastest way to transhabit also sustain old machines. mit on-paper images, documents, One Seattle typewriter repairman and marked-up text. While some says that aging writers who "prefer occupations (journalism) have simplicity and don't want to learn moved overwhelmingly to e-mail, computers" are what keep him in others remain stuck on fax. Real business. And you needn't worry estate, with its endlessly amended about your system going obsolete if offers, counter-offers, waivers, and it already is. warranties, still runs on it. Lawyers

REFU~E TO DIE

TYPEWRITERS'

This medium was declared DOA (Dead on Arrival) after commercial television stormed the scene in the late 1940s. TV stole radio's top shows, national sponsors, and central place in the home. But this erstwhile dinosaur was quickly repositioned to exploit the next decade's social and technological changes. Portability was key: transistors and cars made radio the mobile medium of an increasingly mobile society. Suburbs, superhighways, and longer commutes provided a vast captive audience. Mass-market youth culture, disc jockeys, and, later, talk jocks opened new franchises. With TV glomming the national market and local newspapers folding in droves, radio became a more local medium, airing hometown news, sports, weather, and traffic reports. Now, ownership consolidation and cookie-cutter programming are reversing that trend; and mobile-Internet games, MP3s, and instant messaging threaten radio's franchise as the real-time, go-anywhere companion. But hey, radio has been pronounced obsolete before.

Time was, back in the 1980s, that the clickety-click of dot matrix was the sound of progress. Now it's just a memory for most PC users, who want ink-jet or laser printers to churn out family photos and fancy letterheads.

But just as dinosaurs evolved into birds-so the theory goes-dot matrix has gotten a jazzier name ("impact printing") and survived as an industrial tool rather than a consumer toy. For accounting firms, banks, and pharmacies with reams of data to print out (and for whom speed, reliability, and economy actually count for more than looks), dot-matrix-er, impactprinting still works. Small wonder: today's impact rigs can print up to 2,000 lines a minute, over 500,000 pages a month, for less than a fifth of a cent per page-versus one <;.entper

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page and up for ink-jet and laser printers. Epson still offers 12 models, while Okidata advertises 36.

The teens who made these devices essential fashion accessories in the early 1990s graduated to cell phones, and even RadioShack stopped selling them. But pager sales rose in 2002, contrary to industry expectations.

Some institutions still rely heavily on pagers: police departments, whose officers' hands and gun belts are often too full for cell phones; hospitals, where cell-phone signals would interfere with diagnostic equipment; and schools, which can't readily afford cellular service. And pagers still beat cell phones in some ways. They're cheaper, with no roaming charges.

They need far fewer transmitters than cell phones but still provide better coverage, so they work in the dead spots between local "cells." And pagers tend not to jam up in emergencies the way overloaded cells may.

Best of all, they are far less likely to make you crash your car or turn you into a yakking boor. And now, twoway text messaging makes them a plausible alternative to phones.

Cassettes supplanted reel-to-reel for home recording in the 1960s; now cassettes have given way to CD

netic pulse wipes out vital communications circuits.

MAINFRAME COMPUTERS' These big rigs costing over $1 million apiece have been dismissed as dinosaurs-big, lumbering, expensive ones at that-since the PC arrived.

But the explosion of Windows networks and Unix servers obscured the fact that banks and other institutions have continued relying on mainframes for largescale data processing. And "big iron" has seen a minor resurgence in the new millennium: IBM's mainframe sales rose in 2001 for the first time since 1989 and have continued to ÂŤ increase. Speed, security, and relia~ bility are also motives: IBM claims a Ql once-in-30-years failure rate for its latest model, the z990.

! offer two-track 1.27-centimeter (half-inch) players. "The market's pretty steady," says Dan Palmer, former product-development director at the high-end manufacturer Otari.

"Archiving" is what drives it: customers buy the players to transfer precious taped works to digital.

players and recorders. So surely tape is as defunct as the dodo? Not quite.

Many analog tape sizes, from twotrack 0.63-centimeter (quarter-inch) to 24-track five-centimeter (twoinch), are still available.

Some recording engineers still swear by tape, which they claim captures nuances of sound that even the most byte-heavy digital recorder can'tjust as ardent audiophiles still swear by vinyl records played on $10,000 laser turntables. And a few firms still

Audiophiles have sustained another technology that's even older than magnetic tape. In the 1970s, compact, energy-efficient transistors boded to replace vacuum tubes entirely. But transistors couldn't satisfy some guitar players and hi-fi cognoscenti. "We use vacuum tubes because they sound good," says Victor Tiscareno, a trained violinist and vice president of engineering at Red Rose Music, a maker of highend home audio systems. Low-distortion, solid-state-transistor sound "looks lovely on an oscilloscope," he explains. "But what we measure and what we hear aren't the same.

Vacuum tubes just sound more human, more lifelike." And after Armageddon, they may be the last amplifiers left standing; rumor has it the U.S. government still keeps backup tubes in case an electromag-

FORTRAN Forty-seven years after IBM unleashed it, Fortran (formula translation), the original "high-level" programming language, would seem to be the infotech equivalent of cuneiform. But it's still widely used, especially in scientific computing. Why has this Eisenhower-era veteran outlasted so many hardware and software generations? "It's partly the learning curve," says HewlettPackard Laboratories' Hans Boehm, former chair of the Association for Computing Research's special-interest group on programming languages. "For some people it's good enough, and it's hard to let go of something once you learn it."

Adaptability and compatibility, which made Fortran the programmers' lingua franca in the 1960s and '70s, are also key to its viability.

Major upgrades have boosted efficiency and added features while preserving old versions intact. So a vast number of tried-and-true Fortran 77 programs jibe with the current Fortran 90. Microsoft, take note. D About the Author: Eric Scigliano is a science and technology Seattle, Washington.

writer based in

The.up-Up Eradicating polio from the planet, one child at a time

he index case was an II-month-old boy with thick black hair his mother liked to comb forward so that the bangs rimmed his round face. His family lives in Karnataka, in a village called Upparahalla, along the Tungabhadra River. Dry'mountains of teetering rocks can be seen in three directions from the village. It has no running water and little electricity. The boy's mother is illiterate; the father can read only road signs. They are farm laborers, and they live with their three children in a single-room hut of thatch and mud. But the children are well nourished.

The mother wears gold and silver earrings. Once in a while, they travel.

In April last year, the family took a trip north to see relatives. Shortly after they returned, on May I, the boy developed high fevers and racking bouts of nausea and vomiting.

His parents took him to a nearby clinic, where a doctor gave him an antibiotic injection. Two days later, the fevers subsided, but he became unable to move either of his legs. In a panic, the parents took him back to the doctor, who sent him to the district hospital in Bellary, about 65 kilometers away.

As the day progressed, the weakness spread through the boy's body. His breathing grew shallow and labored. He lay flat and motionless in his hospital cot.

A doctor at the hospital, following standard procedure in cases of sudden childhood paralysis, phoned a surveillance medical officer with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Bangalore. The medical officer made sure that proper cultures were taken and sent to a national laboratory in Mumbai. On June 24, the laboratory results came back. A young technical officer with the WHO in New Delhi got the call; it was a

T

Left: A vaccinator giving polio drops to a child in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, in July. Moradabad has the highest number of polio cases in India.

Right: A boy disabled by polio watches other children play near the Taj Mahal in Agra.

confirmed case of polio, a disease thought to have been eliminated from southern India, and it set off an alarm.

The World Health Organization is in the 16th year of a campaign to eradicate polio from the world. If the campaign succeeds, it may be mankind's single most ambitious accomplishment. International organizations are fond of grandsounding pledges to rid the planet of this or that menace.

Such pledges make the organizations feel that they are doing something important. But they nearly always fail. The world is too vast and too various to submit to dictates from on high.

A handful of serious attempts have been made to eliminate individual diseases from the world. In 1909, the newly established Rockefeller Foundation launched the first global eradication campaign, an effort to end hookworm disease, using anti-helminthic drugs, in 52 countries. It didn't work. Today, a billion people-a sixth of the world's population-are infected with hookworm, an intestinal parasite that feeds on human blood. A 17-year campaign against yellow fever, led by the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States armed services, had to be abandoned in 1932 when yellow fever was found to have a reservoir outside human beings. (The yellowfever virus persists in mosquitoes' eggs.) In 1955, the WHO and UNICEF began a campaign to end yaws, an infectious

at the WHO, at UNICEF, and in the Indian government. It was disease causing painful, purulent skin ulcers; workers screened 160 million people in 61 countries for the disease, and treated his job to provide the initial assessment of the facts on the every case they found with penicillin. A dozen years later, the ground. "The case is in an area that has a history of being the campaign was dropped when it turned out that silent, subclinical worst in Karnataka," he wrote; it had the most polio cases in the infections were continuing to propagate the disease. Billions of early years of the campaign, and poor routines of immunization.

"Risk of establishment of virus in the area high, unless quick dollars were spent in the 1950s and ' 60s to eradicate malaria; today the disease afflicts more than 300 million people a year. wide and strong measures in the form of a wide mop-up are In the course of a century, the only successful attempt at distaken." A "mop-up" is WHO lingo for a targeted campaign to immunize all susceptible children surrounding a new case. It's ease eradication has been the battle against smallpox-a mammoth undertaking that was, however, decidedly simpler than the what is done in an area that has been rendered polio-free but is campaign against polio. Smallpox, with its distinctive blisters facing a new infection that threatens to bring the disease back.

The campaigns are highly targeted, and are carried out rapidly, in and vesicles, could be easily and quickly identified; the moment a case appeared, a team could be dispatched to immunize every- just three days, to insure that children are not missed and to make one the victim might have come into contact with. That strategy, it easier to recruit volunteers. known as "ring immunization," eradicated the disease by 1979.

Sunil Bahl sent around a map of the proposed area for the Polio infections are far harder to identify. For every person who mop-up operation, an area covering 80,000 square kilometers. is paralyzed, between 200 and 1,000 infected people come down Working around the summer holidays and festivals, government with little more than a stomach flu-and officials selected July 27 for the start of the first immunization they remain silently contagious for several weeks after the symptoms abate. Nor is round. The second round would follow a month later. Brian every case of childhood paralysis polio; and it usually takes a Wheeler, a 35-year-old Texan who is the chief operations officers for the WHO's polio program in India, couple of weeks for stool specimens to be obtained, delivered to a laboratory, and prop- Polio infections in India explained the logistics to me. The Indian erly tested. By the time one case has been government would have to recruit "and organize teams of medical workers and identified, scores more people have been have substantially infected. As a result, the area targeted for polio increased, from a low of volunteers, he said. They would have to be trained in how to administer the vaccine, immunization must be far larger than that for smallpox. And, whereas people needed to be 268 in 200 I to I ,600 in and provided with transportation, vaccine, and insulated coolers and ice packs to keep vaccinated against smallpox only once for 2002, when it accounted the immediate protection, a single dose of polio vaccine cold. And they would have to vaccine does not always take-children fan out and vaccinate every child under with for four-fifths of the five years of age. Anything less than 90 diarrheal illnesses tend to pass the vaccine world's remaining cases. percent coverage of the target population straight through-and so a repeat round of would be considered a failure. immunization is required within four to six I asked him how many people that would involve. weeks. In logistical terms, it's the difference between extinHe checked his budget sheet. The plan, he said, was to employ guishing a candle flame and putting out a forest fire.

Despite all these obstacles, the campaign against polio has 37,000 vaccinators and 4,000 health-care supervisors, rent 2,000 vehicles, supply more than 18,000 insulated vaccine carriers, and made immense progress. In 1988, more than 350,000 people developed paralytic polio, and at least 70 million were infected have the workers go door to door to vaccinate 4.2 million chilwith the virus. In 2002, only 1,919 cases were identified. The dren. In three days. whole of the Americas, Europe, and the western Pacific, along Polio is caused by an intestinal virus; the virus must be ingested to bring about an infection. Once inside the gut, it passes. with nearly all of Africa and Asia, are currently free of the disease. through the lining and takes up residence in nearby lymph nodes.

India is the one country where polio infections have substantially increased in recent years, from a low of 268 in 2001 to There it multiplies, produces fevers and stomach upset, and pass1,600 in 2002, when it accounted for four-fifths of the world's es back into the feces. Those infected can contaminate their clothing, bathing sites, even supplies of drinking water, and thereby remaining cases. With its vast population, areas of severe poverty, and varied cultures and geography, it is the place where the spread the disease. (The virus can survive as long as 60 days outside the body.) campaign against polio is at greatest risk of failure. The outbreak Poliovirus infects only a few kinds of nerve cells, but what it in 2002 was a serious setback, but it was at least confined to a handful of northern states. Now a boy in south India had the dis- infects it destroys. In the most dreaded cases, the virus spreads ease-Kamataka's first case in almost three years-and if it wasfrom the bloodstream into the neurons of the brain stem, the cells that allow you to breathe and swallow. To stay alive, a person has n't checked there it would blaze across the country all over again.

On June 25, less than 24 hours after the report of the to be fed through a tube and ventilated by machine. The nerve Kamataka polio case came in, Sunil Bahl, a WHO physician and cells most commonly attacked, though, are the anterior horn cells technical officer in the Delhi office, sent an e-mail to key people of the spinal cord, which control the arms, the legs, and the

abdominal muscles. Often, so many neurons are destroyed that muscle function is eliminated altogether. Tendon reflexes disappear. Limbs hang limp and useless.

The first effective vaccine for polio was introduced in 1955, after the largest clinical trial in history. (Jonas Salk's vaccine; made from killed poliovirus, was given to 440,000 children; 210,000 received a placebo injection, and more than a million served as unvaccinated controls.) Five years later, Albert Sabin published the results of an alternative polio vaccine he had used in an immunization campaign in Toluca, Mexico, a city of 100,000 people, where a polio outbreak was in progress. His was an oral vaccine, easier to administer than Salk's injected one. It was also a live vaccine, containing weakened but intact poliovirus, and so it could produce not only immunity but also a mild contagious infection that would spread the immunity to others. In just four days, Sabin's team managed to vaccinate

A poster in Jodhpw; Rajasthan, features Amitabh Bachchan calling on parents to "get up and go to the polio booth. " April 2004.

more than 80 percent of the children under the age of 1126,000 children in all. It was a blitzkrieg assault. Within weeks, polio had disappeared from the city.

This approach, Sabin argued, could be used to eliminate polio from entire countries, even the world. Curiously, the only person in the West who took him up on the idea was Fidel Castro. In 1962, Castro's Committee for the Defense of the Revolution organized 82,366 local committees to carry out a succession of week-long, house-to-house national immunization campaigns using the Sabin vaccine. In 1963, only one case of polio occurred in Cuba. . Despite those results, Sabin's grand idea did not catch on until 1985, when the Pan American Health Organization launched an

initiative to eradicate polio from the Americas. (Six years later, Luis Fermin Tenorio, a two-year-old boy in the town of Pichinaki, Peru, became the last polio victim in the Americas.)

In 1988, spurred by the campaign's growing success, the WHO committed itself to eradicating polio from the world. That year, Rotary International pledged a quarter of a billion dollars for the effort (it has since provided $350 million more). UNICEF agreed to organize the worldwide production and distribution of vaccine. And the United States made the campaign one of the CDC's core initiatives, supplying both expertise and considerable additional funding.

The centerpiece of the effort has been what are called national immunization days-three-day periods when all children under five in a country are immunized, regardless of whether they have received immunization before. In one week in 1997, 250 million children were vaccinated simultaneously in China, India, Bhutan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, and Burma. In each of the past three years, national immunization days have reached more than half a billion childrenalmost a tenth of the world's population. Through such efforts-and a reliable network of monitors to detect outbreaks-the WHO campaign has brought the incidence of polio in the world to less than one percent of what it used to be.

The striking thing is that the WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.

In India, a nation of a billion people, the WHO employs 250 physicians around the country to work full time on polio surveillance. The only substantial resource that the WHO has cultivated is information and expertise. I didn't understand how this could suffice. Then I went to Karnataka.

For the three days of the mop-up, I traveled through Karnataka with Pankaj Bhatnagar, a WHO pediatrician, whose job was to see that the operation was properly executed. He is in his forties, with a slight paunch and an easy, genial manner. This can be a tricky business, he explained as we waited in Delhi for our flight to Karnataka. The WHO provides much of the money for mop-up operations. UNICEF provides the vaccines. Rotary of India prints the banners and advocates locally for the cause.

But the operation itself is run by government health officials: they are the ones who must hire the thousands of vaccinators, train them properly, and send them from house to house.

We took a plane to Bangalore, then traveled eight hours

Left: A team of polio vaccinators uses a small boat to reach remote areas of the Brahmaputra flood plain in Assam in May. Right: A vaccinator catches a child getting off a boat in the South 24 Parganas district in West Bengal in August this year. Far right: A boy receives polio drops in old Delhi in November last yew:

overnight by train to Bellary, a crowded, dusty town that is the district seat for Upparahalla. At a small, strange hotel there (it had a safari theme), Pankaj convened the members of his team over breakfast. To monitor the immunization of four million children, he had just four people: three young medical officers and himself. They were the only ones available who spoke Kannada. The medical officers finished their breakfast of idli and dosa, and lit up cigarettes (in India, it seems, half the doctors who work in public health smoke), and then Pankaj asked for a status report.

Since the index case was identified, he was told, four more cases of confirmed polio had appeared in the region, and four "hot" cases were awaiting confirmatory testing. Of the 13 districts targeted for mop-ups, Bellary accounted for all but one of the cases.

"Then we must concentrate our monitoring in this district," Pankaj said. "This is now the place with the most intense transmission of polio in the world." Another doctor pulled out some figures on the area. Bellary district, he told Pankaj, has a population of 2,965,459, with 542 villages and nine urban towns.

Fifty-two percent of the males and 74 percent of the females are illiterate. There are just 99 doctors in the public-health system.

He turned to a map. The polio cases, he said, were clustered in a triangle of villages around Siriguppa, a small, slum-ridden town about 65 kilometers away.

Pankaj made his assignments. For the mop-up, he would cover at least Upparahalla; a village called Sirigere, where polio had appeared; the two urban areas with hot cases; and a mine in Chitradurga, where vaccinators might have particular difficulties gaining entry, because the housing was on the property of a private company. He divided the others among the remaining villages and asked them to follow up behind him for a second check in Upparahalla and the'urban areas. The group then split

up. By 8:30 in the morning, Pankaj and I were on the road.

We had a rented four-wheel-drive Toyota and a betel-nut-chewing driver who waited until we were an hour down a pitted road to tell us that the battery was dead. Whenever the engine was turned off, he said, we'd need to push-start the car. Pankaj thought this was funny.

The terrain outside the windows was baked by the hot sun, and the hills were desert-lizard brown. The monsoon had failed to come this year. Only the few fields that had drip irrigation looked green. It took us about two hours to travel the 55 kilometers to Sirigere, a village of mud-walled huts jammed up against one another. There was garbage in the alleyways, and dusty-faced children were playing everywhere. Pankaj had the driver stop at a group of dwellings seemingly at random. Marked in chalk on each door was a number, a "P," and that day's date. The number was the house number. The "P" meant that the vaccinators had come, identified all the children under the age of five who lived in the house, and vaccinated them-that very day, according to the date marked.

Pankaj took out a pad of paper and strode over to one of the huts.

He asked the young woman at the door how many children lived there. One, she said. He asked to see the child. When she found him, Pankaj took his hand and noted the black ink mark on the nail bed of his little finger-it's how the vaccinators tag the children who have received polio drops. Was any other child in the fields? Away at a relative's? No, she said. He asked if her boy had received routine immunizations before today. No, she said.

Had she heard about the polio case in town? She had. Had she heard about the vaccination team before the workers arrived at the door? She had not. He thanked her and wrote all the information down on a form before moving on.

So far, the workers had done their job, Pankaj said, several houses later. But he was disturbed that no one knew the vaccinators were coming that day. In addition to banners (we'd seen a couple hanging as we came into the village), they were supposed to use "miking" to reach the illiterate-au to-rickshaws with loudspeakers playing tapes announcing the upcoming campaign. Without that warning, some people would turn the vaccinators away.

Going around to a few more huts, we bumped into a vaccination team-a social-welfare worker wearing sandals, a blue sari, and a flower in her hair, and a younger, college-student volunteer with a flower in her hair, too, and a square blue cold box of vaccine slung over her shoulder. They were standing in front of

operation is organized. a hut they'd marked with an "X" instead of a "P"-the woman The medical officer's microplan was a sheaf of ragged paper, of the house had said that three children lived there, but one was with marker-drawn maps and penciled-in tables. The fIrst page absent and could not be vaccinated. Pankaj asked the vaccinators said that he had recruited 22 teams of two vaccinators each to to open their cold box. He checked the freezer packs inside-still cover a population of 34,144 people. "How do you know this frozen, despite the heat. He inspected the individual vaccine vials-still fresh. There was a gray-and-white target sign on each population estimate is right?" Pankaj asked. The officer replied vial. Did they know what it meant? That the vaccine was still that he'd done a house-to-house survey. Pankaj looked at the map-the villages in the area were spread out over more than 15 good, they said. What does it look like when the vaccine expires? kilometers. "How do you distribute the The white inside the target turns gray or . vaccine to the vaccinators who are far black, they said. Right answer. Pankaj To monitor the immunization away?" By vehicle, the officer said. "How moved on. of four million children, WHO many vehicles do you have?" Two, he We went to the home of the village's recent polio case. The girl was 18 said. "What are the vehicles?" One was an pediatrician Pankaj Bhatnagar ambulance. months old and silent. The mother, pregThe other was a rented car.

"And how does the supervisor get out to nant and with a three-year-old boy clinghad just four people: three ing to her side, laid her down on her the field?" There was a pause. The officer shuffled through the microplan. More back so that we could examine her. medical officers and himself. silence.

He did not know.

Neither leg would move. Lifting each one, Ifelt no resistance in the child's hips, her knees, her ankles.

Pankaj went on. Twenty-two teams would require about a hundred ice packs per day. "Why did you budget for only 150 ice Only four weeks had passed since she was stricken. She almost packs?" We are freezing them overnight for the next day, the officertainly was still contagious. cer explained. "Where?" He showed Pankaj his deep freezer.

Pankaj found three children visiting the house. He checked each of their hands. None had received polio drops yet.

Pankaj opened it up and pulled out the thermometer, which We gave the four-wheel-drive a push and made our way to revealed that the temperature was above freezing. The electricity Sirigere's primary health center, a few kilometers outside the vil- goes out, the officer explained. "What is your plan for that?" He had a generator. But when pressed to show it he was forced to lage. It was a drab, unpainted three-room concrete building. The admit that it wasn't really working, either. center's medical officer met us at the door. About 40 years old, with ironed slacks, a buttoned short-sleeve shirt, and the only Later, in Siriguppa, where two of the hot cases had appeared, college education in the area, he seemed eager to have our comwe walked the neighborhoods with another medical officer. The two hot cases, we found, were in a small Muslim enclave that pany. He offered tea and tried to make some small talk. But had sprouted up a few months earlier. Going door to door, Pankaj l?ankaj was all business. "May I see your microplan?" he asked . before we had even sat down. He was referring to the block-bylearned that almost none of the enclave's children had received block plan drawn up by each local officer. It is the key to how the routine immunizations. Some of the families seemed suspicious

of us, answering questions tersely or trying to avoid us altogether. We found one boy whom the vaccinators had missed. The previous year, rumors had circulated widely among Muslims that the Indian government was giving different drops to their male children in order to make them infertile. The rumors were thought to have been quashed by an education campaign and greater Muslim involvement in the immunization program. But one had to wonder.

Walking with a local doctor and a vaccination team through a village called Balkundi, we came to the home of a small, pretty woman, who had rings on her toes and a baby held loosely on her hip. Another child, a boy of about three, stood nearby, staring at our little crowd. Neither child had been vaccinated, so Pankaj asked if we could give them the polio drops. No, she said. She did not appear angry or afraid. Pankaj asked if she knew that a case of polio had appeared in her neighborhood. Yes, she said. But she still didn't want the drops given. Why? She would not say. Pankaj said O.K., thanked her for her time, and moved on to the next house.

"That's it?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

The local doctor had stayed behind, however, and when we looked back he was shouting at the mother: "Are you stupid?

Your children will become paralyzed.

They will die."

It was the one time I saw Pankaj angry.

He walked back and confronted the doctor.

"Why are you shouting?" Pankaj demanded. "Before, she was listening, at least. But now? She's not going to listen anymore."

"She is illiterate!" the doctor shot back, embarrassed to be rebuked so openly. "She does~'t know what is right for her child!"

"What does that matter?"

Pankaj replied. "Your shouting doesn't help anything. And neither does a story going around that we are forcing drops on people."

So far, few were refusing the drops, and that was good enough, he told me later. A single nasty rumor could destroy the whole operation.

One difficult question came up repeatedly-from local doctors, from villagers, from workers trudging house to house. The question was: Why? Why this huge polio campaign when what we need is-fill in the blank here-clean water (diarrheal illness kills 500,000 Indian children per year), better nutrition (half of children under three have stunted growth), working septic systems (which would help prevent polio as well as other diseases), irrigation (so a single rainless season would not impoverish farming families)? We saw neighborhoods that had had outbreaks of malaria, tuberculosis, cholera. But no one important had come to visit in years. Now one case of polio occurs and the infantry marches in?

There are some stock answers. We can do it all, goes one. We can eradicate polio and do better on the other fronts. In reality, though, choices are made. For that whole week, for instance, doctors in northern Karnataka had all but shut down their primary health clinics in order to carry out the polio-vaccination work.

Pankaj relies on a somewhat more persuasive line of argument: that ending polio is, in fact, worth diverting resources for.

In one village, I watched a resident demand to know why the government and the WHO weren't combating malnutrition there instead. There was only so much they could do, Pankaj said.

"And, if you're starving, becoming paralyzed certainly isn't going to help."

Still, you could make the same claim for almost any human problem that you decide to tackle-blindness or cancer or, for that matter, kidney stones. ("If you're starving, kidney pain certainly isn't going to help.") So far in the 16-year polio campaign, an estimated five million cases of paralytic polio have been

A health worker chalk-marking a house near Khuri village in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan in April this year to confirm polio coverage.

averted, and that is an extraordinary achievement. But the campaign has already cost three billion dollars, more than $600 a case. To put that in perspective, the Indian government's total budget for health care came to four dollars per person last year.

Even if the campaign succeeds in the eradication of polio, it is entirely possible that more lives would be saved in the future if the money were spent on, say, building proper sewage systems or improving basic health services. What's more, success is by no means assured. The WHO has had to extend its target date for eradication from 2000 to 2002, and then to 2005. In these final years of the campaign, more and more money is spent chasing the few hundred cases that keep popping up. A certain weariness

lion of the targeted 4.2 million children had been vaccinated. settles in. Around 24 million children are born in India each year, India has had just 36 cases of polio in the last three months of creating a new pool of potential polio victims the size of 2003 because of such efforts. There have been almost no cases Venezuela's entire population. Just to stay caught up, a mammoth campaign to immunize every child under the age of five during that time in northern India, a region that had more than a thousand cases in 2002. Pankaj and his colleagues believe that began in January this year. Stopping the very last case of polio, one official told me, might cost as much as $200 million. The they're finally close to their goal of eradication. And as India goes, so, we can expect, will the world. truth is, no cost-benefit calculus will tell us whether all that money is well spent.

Pankaj says that he has seen more than a thousand cases of There is, nonetheless, a kind of greatness in the elimination of polio in his career as a pediatrician. When we drove through the a terrible disease. We as a civilization have few things we can villages and towns, he could pick out polio victims at a glance. accomplish of genuinely lasting significance for mankind: we They were everywhere, I began to realize: the begger with two have built no pyramids, no Great Walls to stand for thousands of emaciated legs folded under him, rolling by on a wooden cart; years. It is, instead, through medicine that we may create our the man dragging his leg like a club down the street; the passerenduring monument. The eradication of smallpox and now, per- by with a contracted arm tucked against his side.

On the second day of the mop-up, we visited Upparahalla, the haps, polio will stand as our pyramids. village where the Karnataka outbreak had started. The first, But this means we must actually get down to that final polio case. Otherwise, the efforts of the hundreds of thousands of vol- index case of polio was now a 14-month-old boy with a healthy, unteers, the billions spent will have amounted to nothing, and almost muscular thickness about his upper body; after the first few days of his infection, his breathing had returned to normal. perhaps worse than nothing. To fail at this venture would put into question the very ideal of eradication.

But when his mother put him down on his stomach you could see Beneath the ideal is the gruelingly unglamthat his legs were withered. With the exerorous and uncertain work. But there is a sys- Even if the campaign cises the nurses had taught her to do with tem, and it has eradicated polio in countries him, he had regained enough movement in his left leg to be able to crawl, but his right with far worse conditions than I was seeing in succeeds in the India-for example, in Bangladesh, in eradication of polio, leg dragged limply behind him.

Vietnam, in Rwanda, in Zimbabwe. Polio was Making our way around the open eradicated from Angola in the midst of a civil it is entirely possible sewage, the mud-covered pigs, the cows war. An outbreak in Kandahar in 2002 was resting curled up like cats with their heads that more lives would halted by a WHO-led mop-up operation on their hooves, we found the neighbor despite the Afghan war. New mop-ups are now be saved in the future girl who had come down with polio after under way in northern Nigeria, where an outthe boy. She was 18 months old, with a if the money were big worried face, perfect white teeth, and break recently appeared and spread into neighshort spiky hair. Her mother wore an boring countries. In India, Pankaj told me, spent on improving impassive expression as she stood before there have been campaigns on camels in the Thar Dese'rt of Rajasthan, in jeeps among the basic health services. us in the sun, holding her paralyzed child. tribal communities of the Jharkhand forests, on Pankaj gently asked her if the girl had had power boats through flooded regions of Assam and Meghalaya, polio drops before-perhaps she'd received the vaccine but it on Navy cruisers traveling to remote islands in the Bay of had not taken. The mother said that a health worker had come Bengal. We covered about 1,600 kilometers in our Toyota in around with polio drops a few weeks before her daughter three days of going town to town. Outside the village of became sick. But she had heard from other villagers that chilBalkundi, we came upon several makeshift shanties for migrant dren were getting fevers from the drops. So she refused the vaccination. A look of profound sadness now swept over her. laborers, about six kilometers apart and not on any maps. When we checked the children, though they all had the vaccinators' ink She had not understood, she said, staring down at the ground.

Eventually, Pankaj continued onward, checking on the vaccinamarks on their pinkies. At Chitradurga, we found the mines in tors going door to door. Then, when he was finished, we left. The decay, but state officials had made sure that the company gave the vaccinators access to the workers' compound. With some road heading out of the village was a red dirt track and we rattled searching, we discovered a few children here and there. Every over it with our wheels in the ruts that the bullock carts had made. one of them had received the vaccine, too.

"What will you do when pobo is finally gone?" I asked Pankaj.

By the end of the mop-up, UNICEF officials had bought more than five million doses of fresh vaccine and distributed them "Well there is always measles," he said. through the 13 districts. They had blanketed television, radio, and local newspapers with public-service announcements.

About the Author: Atul Gawande is an assistant professor in the . Rotary of India had printed and delivered 25,000 banners, Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health.

60,000 posters, and more than 650,000 handbills. And four mil-

hen Steve Jobs cruises into the airy reception area on the Apple Computer campus in Cupertino, California, on a recent morning, nobody pays much attention to him, even though he's the company's CEO. He's wearing shorts, a black T-shirt and running shoes. Tall and a little gawky, Jobs has a fast, loping walk, like a wolf in a hurry. These days Jobs seems eager to distance himself from his barefoot youth-who was that crazy kid who once called the computer "a bicycle for the mind"q-and driven to prove himself as a clear-thinking Silicon Valley capitalist.

Jobs punches the elevator button to the fourth floor, where his small office is located. For a man who is as responsible as anyone for the wonder and chaos of Silicon Valley, Jobs' view of it all is surprisingly modest: shrubby treetops extending out toward San Francisco Bay, the distant whoosh of the freeway below.

There is nothing modest, however, about Apple's recent accomplishments. Last year, Jobs' company has rolled out the PowerMac G5, arguably the fastest desktop computer on the planet; has redesigned the Powerbook and iBook laptops; and introduced Panther, a significant upgrade of the OS X operating system. But Jobs' biggest move, and certainly the one closest to his heart, has been Apple's plunge into the digital-music revolution. It began two-and-a-half years ago, with the introduction of the iPod portable music player, which may be the only piece of Silicon Valley hardware that has ever come close to matching the lust factor of the original Macintosh. Then, in AprillCjst year, Apple introduced its

digital jukebox, the iTunes Music Store, first for the Mac, and then, in October, for Windows. The result: 20 million tracks downloaded, close to a million and a half iPods sold, aggressive deals with AOL and Pepsi, and lots of good PR for Apple as the savior of the music industry.

Still, Jobs's bet on digital music is a hugely risky move in many ways, not only because powerhouses such as Dell and Wal-Mart are gunning for Apple (and Microsoft will be soon, as well), but because success may depend on how well Jobs, a 48-year-old billionaire, is able to understand and respond to the fickle music-listening habits of 18-year-olds in their college dorms.

JEFF GOODELL: Do you see any parallel between the music revolution today and the PC revolution in 1984?

STEVE JOBS: Obviously, the biggest difference is that this time we're on Windows. Other than that, I'm not so sure. It's still very early in the music revolution. Remember, there are 10 billion songs that are distributed in the U.S. every yearlegally-on CDs. So far on iTunes, we've distributed about 16 million [as of October 2003]. So we're at the very beginning of this.

Bringing iTunes to Windows was obviously a bold move.

Did you do much hand-wringing over it?

I don't know what hand-wringing is. We did a lot of thinking about it. The biggest risk was that we saw people buying Macs just to get their hands on iPods. Taking iPods to Windows-that was the big decision. We knew once we did that that we were going to go all the way. I'm sure we're losing some Mac sales, but half our sales of iPods are to the Windows world already.

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How did the recor4 companies react when you initially approached them about getting onboard with Apple?

There are a lot of smart people at the music companies.

The problem is they're not technology people. The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person who's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates. It's an intuitive process. And the best music companies know how to do that with a reasonably high success rate.

I think that's a good thing. The world needs more smart editorial these days. The problem is that that has nothing to do with technology. When the Internet came along and Napster came along, people in the music business didn't know what to make of the changes. A lot of these folks didn't use computers, weren't on e-mail-didn't really know what Napster was for a few years. They were pretty doggone slow to react.

Matter of fact, they still haven't really reacted. So they're vulnerable to people telling them technical solutions will workwhen they won't.

Because of their technological ignorance.

Because of their technological innocence, I would say. When we first went to talk to these record companies-about 18 months ago-we said, "None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.Ds here who know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content."

Of course, music theft is nothing new. There have been bootlegs for years.

Of course. What's new is thjs amazingly efficient distribution

system for stolen property, called the Internet-and no one's gonna shut down the Internet.

And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. The way we expressed it to them was: You only have to pick one lock to open every door.

At first, they kicked us out. But we kept going back again and again. The first record company to really understand this stuff was Warner. Next was Universal. Then we started making headway. And the reason we did, I think, is because we made predictions. And we were right. We told them the music subscription services they were pushing were going to fail.

MusicNet was gonna fail, Pressplay was gonna fail. Here's why: People don't want to buy their music as a subscription.

They bought 45s; then they bought LPs; they bought cassettes; they bought 8-tracks; they bought CDs. They're going to want to buy downloads.

They didn't see it that way. There were people running . around-business-development people-who kept pointing to AOL as the great model for this and saying: "No, we want that-we want a subscription business."

Slowly but surely, as these things didn't pan out, we started to gain some credibility with these folks.

Despite the success of iTunes, it seems that it's a little early to call all of your competitors failures. RealNetworks' Rhapsody, for example, has won over some critics.

One question to ask these subscription services is how many subscribers they have. Altogether, it's around 50,000. And that's not just for Rhapsody, it's for the old Pressplay and the old Musicmatch. The subscription model of buying music is bank-

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rupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful.

When you went to see music executives, was there much comment about Apple s "Rip. Mix. Burn. " campaign? A lot of them regarded it as an invitation to steal music.

The person who assailed us over it was Michael Eisner.

Because he didn't have any teenage kids living at home, and he didn't have any teenage kids working at Disney whom he talked to, so he thought "rip" meant "rip off." And when somebody actually clued him in to what it meant, he did apologize.

Lately, the recording industry has been threatening to throw anyone caught illegally downloading music in jail. Is that a smart approach?

Well, I empathize with them. I mean, Apple has a lot of intellectual propeliy, and we really get upset when people steal our software, too. So I think that they're within their rights to try to keep people from stealing their product.

Our position from the beginning has been that 80 percent of the people stealing music onJine don't really want to be thieves.

But that is such a compelling way to get music. It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves-without a legal alternative, that offers those same benefits-rings hollow. We said, "We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves unless you can offer them a carrot-not just a stick."

And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience ... and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song.

The other thing we told the record companies was that if you go to Kazaa to download a song, the experience is not very good. You type in a song name, you don't get back a song-you get a hundred, on a hundred different computers. You try to download one, and, you know, the person has a slow connection, and it craps out. An~ after two or three have crapped out, you finally download a song, and four seconds are cut off, because it was encoded by a lO-year-old. By the time you get your song, it's taken 15 minutes. So that means you can download four an hour. Now some people are willing to do that. But a lot of people aren't.

You've sold about 20 millions songs on iTunes so far-it sounds like a big number, until you realize that billions of music files are swapped every year.

We're never going to top the illegal downJoading services, but our message is: Let's compete and win.

David Bowie predicted that, because of Internet and piracy, copyright is going to be dead in 10 years. Do you agree?

No. If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. But on another level entirely, it's just wrong to steal. Or let's put it this way: It is corrosive to one's character to steal. We want to provide a legal alternati ve.

Of course, a lot of college students who are grabbing music off Kazaa today don't see themselves as doing anything any different from what you did when you were a teenager, copying bootleg Bob Dylan tapes.

The truth is, it's really hard to talk to people about not stealing music when there's no legal alternative. The advent of a legal alternative is only six months old. Maybe there's been a generation of kids lost-and maybe not, who knows? Maybe they think stealing music is like driving 110 kilometers per hour on the freeway-it's over the speed limit, but what's the big deal? But I don't think that's the way it's going to stay, not with future generations, at least. But who knows? This is all new territory.

Apple has had a head start in the digital-music business, but obviously lots of other companies are getting into it now, too.

Last week, for example, Dell come out with its rival to the iPod, the Dell DJ. We will ship way more digitalmusic players than Dell this quarter. Way more. In the long run, we're going to be very competi-, tive. Our online store is better than Dell's. And we have retail channels. Most people don't want to buy one of these things through the mail. Dell's distribution model works against them when they get into consumer electronics. Like, they're going to be selling plasma TV s online. Would you ever buy a plasma TV without seeing it? No way.

And then there's Microsoft.

What happens to Apple when Bill Gates starts building an iTunes clone into the Windows desktop?

I'd answer that by saying I think Amazon does pretty well against Microsoft. So does eBay. So does Google. And AOL has actually done pretty well, too-contrary to a lot of the things people say. There are a lot of examples of companies offering services, Internet-based services, that have done quite well.

And Apple is in a pretty interesting position. Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac-it's recorded on a Mac; it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac. Almost every artist I've met has an iPod, and most of the music execs now have iPods. And one of the reasons Apple was able to do what we have done was because we are perceived by the music industry as the most creative technology company. And now we've created this music store, which I think is non-trivial to copy. I mean, to say that Microsoft can just decide to copy it, and copy it in six months-that's a big statement. It may not be so easy.

How about movies? Do you see an iTunes movie store?

We don't think that's what people want. A movie takes forever to download-there's no instant gratification.

Has it been difficult wooing artists to the iTunes store?

Most successful artists control the online distribution of their music. So even though they could do a deal with, say, Universal Music, the largest in the business, these companies

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weren't able to offer us their top 20 artists. So we had to go to each artist, one by one, and convince them, too. A few said, "We don't want to do that." Others said, "We'll let you distribute whole albums but not individual tracks." And we declined.

The store is about giving the users choice.

Do you expect that one day Apple will start signing musicians-and, in effect, become a record label?

Well, it would be very easy for us to sign up a musician. It would be very hard for us to sign up a young musician who was successful. Because that's what the record companies do.

We think there's a lot of structural changes that are probably gonna happen in the record industry, though. We've talked to a large number of artists who don't like their record company, and I was curious about that. The general reason they don't like the record company is because they think they've been really successful, but they've only earned a little bit of money.

They feel they've been ripped off.

They feel that. But then, again, the music companies aren't making a lot of money right now ...so where's the money going? Is it inefficiency? Is somebody going to Argentina with suitcases full of hundred-dollar bills? What's going on?

After talking to a lot of people, this is my conclusion: A young artist gets signed, and he or she gets a big advance-a million dollars, or more. And the theory is that the record company will earn back that advance as the artist is successful.

Except that even though they're really good at picking, only one or two out of the ten that they pick is successful. And so most of the artists never earn back that advance-so the record companies are out that money. Well, who pays for the ones that are the losers?

The winners pay. The winners pay for the losers, and the winners are not seeing rewards commensurate with their success.

And they get upset. So what's the remedy? The remedy is to stop paying advances. The remedy is to go to a gross-revenues deal and tell an artist, "We'll give you 20 cents on every dollar we get, but we're not gonna give you an advance. The accounting will be simple: We're gonna pay you not on profits-we're gonna pay you off revenues. It's very simple: The more successful you are, the more you'll earn. But if you're not successful, you will not earn a dime. We'll go ahead and risk some marketing money on you. But if you're not successful, you'll make no money. If you are, you'll make a lot more money." That's the way out. That's the way the rest of the world works.

So you see the recording industry moving in that direction?

No. I said I think that's the remedy. Whether the patient will swallow the medicine is another question.

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TRACING WOMEN'S HISTORY Professor Geraldine Forbes, a Fulbright scholar, tracks the history of Indian women through family photo albums

this lady, Shudha Mazumdar, exttime when you chance upon about her father and her great some timeworn photograph of uncle, intellectuals whom an unknown family of the past, I had already studied. Then I hidden in a drawer of heirloom furniture, began to listen to her and don't ignore it. If you look beyond its I was gradually led into common appearance, you may be able to another lesser-known world. see the layers of the past social reality Although she had an captured in the image. It might be an arranged marriage at age 11, interesting pastime for you, but it is more than that to American historian Geraldine she spoke English fluently and became a prominent Forbes, who "reads" photographs. She member of various organizadoes this by reconstructing the historical tions that helped women. In evidence and the circumstances in which the course of our conversathe photograph was taken. tion, she mentioned her perFor decades, she used old phosonal memoirs," explains tographs as new sources of unofficial Forbes.

This SOO-page docudata to trace the history of women in Suniti Majumdar and her friend Lalita. c.

1910. ment would later become India, thus turning the tranquil silence of Photographer J. Burlington Smith, Darjeeling. the first volume in Forbes' bromide prints into a tool to reveal the Bijoy Chandra Majumdar Collection.

"Foremother Legacies" series. forgotten past of Indian women's lives.

Photograph courtesy Sevati Mitra.

To understand Mazumdar's A distinguished professor in the departlife, Forbes needed to underment of history at the State University of New York at Oswego, Forbes was recently in India as a Fulbright stand other women of her generation who were born around fellow to complete a project on "Photographic Imagery in the 1900. Further, she found that her research could not depend History of Indian Women." In India she continued her research and solely on libraries and archives, where there was little information on Indian women, beyond a few politically famous ones. So worked with an archivist to develop a digital archive of her collection. This work was motivated by intimate writings and memoirs of she began to contact people who might have preserved personal papers, letters and associational records. Some people showed Indian women.

Her interest in Indian women began when she first carne to her photographs too. This sparked her interest in the potential of visual images as historical documents. In the 1980s, she made India in 1969 as a graduate student studying 19th-century intellectual history of Bengal. One of her sources introduced her to three trips to India to research photographic collections and interview women who had been active in the social and political an elderly family member. "They sent me to meet their aunt who movements of the first half of the 20th century. "At that time I was referred to as their 'family historian.' Initially I only asked

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wanted to understand India's women in their own terms," says Forbes. "When women talked about photographs, they recounted events not included in their autobiographies or oral interviews, and talked, often elliptically, about people not in the photos and memoirs." This led her to rethink questions related to individual life histories, and upon further reflection, to explore the ways photographs can be utilized in writing women's history. She is convinced that this work is significant for the field.

Forbes thinks that these family albums are richer sources than photographic collections found in most archives and libraries. She identifies the date, where the photograph was taken, whether taken by a professional or amateur, and who is in the photograph. She hunts for individuals who can tell her more about the photograph. "I did not find as much archival photography as I had expected, but people began to invite me to their houses, and I discovered family albums," she explains. Her discoveries raised more questions, for example, about what women wore when they marched in demonstrations, how they fashioned themselves for women's meetings, and the difference between their public and plivate selves.

Most of the women Forbes spoke to then are now deceased.

One of her ftrst informants was Krishnabai Rau Nimbkar, a physician and a politically active Gandhian who lived in Pune in her later years. Born in 1906 in Madras, she chose education over getting married young.

Forbes met Nimbkar while researching women who led protests during the early 1930s. She had a rich collection of photographs that documented her childhood and youth and her political and social reform activities. "One of the photos I saw," Forbes says, "was of a party thrown for the women who had been in Vellore jail. The photo itself was not well composed or especially clear, in fact, had it not been identified, I would have assumed it was a community get-together. While showing it to me, Nimbkar began to point out other people in the ']Jhotograph- 'this was my sis-

Sunity Ghosh, Calcutta,1912.

Photograph courtesy Bourne & Shepherd.

Krishnabai Rau in her graduation robe (BA in zoology, 1926); her mother Kamalabai Rau (seated), and her brother Ramchandran Rau, Madras.

Photographer unknown.

Zarine Aibara with camera in her father's garden in Secunderabad, c. 1933. From the Shire en Aibara Collection.

Photographer unknown.

ter' -and went on to identify her aunt, another relative, and friends who had gone to prison with her. It was the first time that anyone had stressed the family and friendship connections of women in jail during the struggle for independence and it changed my perception of the experience."

Another woman whose extensive collection of photographs Forbes saw was Manmohini Zutshi Sahgal (born 1909), a niece of Jawaharlal Nehru who, with her sisters and mother, led women in protests against the British in Lahore. Many of her photographs were of her mother, Lado Rani Zutshi, a freedom fighter and advocate of women's rights. The photographs of Lado Rani's four daughters in a tent on vacation in Kashmir, playing musical instruments, and going to school, prompted Sahgal to talk about her mother's boldness in insisting that daughters were as valuable as sons. Sent to school and then college and university, all four daughters excelled in their studies and became involved in politics. Among Sahgal's collection were a number of snapshots of annual Congress Party sessions where she had served as a volunteer. "The candid shots begin to

explain the attraction of this activIty for young women. It became evident that even though the rules for girls were very strict, they were away from home and were able to meet famous leaders and have adventures," she says.

Kalyani Mukhjerjee Mallik (born 1904), the daughter of Hiranmoyee Devi, niece of Saraladevi Chaudhurani, and granddaughter of Swarnakumari Devi, was the first woman to complete a Ph.D. in philosophy at Calcutta University in 1946.

Unlike many women born at that time-even in elite familiesKalyani was photographed from the time she was a baby. She received an excellent and unusual education, especially in Indore, where her father became director of public instruction.

Showing Forbes a photo of her driving a car, Mallik mentioned that she was one of the first women to drive in Calcutta and that her 'daring' was a result of her early years in Indore where she learned to ride horses, hunt, and ride a bicycle. Having passed her FA before marriage, Mallik continued postgraduate study while she had seven children. Her photograph collection was an interesting mix of graduations, "old girl" reunions, babies, and her children lined up in a row.

Forbes saw the collections of women primarily from Calcutta and Bombay. She wanted to focus on these two cities because these were the most progressive in terms of women's education, social and political organizations, and had photographic studios and societies from the 1840s. In her words, "What I have wanted to trace are details of women's lives such as, who attended events, the objects people surrounded themselves with, and clothing and hair styles. Often it also becomes clear that families made choices about the photographer, events to be photographed, who to include, how they would be arranged, what they would wear and so on. In contrast to men, women's identity was linked primarily with marriage and we can see this pattern in more traditional families, some of whom photographed women only at the time of marriage." She explains that from the beginning of the 20th century, there were families who photographed their daughters from birth, and some women have photographic life-histories that are almost identical to those of their brothers.

Many collections include those of women often doing extraordinary things for the era such as driving a car, riding a horse, swimming, or skiing. There are other photos that mark birthdays, graduation ceremonies, marriages and the birth of children. Forbes' archives are a rich source of data about the history of women in colonial India. While much of the work on photographs to date deals with those that have been institutionally archived, Forbes is working primarily with family photographs.

She believes that they are far richer-"there are thousands more photos in private homes than in any archive." Forbes says they are less distorted: "In archives they are often cropped, rearranged, and specific information about them is lost." Apart from using the photographic collections in smaller libraries, she has looked at photographs in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, and the Sound and Picfure Archives for Research on

Women (SPARROW) in Mumbai. She has also used the photographic collections of some studios, notably of Calcutta-based Bourne & Shepherd before it was destroyed in a fire in 1991, and of R.R. Bharadwaj, one of the early Indian photographers.

Forbes says: "It's increasingly difficult to find the kind of collections I had access to 20 years ago. The pressure of time, the splitting up of families, conditions of ownership, all these are factors that make it difficult to locate well- Geraldine Forbes and Sevati Mitra looking at preserved collections," she admits. It is usually photographs from the Bijoy Chandra Majumdar the females of a family Collection in Calcutta in who are expected to July 2004. Bijoy was put forth the labor to Sevati's maternal keep family archives, grandfather. Photograph a difficult task in the by Bikas Bose. heat and humidity of the tropics.

Forbes wants to develop a shareable archive with the colonial-period photographs she has already collected and to prepare lectures to share her findings with scholars at colleges and universities in India. She explains: "We generally treat text documents as stable. But when we use photographs we realize how unstable they are. For example, one day a woman might look at a school picture and tell a story about hair and grandmothers.

The next day the same person might look at the same photograph, and tell a story about her best friend. Photographs can elicit extremely interesting information from subjects and this infonnation may not have arisen in any other circumstance. But, this information raises questions about 'what is true?' and 'what is the real story?' I don't think there is a 'real story' -which means I believe we must always be aware of the context of historical evidence. Working with photographs makes one acutely aware of the complexities of memory and history and the importance of establishing context."

Forbes hopes that looking at the photographs will add to our understanding of women's history. Conventional history has privileged public space over private space, political activities over those in the domestic realm, and the achievements of men over the achievements of women. Researcher Geraldine Forbes has brought an important contextual dimension to historical studies.

0 About the Author: Romain Maitra is a freelance writer, a critic of art forms, and a seniorfellow of the Department of Culture.

there t's on a monitor: the forest is breathing. Late summer sunlight filters through a canopy of green as Steven Wofsy unlocks a shed in a Massachusetts woodland and enters a room stuffed with equipment and tangled with wires and hoses.

The machinery monitors the vital functions of a small section of Harvard Forest in the center of the state. Bright red numbers dance on a gauge, flickering up and down several times a second.

The reading reveals the carbon dioxide concentration just above the treetops near the shed, where instruments on a 30-meter tower of steel lattice sniff the air. The numbers are running surprisingly low for the beginning of the 21st century: around 360 parts per million, 10 less than the global average. That's the trees' doing. Basking in the sunshine, they inhale carbon dioxide and turn it into leaves and wood.

In nourishing itself, this patch of pine, oak, and maple is also undoing a tiny bit of a great global change driven by humanity.

Start the car, turn on a light, adjust the thermostat, or do just about anything, and you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

If you're an average resident of the United States, your contribution adds up to more than five tons of carbon a year.

The coal, oil, and natural gas that drive the industrial world's economy all contain carbon inhaled by plants hundreds of millions of years ago-carbon that now is returning to the atmosphere through smokestacks and exhaust pipes, joining emissions from forest burned to clear land in poorer countries. Carbon dioxide is foremost in an array of gases from human activity that increase the atmosphere's ability to trap heat. (Methane from cattle, rice fields, and landfills, and the chlorofluorocarbons in some refrigerators and air conditioners are others.) Few scientists doubt that this greenhouse warming of the atmosphere is already taking hold. Melting glaciers, earlier springs, and a steady rise in global average temperature are just some of its harbingers.

By rights it should be worse. Each year humanity dumps roughly eight billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, 6.5 billion tons from fossil fuels and 1.5 billion from deforestation. But less than half that total, 3.2 billion tons, remains in the atmosphere to warm the planet. Where is the missing carbon? "It's a really major mystery, if you think about it," says Wofsy, an atmospheric scientist at Harvard University. His research site in the Harvard Forest is apparently not the only place where nature is breathing deep and helping save us from ourselves. Forests, grasslands, and the waters of the oceans must be acting as carbon sinks. They steal back roughly half of the carbon dioxide we emit, slowing its buildup in the atmosphere and delaying the effects on climate.

Who can complain? No one, for now. But the problem is that scientists can't be sure that this blessing will last, or whether, as the globe continues to warm, it might even change to a curse if forests and other ecosystems change from carbon sinks to sources, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb. The doubts have sent researchers into forests and rangelands, out to the tundra and to sea, to track down and understand the missing carbon.

This is not just a matter of 'intellectual curiosity. Scorching

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summers, fiercer storms, altered rainfall patterns, and shifting species-the disappearance of sugar maples from New England, for example-are some of the milder changes that global warming might bring. And humanity is on course to add another 200 to 600 parts per million to atmospheric carbon dioxide by late in the century. At that level, says Princeton University ecologist Steve Pacala, "all kinds of terrible things could happen, and the universe of terrible possibilities is so large that probably some of them will." Coral reefs could vanish; deserts could spread; currents that ferry heat from the tropics to northern regions could change course, perhaps chilling the British Isles and Scandinavia while the rest of the globe keeps warming.

If nature withdraws its helping hand-if the carbon sinks stop absorbing some of our excess carbon dioxide-we could be facing drastic changes even before 2050, a disaster too swift to avoid. But if the carbon sinks hold out or even grow, we might have extra decades in which to wean the global economy from carbon-emitting energy sources. Some scientists and engineers believe that by understanding natural carbon sinks, we may be able to enhance them or even create our own places to safely jail this threat to global climate.

The backdrop for these hopes and fears is a natural cycle as real as your own breathing and as abstract as the numbers on Wofsy's instruments. In 1771, about the time of the first stirrings of the industrial revolution and its appetite for fossil fuel, an English minister grasped key processes of the natural carbon cycle. In a series of ingenious experiments, Joseph Priestley found that flames and animals' breath "injure" the air in a sealed jar, making

lone in a sealed jar, a mouse would die

A

ft;om exhaled CO2, But as scientist Joseph Priestley observed in 1771, adding a mint plant allows the mouse to thrive.

it unwholesome to breathe. But a green sprig of mint, he found, could restore its goodness. Priestley could not name the gases responsible, but we know now that the fire and respiration used up oxygen and gave off carbon dioxide. The mint reversed both processes. Photosynthesis took up the carbon dioxide, converted it into plant tissue, and gave off oxygen as a by-product.

The world is just a bigger jar. Tens of billions of tons of carbon a year pass between land and the atmosphere: given off by living things as they breathe and decay and taken up by green plants, which produce oxygen. A similar traffic in carbon, between marine plants and animals, takes place within the waters of the ocean. And nearly a hundred billion tons of carbon diffuse back and forth between ocean and atmosphere.

Compared with these vast natural exchanges, the few billion tons of carbon that humans contribute to the atmosphere each year seem paltry. Yet like a finger on a balance, our steady contributions are throwing the natural cycle out of whack. The atmosphere's carbon backup is growing: Its carbon dioxide level has risen by some 30 percent since Priestley's time. It may now

be higher than it has been in at least 20 million years.

Pieter Tans is one of the scientists trying to figure out why those numbers aren't even worse. At a long, low National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) laboratory set against pine-clad foothills in Boulder, Colorado, Tans and his colleagues draw conclusions from the subtlest of clues. They measure minute differences in the concentration of carbon dioxide in air samples collected at dozens of points around the globe by weather stations, airplanes, and ships.

These whiffs of air are stacked against a wall in Tans's lab in 2.5-liter glass flasks. Because the churning of the atmosphere spreads carbon dioxide just about evenly around the planet, concentrations in the bottles don't differ by more than a fraction of a percent. But the differences hold clues to the global pattern of carbon dioxide sources and sinks. Scientists calculate, for example, that carbon dioxide should pile up in the Northern Hemisphere, which has most of the world's cars and industry.

But the air samples show a smaller than expected difference from south to north. That means, Tans says, that "there has to be a very large sink of carbon in the Northern Hemisphere."

Other clues in the air samples hint at what that sink is. Both the waters of the ocean and the plants on land steal carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But they leave different fingerprints behind. Because plants give off oxygen when they absorb carbon dioxide, a plant sink would lead to a corresponding oxygen increase. But when carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, no oxygen is added to the atmosphere.

Plants taking in carbon dioxide also change what they leave

behind. That's because plants prefer gas that contains carbon 12, a lighter form of the carbon atom. The rejected gas, containing carbon 13, builds up in the atmosphere. The ocean, though, does not discriminate, leaving the carbon ratio unchanged. From these clues, Tans and others have found that while the ocean is soaking up almost half the globe's mission carbon-two billion tons of it-the sink in the Northern Hemisphere appears to be the work of land plants. Their appetite for carbon dioxide surges and ebbs, but they remove, on average, more than two billion tons of carbon a year.

Forests like Wofsy's are one place where it's happening. For more than a decade his group has monitored the carbon dioxide traffic between the trees and the air. Instruments on his tower track air above the treetops as wind and solar heating stir it. As each waft of air passes the tower, sensors measure its carbon dioxide content. The theory is simple, says Wofsy: "If an air parcel going up has less carbon dioxide than an air parcel going down, you have carbon dioxide being deposited onto the forest."

The amount changes fast. "Sunshine, perhaps the temperature, rainfall over the past week-all those factors affect what the forest does on an hour-to-hour basis," he says. Even a passing cloud can dampen photosynthesis, spoiling the trees' appetite for carbon. In winter, when leaves fall and decay, more carbon dioxide-a by-product of plant respiration and decomposition-seeps back out of the forest and into the atmosphere.

Still, over more than 10 years, the bottom line of billions of measurements has been positive. On balance, Harvard Forest is sieving carbon from the atmosphere.

It shows in the trees and on the forest floor. To check that their high-tech air measurements weren't somehow being fooled, Wofsy's group strapped calibrated steel bands around trees to measure their growth, gathered and weighed deadfall, and set up bins to collect fallen leaves. The idea was to measure just how much carbon-containing wood and other organic matter was building up in the forest, and to see if it matched the gas measurements. It did.

Each acre of the forest has been taking roughly three-quarters of a ton of carbon out of the atmosphere annually, doing its humble part to counteract greenhouse warming.

Other forests at research sites in the eastern United States are putting on weight as well. That's no surprise, Wofsy says. "In the eastern U.S., the most common age for a forest is 40 to 60 years.

That's the kind of forest that's going to be growing."

The current Harvard Forest, in fact, has a precise birth date: 1938, when a hurricane barreled in from the Atlantic and leveled earlier stands of trees. Elsewhere in the U.S. humans were the hurricane, clearing vast stands of forest for farming. Abandoned in the early 20th century as agriculture shifted westward to the plains, the land is yielding to forest again. The trees, still young, are getting taller and stouter and putting on denser wood. Year by year this slow alchemy locks up carbon in thousands of square kilometers of eastern forest.

More missing carbon could be hiding in the West. Fire once regularly swept the grasslands, rejuvenating them while killing off woody shrubs like mesquite, juniper, and scrub oak. Decades of firefighting policies called for dousing the smallest blaze and allowed the brush to thrive. The practice disrupted the grasslands' natural cycle and led to bulkier, woodier brush that fueled larger, more destructive fires. But it may also have created a major storehouse for carbon. All told, forest and scrub across the 48 states could be taking in half a billion tons of carbon, balancing out more than a third of the emissions from U.S. cars and factories., It's a huge gift, says Wofsy: "That's at least four times what they were trying with Kyoto"-the climate treaty that the U.S. refused to ratify-"and it hasn't hurt anyone."

Princeton's Pacala: "You go to the far north, and it's just palpable how much warming there is."

Indeed it is. While the world as a whole has warmed by about one degree Fahrenheit since 1900, parts of Alaska have warmed by five degrees. Brad Griffith studies caribou at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he has noticed a change in the winters. He remembers clear, cold days and powder snow. "It was never slick, never cloudy; you never had to clean your windshield." Now the winters are warmer, wetter, and slushier. The shrubs on the North Slope seem to love the change, and Griffith has found that the lusher forage gives newborn caribou a better shot at survival.

That's the good news from the north: Right now global warming, ironically, may be helping forestall even more warming, by speeding the growth of carbonabsorbing trees. But balanced against that are warning signs-hints that northern ecosystems could soon turn against us. Eventually, warming in the far north may have what scientists call a positive feedback effect, in which warming triggers new floods of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, driving temperatures higher.

Worrisome signs begin on the aircraft approach to Anchorage. As the route skirts the 160-kilometer-wide Kenai Peninsula, ugly gray gaps ap~ear in the dark green canopy of spruce below. Since the early 1990s bark beetles have been on the rampage in the Kenai, killing spruce on more than 800,000 hectares there. Farther south in the Kenai, says Glenn Juday, a forest ecologist at the University of Alaska, skeletal trees stretch from hori~ zon to horizon. "It's the largest single area of trees killed by insects in North America," says Juday. "No outbreak this size has happened in the past 250 years."

The vast tracts of dead trees will ultimately send their carbon back to the atmosphere when decay or fire consumes them. A warming climate is likely to

Oceans have a mighty appetite for swallowing carbon dioxide.

That leaves more than 1.5 billion tons of missing carbon to account for in the Northern Hemisphere. Mature forests, such as tropical rain forest and the great belt of coniferous forest across Alaska and Canada, probably can't help because they're in a steady state, taking in no more carbon dioxide for growth than they give off (plants breathe too). But Europe's managed woodlands, new forests planted in China, and forests regrowing in Siberia after decades of logging could account for another half billion tons, researchers say.

Then there is a change in the far north, where satellite measurements over the past 20 years have shown that vegetation is getting lusher and enjoying a longer growing season. Natives of the North American Arctic report a new luxuriance on the tundra, where once stunted plants, such as dwarf birch, willow, and alder, are growing tallE!r. The reason is simple, says

blame, Juday and others believe. Warmth favors the beetle by speeding up its life cycle and improving its chance of surviving the winter. And as Juday has found in his study area, warming also stresses the hardy northern trees, making them less able to fight off infestation.

Four hundred thirty-five kilometers north of the Kenai, on a hillside just west of Fairbanks, the Parks Loop Stand appears to the unschooled eye to be thriving. But Juday, who has worked in this grove of 30-meter-tall white spruce for 15 years, knows practically every tree's biography-and he is concerned.

Heavier, wetter snowfalls have broken off branches and crowns.

The trees have also been assaulted by a pest new to northern Alaska, the spruce bud worm.

The first outbreak of spruce bud worm in this region was recorded in 1989, and Juday thinks the warmer climate is again

to blame. Sickly orange branches high in the trees and ragged spruce seedlings festooned with black pupae show that the budworm is still at work. "This was a healthy, beautiful white spruce stand," says Juday. But so many trees have died that the formerly dense canopy has opened up, and the moss that carpeted the shadowy floor has given way to sun-loving grasses.

It's not just the snow and the pests. On the jagged stump of a recently fallen tree Juday points to another fingerprint of warming. The 200-year-old tree's growth rings are thick at the core of the stump, but the outermost rings, representing the tree's last few decades of life, are as thin as puff pastry layers. Juday believes the tree's growth has been slowing because of hotter summers. Thin rings are a sign that the trees are undergoing stress, running short of water in the heat.

Since that finding, Juday's group has examined cores from black spruce, another major tree type in interior Alaska. It too grows more slowly in warmer yeafs because of moisture stress.

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ovely carbon reservoirs-seashells to the layman-pile up on surf-blasted rocks on Florida's Sanibel Islands. Oceans act as sinks, soaking up huge amounts of carbon dioxide. A share of that is used by mollusks to build shells that remain long after their occupants die.

The future of the northern forest could be bleak. Assuming that Alaska continues to warm at the rate some climate models predict, Juday's analysis points to "zero white-spruce growth" by 2090. If that happened, the boreal forest as we know it would be no more. A smaller carbon storehouse could take its place-perhaps a grassy parkland dotted with aspen groves, Juday suggests.

Substantial amounts of carbon dioxide could be released into the atmosphere from the corpse of the old forest.

Across the far north a still bigger pulse of greenhouse gas

W)'here is the missing carbon?

W Oceans and forests are absorbing, at least for now, roughly half of the eight billion tons of carbon that humanity is pouring into the atmosphere each year. Even photosynthesizing bacteria living in a thermal pool do their part absorbing CO2â&#x20AC;˘ The continued ability of sinks to absorb carbon may vanish if global warming persists. Higher water temperatures would reduce the ability of oceans to dissolve CO2, limiting the carbon available to phytoplankton, the aquatic plants that begin the food chain for creatures ranging from whales to sea urchins (left). Increased odds of drought and fire threaten the health of terrestrial sinks like a cedar forest (right). With rising temperatures, decomposition would quicken, releasing carbon faster from decaying animals (below) and vegetation (far right).

Tens of billions of tons of carbon a year pass between land and the could come from the soil. In a somber grove of black spruce on the broad floodplain of the Tanana River south of Fairbanks, Jamie Hollingsworth, who manages an ecological research site at the University of Alaska, sinks a 1.2-meter steel probe into a damp carpet of moss. It slips in easily at first, then stops abruptly about one meter in. Hollingsworth digs through a 35-centimeter-thick layer of moss, roots, and decaying needles, then scoops aside a silty soil below until his shovel grates on the hard permafrost that defeated the probe. Chipping off a clod or two, he reveals silvery veins of ice.

That eternal ice is in jeopardy across much of the far north.

Near Fairbanks, at the heart of Alaska, the soil has warmed as much as three degrees Fahrenheit over the past 40 years, putting large tracts of permafrost in danger of thawing. Here and thereeven at spots on the university campus--it has already crossed the threshold, and melting has left the ground unstable and boggy. Farther north there's a larger margin of safety.

Fires can speed up the melting. In the summer of 2001 a fire raced through a hundred thousand hectares of floodplain forest along the Tanana. The charred snags now stand on bare sand and silt, in many places burned clean of the usual thick moss carpet.

The moss is critical to the permafrost: It insulates the soil, keeping

The atmospheric level of carbon dioxide could jump by a hundred parts per million as a result, he says-more than 25 percent above current levels.

So where in nature can we look for salvation? Until recently climate scientists hoped it would come from farther south. In temperate and tropical vegetation, they thought, a negative feedback effect called carbon fe11ilization might rein in the carbon dioxide rise. Plants need carbon dioxide to grow, and scientists have found that in laboratory chambers well-nourished plants bathed in high-carbon dioxide air show a surge of growth. So out in the real world, it seemed, plants would grow faster and faster as carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, stashing more carbon in their stems, trunks, and roots and helping to slow the atmospheric buildup. Such a growth boost could, for example, turn mature tropical forests-which normally don't soak up any more carbon than they give off-into carbon dioxide sponges.

Alas, it appears not to work. At Duke University's forest in North Carolina, William Schlesinger and his colleagues have been giving 30-meter-wide plots of pines a sniff of the future.

Over each plot a ring of towers emits carbon dioxide at just the right rate to keep the concentration in the trees at 565 parts per million, the level the real atmosphere might reach by mid-century. When the experiment started seven years ago, the trees showed an initial pulse of growth.

"These trees woke up to high carbon dioxide and were able to make good with it for a couple of years," says Schlesinger. But then the growth spurt petered out, and the trees' growth has slipped most of the way back to normal. That's not to say that high carbon dioxide didn't have some long-term effects. Poison ivy, for some reason, "is one of the winners," says Schlesinger, with a sustained growth rate 70 percent faster than normal. And allergy sufferers will not be pleased to learn that the carbon dioxide-fertilized pines produced extravagant amounts of pollen.

To take advantage of a carbon dioxide bonanza, it seems, most plants also need extra nitrogen and other nutrients. Schlesinger's experiment is one of many to show lately that in the real world, more carbon just means plants will probably run short of something else essential. Resurgent forests are soaking up plenty of carbon now, but we owe that mainly to our ax-wielding forebears,

it at subfreezing temperatures and helping preserve the ice through the summer. Any permafrost in the fire zone is now in danger of thawing-and hotter summers have made fires more common in many parts of the north, including Siberia and western Canada.

Climate experts keep a wonied eye on the permafrost because vast reserves of peat and other carbon-rich organic material are frozen into it-a global trove of carbon estimated at 200 billion tons. For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years low temperatures entombed it. Now, says TeITy Chapin of the University of Alaska, "it's potentially a very large time bomb."

The permafrost's full megatonnage isn't certain. Some of the subterranean ice would create bogs when it melted, and the oxygen-poor waters of bogs can inhibit decay and keep the carbon locked up. But northern warming could well bring a drier climate, and that could open the way to a worst-case scenario, says NOAA's Tans. "If, due to warming in the Arctic, the permafrost warmed up and dried out, most of that carbon could be released."

atmosphere: given off by living things as they breathe and decay. ~ (? ~ ~ ~ ~

who cleared the land in centuries past. That land sink is not likely to increase by much, say scientists. And it will eventually saturate as today's young forests mature. "We can expect this sink to disappear on the order of a hundred years," says Princeton's Pacala. "You can't count on it to keep getting larger, like manna from heaven, the way a carbon-fertilization sink would."

The outlook for an increased ocean sink is no brighter. Taro Takahashi of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has spent decades on oceanographic research ships, making thousands of carbon dioxide measurements just above and just below the water surface to track the exchange of gas

between the ocean and the atmosphere.

The North Atlantic and the southern oceans have cold, nutrient-rich waters that welcome carbon dioxide, Takahashi has found. Carbon dioxide dissolves easily in cold water, and the nutrients foster marine-plant growth that quickly uses up the dissolved carbon dioxide. When the plants and the animals that feed on them die and sink into the abyss, their remains carry away the carbon and make room for more.

The traffic mostly goes the other way in warmer, less biologically rich seas. But the global balance is favorable, for now at least. More carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans than is given off. Takahashi's measurements confirm that the oceans take up nearly as much carbon as the regrowing forests and thickening brush on land: an average of two billion tons a year. "One-half of the missing carbon is ending up in the ocean," Takahashi says.

That may be as good as it gets, he adds. "My major question is whether the ratio is going to change" as global warming raises the temperature of surface waters and carbon dioxide continues to build up in the atmosphere. "The prognosis is not particularly bright," Takahashi says. A warm soda fizzing over the rim of a glass illustrates one effect: carbon dioxide is less soluble in warmer water.

What's more, dissolved carbon dioxide can easily slip back into the atmosphere unless it is taken up by a marine plant or combines with a "buffer" molecule of carbonate.

But the ocean's supply of carbonate is limited and is replenished only slowly as it is washed into the ocean by rivers that erode carbonate-containing rocks such as limestone. In absorbing those two billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere year after year, the ocean is gradually using up its buffer supply. Jorge Sarmiento, an oceanographer at Princeton University, has been trying to predict the impact of such changes on the ocean's ability to act as a carbon dioxide sponge. He expects that over the next century, its carbon appetite will drop by 10 percent-and it may ebb much further in the long run.

With no new help from nature in sight, perhaps it is time for us to think about creating our own carbon sinks. Scientists have dreamed up plenty of possibilities: planting new forests, for example, which the Kyoto climate treaty would encourage. The approach has already taken root on a grand scale in China, where the government has planted tens of millions of hectares since the 1970s. The bureaucrats set out to control floods and erosion, not stem global change, but the effect has been to soak up nearly half a billion tons of carbon.

Steve Wofsy sees another possibility in his forest studies.

Young forests like his study plot are hungry for carbon right now because they are growing vigorously. So why not try to keep a forest young indefinitely, by regular thinning? "You manage it so that every year or every 10 years you take out a certain amount of wood" to be used in, say, paper, housing, and furniture, Wofsy says. "You might have a situation where you could make the land-

scape continue to take up carbon for a long time-indefinitely."

Then there's the siren call of the sea. Although as Sa.llniento points out the ocean's natural uptake is dwindling, scientists have tried to find a way to give a boost to its carbon appetite. In the 1980s oceanographer John Martin suggested that across large tracts of ocean, the tiny green plants that are the marine equivalent offorests and grasslands are, in effect, anemic. What keeps them from flourishing-and perhaps sucking up vast quantities of carbon dioxideis a lack of iron. Mattin and others began to talk of a "Geritol solution" to global warming: Send out a fleet of converted oil tankers to sprinkle the oceans with an iron compound, and the surge of plant growth would cleanse the air of industrial emissions. As the plants and the animals that grazed on them died and sank, the cat'bon in their tissues would be safely locked away in the deep ocean.

Reality has not been quite so elegant. Experiments have shown that Martin was partly right: A dash of iron sulfate does cause the ocean's surface waters to bloom with patches of algae tens of kilometers long, so vivid they can be seen by satellites.

Carbon circulates at speeds ranging from .rapid to infinitesimally slow.

But oceanographers monitoring what happens in the water have been disappointed to find that when the extra plants and the animals they nourish die, their remains mostly decay before they have a chance to sink and be buried. The carbon dioxide from the decay nC?urishes new generations of plants, reducing the need for extra carbon from the atmosphere. Nature is just too thrifty for iron fertilization to work.

Perhaps carbon can be deep-sixed without nature's help: filtered from power plant emissions, compressed into a liquid, and pumped into ocean depths. Three thousand meters down, water pressure would squeeze liquid carbon dioxide to a density great enough to pool on the seafloor, like vinegar in a bottle of salad dressing, before dissolving. At shallower depths it would simply disperse. Either way environmentalists and many scientists are wary of the scheme because injecting vast quantities of carbon dioxide would slightly acidify the deep ocean and might harm some marine life. Last year protesters forced scientists to cancel experiments meant to test the idea, fust near Hawaii and then off Norway.

But Peter Brewer, who is studying the scheme at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, says it's too early to write it off. Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will acidify the ocean's sUiface waters in any case, he points out, and pumping some of the carbon into the ocean depths could slow that process. "Why would you want to take this off the table before

E

ons pass before carbon, locked up in limestone, erodes off Mount Reynolds in Montana (right) or, buried in the crust, issues as a gas from a volcanic vent or emerges as windtossed pollen (below).

you know what it does?" he asks.

The most fitting end for the carbon that human beings have tapped from the Earth, in coal, oil, and gas, would be to send it back where it came from-into coal seams, old oil and gas fields, or deep, porous rock formations. Not only would that keep the carbon out of the atmosphere, but the high-pressure injection could also be used to chase the last drops of oil or gas out of a depleted field.

In fact geologic sequestration, as it's called, is already under way. One field in the North Sea, for example, yields gas that is . heavily contaminated with natural carbon dioxide. So before shipping the gas, the Norwegian oil company Statoil filters out

the carbon dioxide and injects it into a sandstone formation a kilometer below the seafloor. The U.S. Department of Energy plans to start its own test project, which would drill a 3,OOO-meter well in West Virginia and pump carbon dioxide into the deep rock.

No one knows yet how well such schemes might work in the long run. Tapped-out oil and gas fields are, by nature, full of manmade holes that might leak the carbon dioxide. Even if the stored gas didn't leak straight to the surface, it might seep into groundwater supplies. But the North Sea project seems to be working well eight years after it began. Seismic images that offer views beneath the ocean floor show that the thick layer of clay capping the sandstone is effectively sealing in the six million tons of carbon dioxide injected so far.

That's encouraging news for researchers who are working on schemes that would allow humanity to keep burning fossil fuels without dire consequences for climate. Researchers at Princeton, for example, are exploring a technology that would take the carbon out of coal.

In a multistep process coal would react with oxygen and steam to make pure hydrogen, plus a stream of waste gases. The hydrogencould be burned to produce electricity or distributed to gas stations where hydrogen-powered cars-emitting nothing but water vapor-could fuel up. The waste, mostly carbon dioxide but also contaminants that coal-burning plants now emit, such as sulfur and mercury, would be buried. The scheme, says Princeton energy analyst Robert Williams, "could make coal as clean as renewable energy, and you can exploit the low cost of coaL" Or maybe the future lies in fields of solar panels, armies of giant wind turbines, or a new generation of safe nuclear reactors.

No one knows, but that gauge in Wofsy's shack tells us that we don't have long to dither. The trees are doing their best, but year by year the flickering red number is climbing.

D About the Author: Tim Appenzeller World Report in Washington, D. C.

is an editor with U.S. News &

On the test benches of Konarka Technologies in Lowell, Massachusetts, a new kind of solar cell is being put through its paces. Strips of flexible plastic all but indistinguishable from photographic film bask under high-intensity lights. These strips, about 10 centimeters long and five centimeters wide, are converting the light into electricity. Wire a few of them together, and they generate enough power to run a small fan.

Solar cells, of course, are nothing new. But until now, solar power has required expensive silicon-based panels that have relegated it, largely, to niche applications like satellites and high-end homes. What's remarkable about Konarka's power-producing films is that they are cheap and easy to make, using a production line of coating machines and rollers. The process is more akin to the quick-and-dirty workings of a modern printing press than to the arcane rituals performed in the clean rooms of silicon solar-panel manufacturing. The company literally has rolls of the stuff; its engineers plan to cut off usable sheets as if it were saran wrap.

Konarka's technology is just one example of a new type of printable solar cell, or photovoltaic, that promises to go almost anywhere, paving the way for affordable and ubiquitous solar power. Not only are the cells inexpensive to produce-less than half the cost of conventional panels, for the same amount of power-but they're also lightweight and flexible, so they can be built into all sorts of sUlfaces. Flexible films laminated onto laptops and cell phones could provide a steady tJickie of electJicity, reducing the need to plug in for power. Solar cells mixed into automotive paint could allow the sun to charge the batteries of hybrid cars, reducing their need for fuel. Eventually, such solar cells could even cover buildings, providing power for the electricity grid.

A growing number of startups, like Konarka, and big corporations, such as General Electric, Siemens, and chip maker STMicroelectronics, are vying to realize this vision. Konarka hopes to start selling its solar films next year for use in consumer electronics and defense applications. And this winter, Siemens announced that it had boosted the power output of its own prototype plastic-based solar cell to new heights-an achievement that could finally make the technology viable for widespread use.

What's making all this possible is recent breakthroughs in materials science, including advances in nanomaterials. Some of the most promising solar devices are made from conducting plastics and nano-based particles, far too small for the eye to see, that are mixed in a solution. This solution can then be printed, in a process similar to ink-jet printing, onto a surface; there the nanomaterials assemble themselves into structures within the plastic, forming the basis of a solar cell. And all this is done with little human intervention. "The fabulous notion here is that we

may be able to put this active agent in some spreadable medium and basically print these things," says Rice University chemist Richard Smalley, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules known as buckyballs, a key ingredient in many nano solar cells.

Making these cells efficient enough to compete with coal, wind and nuclear power remains an ambitious goal, but it's one that experts say is attainable. Though mainstream applications are early-stage, "the way has been opened," says SerdaI' Sariciftci, a materials physicist at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and a Konarka adviser. "The avalanche has started."

Printing Power In 2003, more conventional solar panels were manufactured than ever before, yet all of them, together, yielded just 750 megawatts of electricity-the equivalent of one average-size coal-fired power plant. What's holding up the solar industry is

cost. Most top-of-the-line solar panels are made with 15-cen-. timeter wafers of crystalline silicon, and those materials are very expensive. As a result, solar power is four to ten times more costly to produce than electricity from conventional power plants.

For decades, solar-cell researchers have tried to develop cheaper alternatives to silicon. The problem has been efficiency: other materials just don't generate enough electricity. But Siemens's achievement earlier this year of the highest efficiency to date in plastic solar cells could change that. The Siemens design combined two of the most important advances in materials science in the past 30 years: electrically conducting polymers and buckyballs.

The idea of combining these materials to capture solar power first gained credence in the early 1990s, when physicists

Sariciftci and Alan Heeger at the University of California, Santa Barbara, created primitive photovoltaic devices by pouring a solution of conducting plastic and buckyballs onto a glass plate, spinning the plate to spread the solution into a film, and sandwiching the film between electrodes.

The conducting polymer absorbed photons, kicking off electrons that were then attracted by the buckyballs and routed to an electrode.

In short, the film acted like a solar cell. Originally, the power output was meager (less than one percent of the energy of incoming sunlight). But the principle of the printable solar cell was proved: you could layer a photovoltaic material on a surface and make it work without complex preparations.

For Sariciftci, printable solar cells became an obsession.

In 1996, after moving to Kepler University, Sariciftci began assembling a research team to boost the power output of his devices. One of his first recruits was Christoph Brabec, a young polymer scientist. By 2000, Sariciftci and Brabec had found a mix of solvents, temperatures, and drying conditions that delivered a better blend of plastic and buckyballs. The result: more electrons made the jump from plastic to buckyball, more than doubling the power output.

In 2001, Brabec left Sariciftci's lab to head a new research effort in polymer photovoltaics at Siemens. It was his team at Siemens that earlier this year significantly increased the power output of the buckyball-plastic cell by tweaking the nanomaterials and shifting to a more industrial-style coating method.

Exactly why the power jumped is not yet clear, says Brabec, though he suspects that the explanation has to do with a more regular structuring of the cell's polymers and buckyballs. What is clear to Brabec is that he and his colleagues can squeeze even more power out of these cells, at least doubling their efficiency once more to capture 10 percent of incoming solar energy-a percentage that experts consider to be a threshold for rooftop applications. "We are absolutely sure that efficiency will continue to climb," says Brabec.

Now, he says, it is time to demonstrate that large-scale production is feasible. "What we did was in a clean room, and the maximum module size is [15 centimeters]," he explains. "The logical next step is to get out of the lab and try reel-to-reel production under industrial conditions." He hopes to get there next year.

Shining Startups At least one startup may beat Siemens to that goal. Konarka is now gearing up to manufacture its novel photovoltaic film, which it expects to start selling next year. Unlike Siemens's, Konarka's films don't use buckyballs, instead relying on tiny semiconducting particles of titanium dioxide coated with lightabsorbing dyes, bathed in an electrolyte, and embedded in plastic film. But like Siemens's solar cells, Konarka's can be easily and cheaply made.

Konarka sees a short-term payoff in consumer products.

Power-hungry electronics such as cell phones and laptops-and

Siemens head of research, Christoph Brabec, and his team of researchers significantly increased the power output of the buclcyball-plastic cell.

anything else with a battery and access to light-could make good use of Konarka's flexible film, according to executive vice president Daniel McGahn. And the solar films could eliminate the need to run power cords to many other electronic devices installed in homes or businesses, such as the temperature, gas, and process sensors scattered throughout manufacturing plants.

Down the road, researchers hope to boost nano solar cells' power output and make them even easier to deploy, eventually spraying them directly onto almost any surface. Palo Alto, California-based startup Nanosolar, which has raised $5 million in venture capital, is working on making this idea practical. The company is exploiting the latest techniques for automatically assembling nanomaterials into precisely ordered architecturesall with a higher degree of control than ever before possible.

Printable-Solar

Revolution General Electric, Schenectady, New York Adapting methods developed for printable lighting panels to make solar cells; pushing for 10 percent energy efficiency in a practical cell Konarka Technologies, Lowell, Massachusetts Manufacturing solar cells made of semiconductor particles; plans to market five percent efficient cells by 2005 Nanosolar, Palo Alto, California Testing titanium compounds and conductive plastic that can be sprayed on slllfaces to form solar cells; seeking 10 percent efficiency by late 2005 Nanosys, Palo Alto, California Developing self-orienting nanoparticles in conductive plastic for photovoltaic coatings: plans to incorporate them into commercial roofing tiles in a few years Siemens, Erlangen, Germany Researching buckyballs and conductive plastic for solar cells and photodetectors: seeks practical flexible cells by 2005 STMicroelectronics, Geneva, Switzerland Blending buckyballs with carbon-based molecules containing copper atoms to make solar cells; conducting research into efficiency and feasibility

Printable solar cells could be built into the surlaces 01 cell phones, laptops, cars, and even buildings, paving the way lor affordable and ubiquitous solar power.

Nanosolar's approach is disarmingly simple. Researchers spray a cocktail of alcohol, surfactants (substances like those used in detergents), and titanium compounds on a metal foil.

As the alcohol evaporates, the surfactant molecules bunch together into elongated tubes, erecting a molecular scaffold around which the titanium compounds gather and fuse. In just 30 seconds a block of titanium oxide bored through with holes just a few nanometers wide rises from the foil. Fill the holes with a conductive polymer, add electrodes, cover the whole block with a transparent plastic, and you have a highly efficient solar cell.

In theory, at least, energized electrons in anosolar's columns of plastic need only jump a few nanometers to reach the titanium compounds. From there, the electrons shoot straight through the vertically oriented titanium compounds to an electrode. "It's a fast path out," says Nanosolar's CEO Martin Roscheisen, an Internet entrepreneur who founded the company two years ago.

This technology could enable Nanosolar to spray-paint photovoltaics onto building tiles, vehicles, and billboards, and wire them up to electrodes. At first, the cells would be applied in manufacturing, but eventually they might be sprayed onto existing surfaces. When will this approach become prevalent enough to feed electricity to power grids? Roscheisen won't say, but he vows that by the end of next year, Nanosolar will have prototypes that capture 10 percent of incoming solar energy.

Catching Some Sun In their initial applications-such as powering cell phones and laptops, as Konarka envisions-printed solar cells won't need to produce that much power or run for decades at a time. But scaling them up from personal electronics to rooftops is a whole other story.

Unlike the crystalline silicon in conventional solar panels, the polymers and dyes employed in printable solar cells are exquisitely sensitive to oxygen. Protecting these materials from blowing sand, intense sunlight, extreme temperature shifts, and the myriad other forms of abuse that nature heaps on solar panels will require hermetic seals. But Brian Gregg, a solar expert at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, predicts that materials scientists will soon develop workable seals that will protect the del-

HANDHEW POWER: Konarka's solar film is light and flexible and could be laminated onto portable devices.

icate devices over the long term. "There's no reason to believe that we can't make [printed] solar cells that will last for 30 years," says Gregg.

Indeed, the recent advances in printable solar cells-and the growing possibilities presented by nanotechnology-leave many experts more opt.imistic than ever that the technology is nearly ready to tackle one of the world's most troubling problems: how to create a ready and renewable supply of energy. Nanotech pioneer Richard Smalley, for one, is convinced that a solar-powered grid is not just possible but also inevitable-and indispensable.

Nanotech could help solve the energy problem, Smalley contends, by providing new tools and materials that make widespread use of solar cells economically viable. But he believes it will take billions of dollars in funding and the focused efforts of the world's top chemists and physicists to make that happen. So for the past two years, he has been crisscrossing the United.

States, evangelizing for nothing short of a modern-day Manhattan Project to use nanotech to deliver a sustainable energy system.

That's the long-term vision. In the meantime, the Konarkas and Siemenses of the world are taking some critical first steps toward changing how we think about harvesting energy from the sun, and how we use electricity in our lives. It may not yet be the Manhattan Project urged by Smalley, but it's a fast-growing effort that could quickly reach critical mass.

0

About the Author: Peter Fairley, a Technology Review contributing writer, covers technology, energy and the environment from Victoria, British Columbia.

Mixing

Pragmatism :::princi pIes

America's foreignpolicy moves have always reflected a blend of realism and idealism, unilateralism and multilateralism

onventional wisdom puts it this way: Americans, having little interest in the wider world, have never been very adept at dealing with it. Portrayed as "innocents abroad," they are said to vacillate between head-in-the-sand isolationism and holier-than-thou moralism.

The trouble with this view, shared not only by foreign observers but by many Americans as well, is that it is simply untrue.

As foreign-affairs specialist Walter Russell Mead argues in his prizewinning book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, Americans have taken a lively interest in international affairs since the nation's founding.

Along the way, they have developed a distinctive diplomatic tradition-really a collection of competing traditions-that has generally served the nation, and arguably the world, quite well.

C

bt that, in the course of time and t ;"+-: s;'the friJii~ of such a plan [treating oilier nations equally and fairly] would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it?" 짜

True, American foreign policy has usually borne little resemblance to the practices of Europe's great powers, formulated by such masters of realpolitik as Otto von Bismarck of Prussia. But if we have often looked inconsistent or naive in our policies, it is not because we lacked guiding principles. To the contrary, says historian Walter McDougall, it

"The United States would intervene in the alliirs of other American countries only as a last resort, only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggTession to the detriment of the entire body of American nations."

is "because we have canonized so many diplomatic principles since 1776 that we are pulled every which way at once."

That profusion of competing policy approaches is an inevitable consequence of democracy itself. Yet for all the bumpiness that democracy entails, America's ascent to the status of the world's sole superpower has less to do with the brute "power politics" of the last 50odd years than with the energies unleashed

by Americans' long debate over their place in, and relations with, the larger world. The terms of that debate, addressed in many of the nation's most important foreign-policy documents, have remained remarkably consistent for two centuries. The themes include America's concern with its political and historical uniqueness, its drive for territorial expansion and influence (particularly in this hemisphere), its wariness of alliances with other nations, and a constantly shifting mix of pragmatism and idealism.

Many of those concerns emerge in George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796. Its caution against "permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" is often cited as a warrant for isolationism or unilateral ism. Washington certainly feared that the independence and integrity of the new republic might be compromised if it were drawn into the schemes of less virtuous-that is, European-states.

That theme has resonated among ardent republicans (lower case) to this day, as was seen in the recent debate over whether the United States should have invaded Iraq without the support of France and Germany.

But Washington's speech, written with his treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, was far more nuanced than many take it to be.

Washington did not urge the nation to extricate itself from "existing

engagements" with friendly nations, and he did advise it to "trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary purposes." Behind his counsel was a greater concern for "good faith and justice" in dealing with all nations-a moral strain that would echo through presidencies to come.

Washington believed that honesty and fairness were not only morally right but also "good policy." To statesmen of the Old World, this was a radical concept. Yet it was not naive idealism. Washington was convinced that treating other nations equally and fairly would ultimately redound to the wellbeing of the United States-perhaps even inspiring other nations to follow suit. "Who can doubt," said Washington, "that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it?"

Americans realized from the beginning, however, that virtuous behavior and open commerce with other nations would not suffice. The encroachments of European powers in the New World threatened not only America's territorial integrity but also the nation's hemispheric interests. In an 1823 address to Congress, President James Monroe issued a clear warning to the European powers: no new colonies in the Americas.

Like other key foreign-policy documents, the Monroe Doctrine has been interpreted both nan'owly' and expansively.

John Quincy Adams, for one, saw it as the embodiment of a wish that other parts of the Americas become, like the United States, free and democratic republics. Yet supporters of Manifest Destiny-a phrase coined by journalist John O'Sullivan in 1839-took the doctrine as justification for making the United States itself a larger nation.

Even bolder in their interpretation of the doctrine were the quasi-

imperialistic statesmen and politicians- Theodore Roosevelt foremost among them-who nudged President William McKinley into declaring war on Spain in 1898. As a result, the United States for the first time joined other world powers in planting its flag on foreign lands, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.

Later, in documents such as the Platt Amendment of 1903, which established a special relationship with Cuba, and Roosevelt's 1905 Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the American expansionists cast their overseas ambitions in idealistic terms. The United States would intervene in the affairs of other American countries only as a last resort, Roosevelt said, and only if "it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations." In extending American power abroad, Roosevelt continued, "we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large."

Many skeptics have insisted that all this was no more than a fig leaf covering naked imperialism. Yet at a time when other powers were establishing colonies and spheres of interest in Africa and Asia, America's modest adventure in territorial acquisition was partly a prudent defensive measure and partly an attempt to keep the world relatively open for commerce. And that conmlerce included not just goods but ideas and ideals.

Woodrow Wilson is often derided as the most naively idealistic of American statesmen. But his 14 Points-intended to promote peace and equity through, among other means, open negotiations, arms reductions, and a "general association of nations"-were only a somewhat exaggerated expression of America's idealist tradition. Th~

Senate ultimately rejected Wilson's bid for membership in the League of Nations, fearing it would require abandoning too much sovereignty.

It was a lesson Franklin D. Roosevelt took to heart a quarter of a century later when he insisted on the creation of the Security Council (with crucial veto powers for each member) within the United Nations as a precondition for America's entry.

America's most successful foreign-policy moves have always reflected a blend of realism and idealism, unilateralism and multilateralism. There are no finer examples than the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshall Plan (1948), both intended to aid or rebuild Europe after World War II and to strengthen it against possible communist takeover. In the doctrine named after him, President Harry S. Truman enunciated a principle that would guide the nation until the fall of the Soviet Union: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. " With remarkable steadfastness and generally good results, subsequent Presidents applied Truman's doctrine in various ways, in different regions. Although there would be the debacle of the Vietnam War, that conflict's high human cost taught lessons that were no less instrumental to the outcome of the Cold War than were the good deeds of the Peace Corps, established in 1961 by John F. Kennedy. Containment prevailed, and by the final decade of the 20th century, the last of the pernicious "isms" was discredited and defeated.

Has America's increasingly dominant role in international affairs brought the world toward a more hopeful future for all nations? That would be the outcome George Washington keenly desired. And

"I believe d1at it must be fue policy 路of fue United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

-HAJU\Y

s. TRUMAl'i

though many contemporary realities-from terrorist insurgencies to civil strife in wretchedly poor nations-militate against the fulfillment of that dream, the experiment introduced by the United States remains, in Washington's words, "recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature." D About the Author: Jay Tolson is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report.

Pro Cricket

l!l(j][JiJ {JJ0 (ยง)[JiJ (J!Ju@ n a recent Sunday afternoon, two teams of men smartly attired in cricketing gear prepared for a face-off at a minor league baseball field in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Three hours later, with the match satisfactorily over, the cheery group was packing its bags and heading home. "Any longer and Americans begin to lose interest," explains Kal Patel, a Iselin, New Jersey-based entrepreneur.

Patel has devoted a significant portion of his wealth to study cricketing trends across the United States. His survey revealed Americans want the "fast-food" version of cricket. "Americans don't want to spend

more than three hours watching a movie, at the theater, or at a game," says Patel, who is chairman and commissioner of American Pro Cricket.

An abridged version of the game that commands a fanatical following in Britain and its former colonies, Pro Cricket is based on the "30" (third generation) format that allots each team 20 overs of five balls each. Why five? "That extra ball [in each over] put us over the three-hour mark.

Besides, it's perfect math. Five balls an over, 100 balls a side," says Patel.

Cricket has been around in the United States for longer than most Americans would imagine. Founding father John

..#

~_~.?~I~~~J~

Adams was purportedly one of AmeIica's first cricketers. The Malin Cricket Club in Northern California notes that its earliest artifact is a 1932 photograph commemorating its first match against the Hollywood Cricket Club. Yet it's only recently that American cIicketers have begun to get noticed on the international circuit.

Earlier this year, the U.S. team won the Six ations Challenge in Shaljah to qualify for the 2004 International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Trophy held in September in England. The ICC and the United States of America's Cricket Association (USACA)-the governing body for cricket in the U.S.-have joined forces to raise the game's profile in America. Gary Hopkins, an expat English

Top Left: Mushfiq Mobarak, assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, practices bowling.

Mobarak bowls left-arm medium pace for the Royal Bengal Cricket Club. Top right: New York Storm batsman West Indian Marlon Samuels in his Pro Cricket team jersey.

Above: Michael Sobieski bowls during a cricket match in Marin County, California.

businessman, took over in mid-August as chief executive of a development project to promote cricket in the United States.

An engineering manager based in Corte Madera, California, Laks M. Sampath played cricket while at the University of Texas. His involvement in the game has grown since his student days. Director of

USACA's Northwest region, Sampath points out that the biggest challenge to popularizing the game in America is making "born and bred Americans play it."

"There is only one 'American' playing cricket [in California] in the entire league," says Sampath.

Backpacking across Australia a decade ago, Michael Sobieski picked up a distinct Australian accent. And, he points out, "a passion for cricket, mate." Sobieski is, by Sampath's account, probably the only American-born cricketer playing league cricket in California.

Sobieski's hometown Petaluma, a short drive north of San Francisco, is better known for its dairy farms. Growing up, he had the typical American childhoodplaying plenty of baseball and basketball.

In 1997, three years after his bmsh with cricket in Australia, he contacted the Marin Cricket Club. At the club he discovered a multiethnic, multiracial group of cricketers and enthusiasts. "This was like a mini vacation; every weekend I got a chance to meet different people," he says, laughing.

One of these was David Roll, whom Sobieski met while at a cricket tournament in Philadelphia. Both Americans, they gravitated toward each other and have been good friends ever since. Born in Baltimore, Roll was first exposed to cricket on a trip to England in 1990. The Indian team was touring that summer. He remembers Graham Gooch's inspirational knock of 333 mns that powered England to 653 for four. Kapil Dev then came in and hit a few sixes, saving India the embarrassment of a follow-on. "I was fascinated [by the game]," Roll recalls. On his return to America, he contacted the British路 and Australian embassies and they put him in touch with local cricket leagues.

At the "ripe old age" of 24, Roll was learning to bowl over-arm and developing a passion for batting. An avid tennis player, he discovered similarities between the footwork needed in tennis and that required of a good batsman. A beguiling off-spinner who sometimes bowls medium pace, he has been working on his batting and has improved his leg-side shots.

After the president of his league, a close friend, suggested he try his hand at umpir-

ing, Roll studied the rules of the game and even sat for tests. Roll has been umpire for 13 of his 14 cricketing years, and has gradually won the respect of South ~sians and West Indians in his league. "When I took up umpiring they would wonder what a born and bred Yankee knew about cricket," he says. Now, Roll is one 0 the most respected and sought-after umpi es in the country.

For Sobieski, it was his experience playing baseball that made him a good fielder in his club. "I made that transition [from baseball to cricket] very easily," he says. For the rest of America, the transition has been relatively slow. According to Patel's survey, there are around 30,000 "active cricketers" and approximately 90 leagues across the country, each with 20 to 25 teams. Besides these groups there are 70,000 others who play cricket at a "casuallevel." "That's a tremendous number of people who play cricket-and the serious players are quite good," says Patel.

The "active cricketers" take 15 to 18 days out of a year to play club games, while the casual players play between five and seven games a year.

On the East Coast, the game has a following in the New York-New Jersey area, Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, Boston an'd Florida. On the West Coast, many summer weekends are spent playing cricket in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland and Oregon.

Laks M. Sampath with Sir Gary Sobers of the West Indies.

Further' land, cricketers flock 0 fields around Dal as and Houston, parts of Arizona and Colorado.

"The population that's playing the game right now is an immigrant population-they are weekend cricketers," says Sampath. In California, South Asians dominate the cricket fields, followed by West Indians, Australians, South Africans, Englishmen and New Zealanders. Mushfiq Mobarak, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, spends his weekends bowling left-arm medium pace for the Royal Bengal Cricket Club. Having grown up playing cricket in Dhaka, he was drawn to the camaraderie of the team and found it "a nice place to hang out with other Bangladeshjs."

In order for the game to grow beyond the expat communities, Sampath says, it has to undergo a metamorphosis. Touted as the "next generation in cricket," the Pro Cricket league currently consists of four teams on the East Coast-the New Jersey Fire, the New York Storm, the Florida Thunder, the DC Forward; and four teams on the West Coast-the Texas Arrowheads, the L.A. Unity, the San Francisco Freedom and the Chicago Tornadoes. Pointing out that USACA has been around for 25 years, Patel says, "They haven't been able to make a dent for tills sport." But neither the ICC nor the USACA has endorsed Pro Cricket. The USACA's stance is that Pro Cricket is a "bastardized format" of the game and it will not have anything to do with it. ~ Like the "old guard" at the USACA, ~ Roll, too, isn't impressed by Pro Cricket.

"There's a lot of hype, and I've seen a few 8 games. My initial impression is that the

*'

tandard of cricket is pretty low .. .it's emtl rrassing." He says that for the abridged version to catch on it "has to be something that the ICC will endorse and sanction."

Pro Cricket, Patel insists, is here to stay. "'Tills is not a one-off type of deal for us.

We will help them [ICC and USACA] see tMe light." While he would love to see ricket grow in America, Sobieski has mixed feelings about its chances. "I would love to be an ambassador for the game-as a coach touring and teaching kids. I think Americans want to see Americans play the game, but you can't have that opportunity unless our kids are learning it," he says.

Kinjal and spouse Hemant Buch started the California Cricket Academy when their nine-year-old son told them he wanted to play clicket. Buch, a visiting professor at San Jose State University, and his wife, an architect, take their Cupertino, Californiabased academy, quite seliously. Tills summer, Sachin Tendulkar's brother Ajit taught 8- to 12-year-old kids the nuances of the game. They've also invested in a British bowling machine. "Last year all our students were Indians ... this year we've had some Britons and Pakistanis," says Kinjal.

Explaining the game's popularity among Indian kids, she says the smaller-built ,South Asians stand less of a chance playing American football and baseball and so felt left out at school. "The kids were sitting at home and watching videos," she says. "As a team sport, cricket is a good game.

Everyone can play it." Patel is confident that Pro Cricket will pique the interest of more Americans within the next five years.

"If we can have log cutting as a sport telecast on ESPN, I think cricket stands a very good chance," he says.

"Cricket sells itself, it's the best game I've ever played. That said, we invented fast food-give it to me and give it to me quickly. The game has to change. As cricket perhaps makes changes for America I an1 hopeful that America will also make some changes for cricket. Like Steve Waugh, I certainly wouldn't want to see the great game 'Americanized,''' Sobieski adds. 0 About the Author: Ashish Kumar Sen is a Washington, D. C. -based journalist working with the Washington Times. He also contributes to Outlook and India Abroad.

ISLAND HOPPING TO A

NE WORLD

By ALEX MARKELS

The 'irst Americans may have arrived not on 'DOt but by boat 'rom Asia, even Europe

D

igging in a dank limestone cave in Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands last summer, 21-year-old Christina Heaton hardly noticed the triangular piece of chipped stone she'd unearthed in a pile of muddy debris. But as her scientist father, Timothy, sifted through the muck, he realized she'd struck pay dirt. "Oh my God!" he yelled to her and the team of other researchers scouring the remote site off the coast of British Columbia. "It's a spear point!"

Bear bones found near the artifact suggested that its owner had probably speared the beast, which later retreated into the cave and eventually died with the point still lodged in its loins. Radiocarbon tests soon dated the remains at about 12,000 years old, making them among the earliest signs of human activity in the region or, for that matter, in all of the Americas.

"It's not the smoking gun, but we're getting closer and closer to finding one," says Timothy Heaton, who is the director of earth sciences at the University of South Dakota. He and his colleagues are trying to rewrite prehistory and show that the people who first explored the Americas at the waning of the laSt Ice Age may have come earlier than archaeologists thought and by routes they never suspected.

Almost from the moment the first white explorers set eyes on America's indigenous "Indians," people have wondered where the natives came from. Among the first to guess right was Fray Jose Acosta, a Jesuit priest who in 1590 speculated that a small group from Asia's northernmost latitudes must have walked or floated to the New World. Indeed, since the 19305 archaeolo-

Copyright Š 2004 U.S. News & World Report, L.P. Reprinted with permission.

gists have taught that the first Americans were big-game hunters who walked across the Bering land bridge from Siberia, chasing woolly mammoths southward through Canada down a narrow corridor between two ice sheets. By about 11,500 years ago, they'd tromped as far south as Clovis, New Mexico, near where archaeologists first found their distinctive fluted spear points.

The Clovis hunters didn't stop there. Their descendants ultimately reached the tip of South America after a footslogging journey begun more than 36,000 kilometers away.

Or so the story goes.

Yet the Heatons' find is the latest addition to a small but increasingly weighty

pile of tools and remains suggesting that the first Americans may have come from Asia not by foot down the center of the continent but along the coast in boats, centuries or millenniums before the Clovis people. The evidence, detailed in scientific articles and a new book by journalist Tom Koppel called Lost World, has turned up along the Pacific coast all the way from Alaska to southern Chile. So far it does not include any human remains of pre-Clovis age. But a woman whose bones were found on Santa Rosa Island off Santa Barbara, California, was only 200 to 300 years more recent. And scientists excavating Chile's Monte Verde site, over 9,600 kilometers from the southernmost Clovis find, have discovered caches of medicinal herbs, twine, and other artifacts that date back 12,500 years-even older than those of the Clovis people. Still other, more controversial digs near the East Coast may even indicate pre-Clovis travel across the northern Atlantic from Europe.

Such finds have dovetailed with genetic, biological, and climate research to paint a far more complex-and, many scientists believe, more realistic-picture of America's first explorers. Rather than a

COMING TO AMERICA DNA studies suggest that the ancestors of today's Indians arrived in multiple waves. The traditional picture held that they migratedfrom Asia across the Bering Strait-then exposed land-and down the midsection of the continent some 11,500 years ago.But more recent archaeologicalfinds point to other, earlier routes, along the Pacific coast and perhaps across the Atlantic.

PACIFIC COAST Artifacts found along the shore suggest that the first Americans may have come in boats more than 12,000 years ago, hugging the coast as far south as Chile.

Spear point from Queen Charlotte Islands

single migration of Clovis people, "there were clearly several waves of human exploration," says Douglas Wallace, a geneticist at the University of CaliforniaIrvine. Wallace's DNA studies of American natives identify at least five genetically distinct waves, four from Asia and one possibly of European descent, the earliest of which could have arrived more than 20,000 years ago. That diversity jibes with research by linguists who argue that the Americas' 143 native languages couldn't possibly have all developed from a single 11,SOO-year-old tongue. And if they had, then the languages would be most diverse along the mainland route the Clovis people traveled.

In fact, the number of languages is greatest along the Pacific coast, adding to suspicions that at least some of the first immigrants came that way. Until recently, many geologists assumed that the Ice-Age shore was a glaciated wasteland. But new studies of fossil records and ancient climates imply a navigable coastline full of shellfish, seals, and other foods, with patches of grassy inland tundra capable of supporting big game-and perhaps seafaring humans wending their way south.

Unfortunately, looking for evidence that could clinch the coastal-migration scenario is akin to searching for the lost city of Atlantis. Warming temperatures since the last Ice Age have helped transform the ancient tundra into thick forests, rendering most signs of early human exploration all but invisible. And as IceAge glaciers melted, the world's sea level has risen hundreds of feet, submerging most of the coastal campsites where the ancient mariners may have sojourned.

"Most of those places are under 100 to 120 meters of water, which makes the searching a bit difficult," explains Daryl Fedje, an archaeologist with the Canadian park service who has overseen the decade-long search in the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, he traversed the waters off the foggy archipelago on a research vessel, mapping the ocean bottom and dredging up sediments including, in 1998, a 10-centimeter-long basalt blade that showed telltale flaking from use by an ancient hunter. Retrieved from a site that might have made an ideal beachside camp 10,200 years ago, it was one of the oldest human artifacts yet

Pacific Ocean

DOWN THE CONTINENT

Monte .Ven{e

Other waves of immigrants may have followed inland routes, among them the Clovis people of North America, big-game hunters who made finely worked spear points.

Clovis point from New Mexico

found in the region and the first inkling of the potential treasure-trove on the sea bottom. The find made headlines and inspired some to call for a comprehensive high-tech search of the seafloor.

Yet the immense costs of a seafloor survey have prevented the idea from becoming more than a pipe dream. So Fedje and other researchers have instead focused on caves on the nearby islands and in Alaska, where artifacts are protected from weather and decay. "The caves have been a real windfall," says Heaton of the animal bones he has found. He's confident that "it's really just a matter of time" before he and his colleagues find pre-Clovis human remains, "because in almost every cave we put our shovels to, we find something new."

Archaeologists working on the other side of the continent are also seeking a smoking gun, for a different migration route. Clovisstyle spear points recovered from barrier islands near the Chesapeake Bay and inland in Virginia and Pennsylvania bear a striking resemblance to tools made by the ancient Solutrean people of northern Spain, leading some to speculate about a prehistoric crossing of the Atlantic.

"That could explain how DNA from . ancient Europeans showed up in some of the first Americans," says Dennis Stanford, chairman of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. In an upcoming book, Stanford and coauthor Bruce Bradley make the seemingly far-fetched case that an adventurous lot of Iberians walked over an ice bridge or boated across open water to Newfoundland during the last Ice Age. Whether they threaded their way through Pacific archipelagoes or negotiated the icechoked Atlantic, "we need to open our minds and give these early explorers their due," says Stanford. The first people to explore the Americas "were modern humans very much like ourselves."smart, adventurous, and very much capable of making their way in the world."

D About the Author: Alex Markels, a fellow at the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism, is a contributing editor with U.S. News & World Report.

Copyright © 2004 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted by permission.

ON THE

LIGHTER SIDE

Copyright © The ew Yorker Collection 2004 Frank Gotham from Canoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

Copyright © The New Yorker Collection 2004 Danny Shanahan from Canoonbank.com.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2004 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted by pennission.

U.S. Educational Foundation in India (USEFI), established in 1950 through an exchange agreement between the two countries, operates EducationUSA counseling centers that offer accurate information to students who want to pursue higher education in America. Its headquarters in Delhi and the regional.offices in Chennai, Calcutta and Mumbai advise hundreds of thousands of students about admission requirements and the best colleges in the United States.

SPAN spoke to USEFI education'al advisers across India who answered some of your frequently asked questions.

Does the U.S. welcome international students?

American universities value and heartily welcome the different perspectives brought to their campuses by international students.

There were 586,323 international students studying in the United States in 2002-03. Indian students make up nearly 13 percent of the international students studying in the United States today.

What attracts students to go for higher education in the United States?

There are several reasons: the choice of majors and specializations, the system of accreditation, flexibility in the educational system, merit-based admission, financial assistance and the marketability of the degree.

What do most Indian students study there?

Most students from India are interested in postgraduate studies in the United States. A quarter enroll in undergraduate programs. The major fields of interest are engineering, computer science, management and health sciences. Increasing numbers of students are showing preferences for specialized courses in theater, fine arts and animation.

What is the U.S. system of accreditation? Why is accreditation important?

A U.S. academic institution and its programs are recognized by nongovernmental accrediting bodies for maintaining a certain level of performance and quality. This process is continuous and voluntary. Students can transfer course credits more easily from an accredited program. American universities accept degrees only from accredited institutions.

What is the cost of higher education in the United States?

The average cost of education at an American university varies from $20,000 to $50,000 per year. Costs include tuition, fees, housing, transportation and insurance.

What financial aid options are available for foreign students?

Scholarships, assistantships, fellowships or tuition waivers available to international students applying for higher education in the United States are limited, and are offered to highly quali-

fied students. The amount and type of financial assistance or scholarship awarded varies by college, university, department, program, level of study, and is dependent on the availability of resources and policies outlined each year. Applicants for a doctoral program stand a stronger chance of receiving financial support rather than those in a master's program.

How does one select American colleges and universities?

Students select institutions based on some combination of the following factors: Availability of field of interest, level of program offered and specializations Academic and career goals Quality of the program and selectivity Admission requirements: a good academic record, English language proficiency, acceptable standardized test scores, an effective statement of purpose or essay, strong letters of recommendation, proof of financial support and other program-specific requirements Cost of education Nature and availability of financial aid Type of college or university: specialized colleges or institutions, liberal arts colleges, institutes of technology, colleges with religious affiliation Size: enrollments, student-faculty ratio Diversity: representation and number of international students Common research interests (at the graduate level) Special programs: interdisciplinary studies, internship opportunities Location and setting: rural, urban, suburban or citybased location Climatic conditions and geographical locations Student life and campus activities How important are standardized test scores?

Standardized test scores form part of the application procedure and are not the sole decision-making factor in the admissions process. Standardized tests help assess the potential of students applying from varied educational backgrounds.

While the format of each test varies, most focus on measuring the verbal, analytical, problem-solving and quantitative skills of students. The level of skills required in a particular program may vary by the field of study and by the school or department.

For more information, visit USEFI Web sites www.fulbrightindia.org and www.educationusa.state.gov or e-mail questions to adviser@fulbright-india.org.

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he Bar-Kays' "Greatest Hits," a soul CD decide whether to shift its large CD-ROM colYou can drill on Michele Youket's desk at the Library lection to another medium. a two-millimeter And as the blotchy Bar-Kays album shows, of Congress, has seen better days. On its surface are dozens of tiny holes and CDs are, in fact, destructible. "Oh, definitehole in the rusted-out blotches, making it resemble a ly," says Youket, who works in the library's thing, and it'll chrome bumper that's been left to rot in a Preservation Research and Testing Division. still play. junkyard. Youket has many CDs like that"Everything organic degrades." one, by the New Age artist Paul Winter, has shed How soon CDs wear out is a much more complicated-and controversial--question. The discs on its silvery surface, leaving only a transparent disc with a printed logo on top.

Youket's desk have undergone ISO-plus-degree humidity Youket's music collection, stored in her windowless sub"soaks" in the library's ovens to accelerate their age. Youket basement office in Washington, D.C., has implications for can't say how many years of aging these ovens simulate, but every CD buyer and record company in the world. She is the the library's scientists estimate poorly made CDs may deteriolead scientist on the library's four-year-long project testing rate after as little as five or 10 years, while better-made discs the life span of compact discs, a 22-year-old technology could last up to a century. The Bar-Kays CD came out in 1998 once touted as indestructible. It's the first major public study on K-Tel, and Winter's 1987 Earthbeat was on a small, lowbudget label. Although some major-label releases similarly of its kind; upon the release of its findings, the library will wore out after being soaked, a 1996 Sony disc by soul singer Puff Johnson showed only minimal damage. ~xperts say today's music CDs are built for longevity-but only as long as they're kept in cases, unscratched, at room temperature, away from extreme moisture. "If it's stored carefully, it'd probably come close to a human's lifetime," says Alan Sahakian, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University. Adds Jerry Hartke, president of Media Sciences, a CD-quality testing facility, "The error correction in those things is so powerful you can actually drill a two-millimeter hole in the thing, and it'll still play."

The CD-deterioration issue resurfaced in early May, when Dan Koster, Web-content manager at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, told an Associated Press reporter he'd discovered a "constellation of pinpricks" in hundreds of his properly stored collection of more than 2,000 CDs. Youket contacted Koster-her Bar-Kays album _ showed similar pinpricklike defects. Does that mean MICHAEL HORSElY/Library of Congress all CDs will develop deadly pricks over time? No,

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Michele Youket (left) and Chandru Shahani at the Library of Congress' Preservation Research and Testing Division in Washington, D.C.

says Chandru Shahani, chief of Youket's division: "CDs are sturdy. We're not trying to scare people. We'd like to guide the industry into putting out a more stable product."

D About the Author: Steve Knopper is a Denver-based journalist who writes for Rolling Stone, Esquire and Wired magazines.

Our home and office computers are probably protected by antivirus programs and frrewalls. But what about your new cell phone? The latest "smart phones" let you read e-mail, open attachments, and download games and . other programs. Just imagine if a virus slipped through that made toll calls to 1-900 numbers in the middle of the night. With phone spam already here, industry experts suspect phone viruses are bound to come calling soon.

Anticipating the arrival of phone viruses, security software companies are starting to develop dedicated antivirus products. F-Secure of Helsinki, Finland, says that over the past year or so it installed virus detection systems in the networks of nine cell-phone service providers. This year, the company says, it will start selling antivirus protection software for phones themselves.

"We don't want to wait for [an attack] to happen," says Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research at F-Secure. In most respects, the company's antivirus program works the same way as the one on your computer, examining incoming e-mails and files for known viruslike code patterns and behavior. But it's customized to work with the far smaller memory and lower processing power of a typical phone.

F-Secure is not alone. Symantec of Cupertino, California-the largest antivirus software vendor for PCs-earlier this year began working with the world's leading phone maker, Nokia of Espoo, Finland, to install virus protection. Symantec plans to offer security software for a new Nokia phone model expected to reach market later this year. And Microsoft, one of three major makers of operating systems for smart phones, says it is also increasing security.

Phone viruses are still a theoretical concern, but "it's bound to happen this year or in the beginning of next," predicts Sally Hudson, research manager at IDC, an information technology consultancy in Framingham, Massachusetts. If phone viruses do attack, with any luck the new programs will hang up on them.

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orgetabout asking for help at gas sta'"" tions. Your cell phone is rapidly becoming a one-stop source of direc~,; . tions. Over the past year, several startups have launched services that send direc. ~ tJqns to your phone's screen and provide a spee((b interface that reads them as you drive.

In most cases, these services require location information from a separate Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver plugged into the phone. A lost driver dials up the service, which interprets a spoken description of his or her destination, calculates a route based On the GPS coordinates, and transmits directions back to the phone. New versions eliminate the external GPS receiver: gpware of Menlo Park, California, plans to introduce a device this year that includes a GPS receiver and cell-phone technology in a personal-

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These direction finders路 are a big step ~up from the navigation hardware sQld willi some cars, which uses maps stored on CDs or DVDs that typically need to be cfianged when a driver visits a new area. And only about 10 percent of new vehicles sold in 2003 in the United States had such "onboard navigation" built in, says Phil Magney, principal analyst with the Telematics Research Group in Minnetonka, Minnesota. That leaves plenty of room for "offboard navigation"-cellphone systems.

The newer technology has advantages, says Magney. "It translates into lower cost compared to what you might buy in a car. It's go-anywhere, meaning you can take it from your car to a rental car," and you're likely getting the most current data, he says. He predicts oftboard navigation services will help boost the North American market for wireless in-car systems from $4.9 billion to $18 billion by 2010.

0 About the Author: Wade Roush is a senior editor with Technology Review.

He was complex and controversial, but few deny his genius. Marlon Branda created a new kind of actor in mid-20th century, postwar America. His influence remains significant.

he news of Marlon Brando's death on July 1 brought two kinds of sadness: regret that his life had closed, and regret that, artistically speaking, it had closed long ago. His last performance of any interest was in The Freshman (1990), and that was only a mirror image of the Vito Corleone he had created in 1972. Little that Brando had done in his last 30 years was commensurate with his genius.

The sting of his death brought a memory flash-of a stage performance. In 1946 he played the young poet Marchbanks in one of Katharine Cornell's revivals of Shaw's Candida.

Brando didn't have the speech or carriage of the earl's nephew that Marchbanks is, but I have never seen a performance that convinced me more completely that a man is the artist he is said to be. Early in the play someone says to him, "It should make you tremble to think that. .. the great gift of a poet may be laid upon you." Marchbanks replies: "It does not make me tremble. It is the want of it in others that makes me tremble." I can hear Brando still.

I had already been following him closely. In 1943, at holiday time, a children's play of mine was produced by Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School in New York.

Brando was a student there and had been given the worldless role in my play of a guard at a king's court. At one point, meant to be comic, he was hit on the head and fell. Brando, without the help of the director (Mrs. Piscator), devised a collapse that was original and funny. The production was later moved uptown to the Adelphi Theater for a series of Easter matinees, so Brando made his professional debut in this bit part, getting hit on the head.

I asked about him at the school and was told that he was one of the more gifted students but that he was already "difficult."

Apparentlyhe had in him what Poe called "the imp of the perverse." Precisely because Brando was so gifted and had so apparent a potential, he was offhand about acting, bothering to be serious about it only when he actually was performing.

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His first notable Broadway role, for which I had been looking out, was a short-pants youngster in something called 1 Remember Mama, and then he electrified audiences with his one taut scene in Maxwell Anderson's Truckline Cafe. This much-admired performance led to Marchbanks and eventually to Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, which I saw twice. What I remember first about it is Stanley's cuticle. The setting had two rooms; at one point early in the play Blanche

Right: Bonasera (Frank Puglia) asks Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Branda) for a favor in this still from the 1972 film, The Godfather.

Left: Marlon Branda with actress Vivien Leigh in the 1952 film A Streetcar Named Desire.

Bottom: Branda poses with the Oscar statuette at the 27th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, California, in March 1955. He won best actor of the year for his portrayal in On the Waterfront.

DuBois was in one room upbraiding her sister Stella about the brute she had married. Brando, unseen by the women, was standing in the other room, listening to Blanche's outburst, calmly biting the cuticle on one finger. This gesture told us everything we needed to know about Stanley's reaction to the outburst-and about the probable course of the play.

Soon Hollywood beckoned, of course, and Brando acquiesced when he was offered an interesting role-a wheelchair-bound war veteran in The Men (1950). His talent was recognized, but the film had small impact. Next he did Stanley Kowalski on screen, and the world was shaken.

To itemize his film career-a total of 41 pictures-and to judge whether each was worth Brando's presence is not to me the most important matter just now. Rather, a contradiction presses.

What became patent early on in Hollywood, what Brando obviously wanted to be known because he often talked about it in interviews, was his attitude toward acting. The imp of the perverse had apparently enlarged in him and now included a total scoff at any view of acting as an art, even as a respectable occupation for a serious person. It is common in the screen careers of stars, especially if they came from the theater, that they are at first very picky about the roles they accept, then gradually slip into the cur.rents and standards of a film career with less and less choosiness. But it was more than that with Brando: his very spotty career, ranging from some peaks in

the history of world film to some sheer embarrassments, seems less the result of Hollywood pressures than a sort of sloth, almost to nourish his loathing for the whole business.

One of the elements that apparently increased his loathing was the money. In his earliest days he could tease about acting as piffle when he was living at a relatively sane level. But when the money started to pour in, he was, it seems, twice affected: he wanted as much money as he could get at the same time that he thought the huge sums certified the silliness of the work. (By 1977 he was paid $3.7 million, plus percentages of the gross, for 12 days' work on two Superman movies.) His eventual monstrous obesity seemed a clear sign of his hatred for Hollywood. "You're paying for this waistline," he seemed to be jeering at the film world.

He could behave as he did because he was so golden at the box office and so fertile a publicity subject.

(His personal life, not to be detailed here, helped too.) Still, the question persists: why? Why did he behave as he did? Leonard Bernstein, golden enough and glamorous enough in the music world, never animadverted against conceltizing. Martha Graham, certainly not golden but certainly an icon, never spewed on dancing. Why did Brando spout as he did? Yes, the imp of the perverse had been there from the start, but was there something else, a secret?

David Thomson, in an astute obituary article about ~ Brando, wrote: "It is striking ... that his death comes at (L

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"Acting is a bum's life, in that it leads to perfect self-indulgence. You get paid for doing nothing, and it all adds up to nothing." a moment when America's maturity is tragically necessary yet tormentingly distant." Thus Thomson implies that the vagaries of Brando's career were related to the general social and political climate of his lifetime, an insight supported by his recurrent involvement in social and political movements seemingly as a version of penance.

I would add one other possibility. His perversity in his earliest days, spurred by Poe's imp, may just have been a form of vanity, a nonchalance because he had to worry much less about the future than his contemporaries did. But as success and fame arrived, he may have become more and more acutely aware that his profession had low cultural standing in America. (Quite unlike Leonard Bernstein's and Martha Graham's.) His veneration of John Gielgud, when they played together in Julius Caesar (1953), supports this view. Gielgud came from a society where a great actor was a national eminence, not a merely celebrity. It is inconceivable that Brando could ever have said about Gielgud any of the things (according to Peter Manso's biography) he said about himself. "I am not an artist. I hate when people say I'm an artist." Or: "Acting is a bum's life, in that it leads to perfect self-indulgence. You get paid for doing nothing, and it all adds up to nothing." During Brando's lifetime, America produced fine From top: Marlon Brando and Maria actors-Fredric March, for Schneider in a scene from The Last prime instance-and the fact Tango in Paris; a final scene of the that they were not regarded as original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar they would have been in some Named Desire is shown in'New York other countries possibly conCity in 1947. The cast included firmed Brando's view. In fact Brando. Kim Hunter and Jessica Gielgud says in his autobiograTandy; Brando in Viva Zapata!; and phy that he offered Brando a director Bernardo Bertolucci (left) chance to work in another world. discusses a scene from The Last "I begged him to play Hamlet, Tango in Paris with Brando during and said that I would like to location shooting in Paris in 1973. direct him if he did." Also: "I thought he would have made a wonderful Oedipus." Brando said that he had no interest in returning to the stage. Perhaps by this time he was in love with his attitudes toward acting and didn't want to risk becoming as serious as Gielgud about it. His very last work was a voice-over for a character in an animated film that has not yet been released.

Well, now Brando begins a new life as a figure in history, still a paradox. He may be even more of one to those who view his work in the future: less because of his comments about acting, which may fade, than because of the difference between the heights and the sloughs of his career. The best of actors have their ups and downs, but not many of them have his genius. Partly as possible truth about Brando, partly as solace about him for myself, I remember the Marchbanks line: "It is the want of it in others that makes me tremble."

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inspired by The Godfather. Amitabh Bachchan, the most popular actor after Dilip Kumar, even changed his voice into a gruff growl to resemble Brando's raspy drawl in the crime-andrevenge drama Agneepath (1990). Though Bachchan seems to have paid no tribute to Brando, the very fact that he is known as the latter-day Dilip Kumar makes him belong to the Corleone Cosa Nostra. This is almost directly acknowledged by filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma, who is directing Sarkaar, a Hindi remake of The Godfather, with Bachchan and Shabana Azrni playing the arlon Brando (1924-2004) would have been bemused had someone told him half-a-century ago that two of eponymous Gujarati donna.

The great filmmaker Satyajit Ray was an ardent admirer of his earliest films, Viva Zapata! (1952) and Julius Brando. In turn Brando valued Ray's genius. When Ray wrote Caesar (1953), were keenly watched and admired by Dilip the script for The Alien in 1967, he had Peter Sellers and Marlon Kumar, a budding actor with 20 films under his belt.

Brando in mind for the two major roles. However, the project Though Dilip Kumar was initially influenced by well known thespians such as Paul Muni and Laurence Olivier, it was in the ran into difficulties and was never made.

Brando had a false brush with India when he married Anna two-years-younger Brando's perfOlmances as Mexican revoluKashfi, his first wife, under the exotic impression that she had tionary leader and President Emiliano Zapata and Marc Antony Indian roots. In his role as a goodwill ambassador for the that he discovered a kindred spark. Kumar had already porUnited Nations, Marlon Brando visited India in 1967 to gain trayed highly demanding emotional roles in Mela, Shaheed, Andaz, Deedar and Sangdil, but Brando's style helped him in his firsthand knowledge of the country and to provide succor to the famine-affected people of Bihar. In Delhi, he participated in a training to such an extent that he is now considered to be Indian cinema's answer to Marlon ex conversation with Satyajit Ray ~ for Doordarshan, with Amita Brando. .~Malik as the moderator. This The portrayal of Zapata con tinued to obsess Dilip Kumar t historic talk was aired many a until he himself portrayed a sim§ times.

However, the only recorded ilar Indian character in two languages: Bengali and Hindi. memories of India that Brando Emiliano Zapata was transhas left behind are from his painful tour of Bihar. In what formed into Sagina Mahato, a is his partial autobiography, rustic hero from the hilIs, played

by Dilip Kumar in both the verBrando: The Songs My Mother Taught Me, he devotes a long, sions. The Bengali Sagina Mahato was a critical and commoving passage to what he saw mercial success, while the Hindi and experienced in the hungerMarlon Brando's conversation with great filmmaker Satyajit Ray ravaged state. Brando showed a version, substantially different was recorded by Doordarshan in 1967 when Brando was on a from the Bengali film, was a deep awareness of the twin evils tour of India. Film critic Amita Malik (left) was the moderator. moderate hit. of the caste system and poverty that plague India. Traveling hunDilip Kumar recalls a brief chance meeting with Brando in Hollywood: "He was a great figdreds of kilometers on nonexistent roads in a land rover, Brando ure in the world of cinema. He was truly a great actor, a simple witnessed the stark Indian reality. He was traveling with a movie man-a man of values .... His films have made a significant camera to shoot a documentary film as well, but he broke down when he saw a starving child die even as he was filming him. mark in the world of cinema." Though Dilip Kumar may now Brando ultimately finished a 45-minute documentary which he call his own films simple and uncomplicated, the fact remains showed to many colleagues and TV stations in the United States. that Brando's presence in the 1950s and '60s served as an inspiAlthough his colleagues were moved to tears, no one was willration for him.

It is, however, ironic that the Indian cinema, so as the rest of ing to exhibit or air it. Thus, this historic human document, the world, discovered Brando only in 1972 as Don Vito made by possibly the greatest actor of our times, was never publicly telecast. Yet, this documentary is a testimony to the human Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. His stunD ning performance was the heart and soul of The Godfather and bond that existed between Brando and India. had a significant impact on the filmmaking industry. It even won him an Oscar.

About the Author: Vishnu Khare is a film critic and writer based in Nearly a dozen Hindi films have,been either partly or wholly New Delhi.

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