SPAN: September/October 2005

Anurag Kashyap celebrates after winning the 78th annual National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., on June 2.

National Spelling Bee runners-up Samir Sudhir Patel (right) and Aliya Robin Deri (far right).

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hildren of Indian heritage won the top three spots this year in America's largest educational promotion, the annual National Spelling Bee, sponsored by the EW Scripps Co. newspaper chain. Kids with Indian parents or grandparents have been doing well in the competition since Balu Natarajan won by spelling "milieu" in 1985. But this June's win for Anurag Kashyap and second-place tie for Samir Sudhir Patel and Aliya Robin Deri has news media and teachers wondering what makes Indian American children spell esoteric words so well when most people in their community do not speak English as their mother tongue.

For Anurag, 13, of Poway, California, the secrets to success seem obvious: hard work, confidence and experience. "I had contested in the spelling bee last year as well and was confident that my hard work would payoff," he said, after clinching the title with the word "appoggiatura," a type of musical tone.

Anurag-an avid reader who is also good at math, science and geography-rushed into his father's arms and burst into tears after he beat 272 other competitors to win $30,000 in cash, scholarships and books.

He said he was feeling "just sheer happiness."

Samir, 11, of Colleyville, Texas, and Aliya, 13, of Pleasanton, California, each won $4,000.

The use of the word "bee" to describe American community efforts such as spelling bees, sewing bees and quilting bees is a language puzzle. Recently scholars have speculated it comes from the same Middle English word as "boon," meaning "voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a task," according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

In that case it is appropriate. Community newspapers sponsor local contests and pay to send the winners to the state and national championships.

-L.K.L.

EQUALS: Equity for Allin Education

SPAN

Brij Kothari: Learning Is a Song

By Ranjita Biswas

Publisher

Teaching English in South Asia

Michael H. Anderson

An Interview with Richard Boyum.

by Laurinda Keys Long

Editor Laurinda Keys Long

Lessons Learned

Associate Editor

The Teacher ofthe

A. Venkata Narayana

A Conversation with Jason Kamras by Michael Bandler

Hindi Editor

The New SAT: Is it Better?

Govind Singh

By Justin Ewers

Urdu Editor AnjumNaim

Need a Tutor? Call India

Editorial Assistant

By Anupreeta Das and Am.anda Paulson

K. Muthukwnar

Art Director Hemam Bhamagar

Year:

The Young and the Restless

By David T.2. Mindich

Deputy Art Directors Sharad Sovani Khurshid Anwar Abbasi

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal

Printing Assistant A10k Kaushik

Business Manager R. Narayan

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center Bureau of International Information Programs of the State Department

Desi Infotainment for the Diaspora

By Ashish Kumar Sen

Bridging the Media Gap

By Anjum Naim

Media Under Fire: The Case for Ethics

By Shakuntala Rao and Navjit Singh Johal

On the Lighter Side The Inspiration of India in Current American Art

Front cover: Children learn the elements of math and science by using building blocks during a summer camp at the University of California, Berkeley. See story pages 3 to II. Photograph courtesy the Lawrence Hall of Science.

By Kathryn Myers

E-Commerce Gets Smarter

By Robert Buderi

American Diplomats with Indian Roots

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manu-

By Laurinda Keys Long

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

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 Ltd., 95-B Wazirpur Offset & Packagings Industrial Area, Delhi 110052. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. 200; single copy, Rs. 50.

Adoption Option Growing More Popular ByE. Wayne

Corporate Response to HIV/AIDS

By A. Venkata Narayana

Indo-American Fusion Music

By Subhra Mazumdar

Hear Here

By David Taylor

World Trade Center Remembered BySujoyDhar Visit SPAN on the Web at

http://usembassy.

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40

A LETTER

FROM

earning to read by watching Bollywood musicals. Understanding the process of erosion by building a sand castle on the beach. Discovering the secrets of mathematics by taking photographs. These and more innovative ideas in education are turning disadvantaged children into scholastic achievers in India and the United States. We explore many of these intriguing new teaching methods in our cover package, starting with Lea Terhune's description of the science and math programs for young children sponsored by groups based at the University of California's Lawrence Hall of Science at Berkeley. There are colorful, practical booklets and seminars to get parents excited about helping their children learn mathematics for a chance at a better life, and a wonder world of fun day camps and special classes to teach young children the principals of chemistry, geology, biology and other sciences. It's all laid out, with enticing photographs, in "EQUALS: Equity for All in Education."

That idea of giving every child a chance to learn is illustrated by other stories in the package. "Learning Is a Song" by Ranjita Biswas spotlights Brij Kothari, whose bright idea is using songs in movies to teach India's underprivileged to read. Richard Boyum, the U.S. Embassy'S new Regional English Language Officer, explains how the principles of teaching English as a second language can be used in South Asia. And it's hard not to be infected by the enthusiasm of Jason Kamras, the U.S. National Teacher of the Year, who shares insights in "Lessons Learned" that have helped him reach children in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. The revamped U.S. college entrance exam is examined in Justin Ewers' "The New SAT: Is it Better?" while Anupreeta Das and Amanda Paulson look into a budding phenomenon of American education in "Need a Tutor?

Call India."

One theme that runs through the life histories of many American diplomats working in India is that they had a chance early in their lives to get a good education. So many of these Foreign Service officers were born in India, or their parents were, that Laurinda Keys Long asked them to share their stories, challenges, funny moments, memories of fellow Americans and Indians who helped them on their way. It's all there in 'American Diplomats with Indian Roots."

That connection between Indians and Americans is also evoked powerfully in our memorial of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. New Delhi photographer Kamal Sharma was in New York on that day; Calcutta writer

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PUBLISHER

Sujoy Dhar was there a year before. Both focused not just on the buildings, but the people they encountered in "World Trade Center Remembered. " The artistic and spiritual expression that results from the interweaving of American and Indian culture is aptly developed by Kathryn Myers, and illustrated by a handful of American artists, in "The Inspiration of India in Current American Art." Subhra Mazumdar similarly describes the lively reactions of Indian audiences to a pair of Michiganbased musicians who have created new tones in "IndoAmerican Fusion Music."

Another package of stories reviews changes and challenges in the news media. David TZ. Mindich writes in "The Young and the Restless" about the danger to democracy itself when fewer people in each generation care about what's going on in their world and tune out the news. At the same time, there are fresh developments on the media scene, as Ashish Kumar Sen and Anjum Naim describe in their respective stories, "Desi Infotainment for the Diaspora" and "Bridging the Media Gap." It seems like a good idea to have a computer on your shopping cart telling you which of your favorite items are on sale and where you can find them, but the other side of the coin is that the market manager knows more about you. Both aspects of the futuristic world of shopping in some American stores are examined by Robert Buderi in "E-Commerce Gets Smarter."

Among the agreements reached dUling the July meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George W Bush was a commitment on specific programs to fight HIV/AIDS. In "Corporate Response to HIV/AIDS," A.Venkata Narayana tells how Indians and An1ericans are developing workplace programs to push that effort.

E. Wayne tells some good news about more Indian children getting a chance to grow up in Indian families in "Adoption Option," an article movingly photographed by Sebastian John.

We have a new feature in SPAN, starting this issue: an interactive survey and quiz that invites you to give your views on the articles and other aspects of the magazine and encourages you with the chance to win some prizes.

We'll be printing the names of three \vinners in each issue and we will be carefully reading all of your responses, as we do the letters that you write.

Please let us know what you think.

Youngsters in protective goggles concoct mixtures of solids, liquids and gases, learning how to identify properties of chemical substances at a summer day camp offered by the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Equity lor All in Education Teachers and students agree, mathematics is not the easiest b' t t t h t I B t SU Jec 0 eac or 0 earn. u conventional wisdom is turned on its head when innovative, hands-on ~,;... ~~ .". ., methods are used. The EQUAL~ 1/8 program at the University '3~ . of California, Berkeley, ~ ~ ~/ shows the way. ,~v9 . {L

s kids return to math classes in America in September, the lucky ones may be getting a pleasant surprise. If their teachers attended EQUALS workshops during summer break and took the methods

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The use of objects, space and movement helps students visualize and understand mathematics and science.

Above: Jose Franco, director of the EQUALS program at the Lawrence Hall of Science, is enthusiastic about multilingual programs that will eventually allow more people to utilize the learning tools.

gender, race or social status. Eliminate the achjevement gap. That is the EQUALS approach in a nutshell.

EQUALS is a non-profit learning program associated with the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. It was born when Berkeley graduate students and professors in the late 1960s observed the paucity of women in math and science graduate programs. Research revealed that girls, from a young age, are conditioned away from mathematical thinking. Parents and teachers unconsciously and even consciously discourage girls from pursuing math studies. As the EQUALS program evolved, it became clear that students from ethnic minorities and lower socioeconomic groups had similar difficulties with math and sciences. The founders of the program committed themselves to finding ways to make the subjects more accessible to such students. Since then, innovative curricula and materials and teacher, parent and student training developed by EQUALS have made math comprehensible to more young students, from kindergarten through high school.

Jose Franco has been EQUALS director for 14 years. He did hjs time in the trenches, teaching in grade school bilingual Photographs courtesy Lawrence Hall of Science Illustrations by Ann Humphrey Williams, courtesy EQUALSlFamily Math

Family Math, a component of the EQUALS program, brings parents together with children in math workshops. Parents are given tools, such as these cartoon-illustrated booklets, to help their kids at home, increasing the likelihood of success.

programs before he was exposed to EQUALS and eventually started running workshops himself. "I was really impressed by what the EQUALS staff were doing, what message they were conveying to the teachers taking the workshop. And I got really excited about teaching mathematics." The school in Colorado where he began teaching was very traditional. "Everyone used a basic text.

Everyone had to be on the same page every day. There were no hands-on experiences, especially in mathematics."

He adds, "EQUALS opened up my world when it came to how students should leam math."

What's so different?

Instead of demanding rote recitals of multiplication tables, a teacher who is an EQUALS convert may distribute circular pieces of A boy rides an earthquake simulator (left) in "The Forces that Shape the Bay" exhibit and adults and kids perfect a sandcastle (right), learning about the effects of water on soil in a summerfun day at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

The lawrence Hall 01 Science

IJ he Lawrence Hall of Science sits high above the University of California, Berkeley, main campus and enjoys a 180-degree view of the San Francisco Bay. The botanical gardens are next door. Surrounded by nature's wonders, it is an appropriate site for an institution dedicated to inspiring young people to explore mathematics and science.

A memorial to Berkeley's first Nobel laureate, Ernest O. Lawrence, it was opened in 1968 and soon became a national and international focal point of new learning.

What better way for a six-year-old to become acquainted with the double helix than by climbing on its colorful replica in the plaza? Or maybe she'd prefer to crawl over the back of Pheena, the whale, represented in actual whale-like proportions. Inside the hall, interactive exhibits invite children and adults to explore the laws of physics, chemistry and biology and have fun doing it. The planetarium is among the world's best.

Those interested in geology can visit "The Forces that Shape the Bay" exhibit outside. They can feel the earth move and examine faults and types of earth layers to understand how earthquakes happen. Alongside are California's rocks, minerals and drought-resistant plants. Kids can play in the stream table or learn about the Sierra Madre Mountains watershed. They

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can build skyscrapers or play colorful floor games.

Budding naturalists may prefer the basement biology lab, which houses more than 100 animals with information about their habitats and behaviors and how they adapt to the environment. The boy who always wanted to have a tarantula walk on his arm can have his wish granted here.

Besides the permanent and periodically changing exhibits, the Hall of Science actively teaches on site and takes its programs to schools. Barbara Adono, associate director for public programs, says there are also teacher leadership programs, and curriculum development projects. The math program EQUALS functionally autonomously under the Lawrence umbrella.

Adono says, "There's a lot of cross-fertilization and opportunities that would not exist unless the other things were there." It is a dynamic, endlessly creative situation. "It's great to be working with somebody who is working intensely in the schools on a curriculum project and think about turning that into an exhibit or a public program." The research and development is used to tell about the educational programs created for the public and for schools.

"It's a lively place," she says.

The schedule is full of options. Summer camps according to age and grade are offered, as are classes during the school year. And what classes!

The Wizard's Lab on Wheels demonstrates principles of electricity, optics, sound, movement and magnetism, including the Van de Graff static electricity generator to make kids' hair stand on end. In Crime Lab Chemistry, kids analyze ink to discover who wrote the naughty note. There are classes on Pond Organisms and Animal Behavior, but also Breakfast Cereal Analysis. Computer classes are offered for adults.

Besides the EQUALSand Family Math curricula and publications, there are several other programs that support educational development. The Full Option Science System is an inquiry-based science program for kindergarten through eighth grade. It develops curricula according to advances in understanding how children think and learn. Great Explorations in Math and Science provides materials for preschool through eighth grade students and teachers. Hands-On Universe makes images from professional telescopes and image-processing software available for classroom use, to help teach data interpretation, measurement, critical thinking and other skills. Marine Activities, Resources & Education integrates literacy and science with focus on exploration of the ocean, for kindergarten through eighth grade. Science Education for Public Understanding provides hands-on tools to explore science concepts through personal and societal issues. Instructor-focused programs bring teachers together with scientists to enhance class content with activities in oceanography, chemistry and other sciences.

Some of the projects assess and design the most effective ways to guide students from preschool through graduate school in learning math and science. The goal is to create and widely disseminate model programs for educators and students of science and mathematics. The reach is international, and Lawrence looks for opportunities to bring knowledge to new places. Says Adono: "Our general mission is to improve public understanding of science. And I would add that we are deeply committed to equity. We are deeply committed to scientific rigor." And all that while having a good time.

For more information about programs at Lawrence, log on to 0 www.lawrencehallofscience.org.

Brii Kothari

J JJ [ rying to learn Spanish in an American university gave Brij Kothari, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, the idea of helping semi-literates back home to improve their reading. It sounded farfetched, but it turned out to be a simple but effective tool.

Kothari's "lightbulb" moment happened while pursuing a master's degree in communication at Cornell University in New York.

His project frequently took him to Ecuador and he needed to understand Spanish. "So I used to watch a lot of Spanish films with English subtitles. One day, suddenly I thought: Why not Spanish films with Spanish subtitles? It'd be a better way of learning the language. Adding text to the audio, you could actually follow what the native speaker says. Then I exclaimed, 'Why not add subtitles to the popular film song programs in India? This way those who had rudimentary knowledge of the alphabets could learn to read!'"

The casual thought took shape when he returned to teach at the Centre for Educational Innovation at his alma mater in Ahmedabad. Kothari's idea was to use entertainment to augment reading habits among early literates, school dropouts, even adults. "Since a huge number of children and adults watch TV for entertainment, even in rural areas of India, why not use this resource to get an educational benefit out of it?"

This was the beginning of Same Language Subtitling or SLS, in 1996.

SLS subtitles film songs, which are popular across India, and builds on people's familiarity with the lyrics. With SLS, they can read the words to their favorite songs.

According to Kothari, SLS "doubles and even triples the rate of reading improvement that children may be achieving through formal education."

When his research team visited villages, railway stations and roadside cafes, they found that people who tried it were enthusiastic about the idea.

Kothari approached the Ahmedabad center of Doordarshan to try his idea in "Chitrahaar," a program featuring film song sequences. The government network approved and implemented SLS in 1999.

"Chitrahaar" is no longer telecast, but SLS features in the similar "Rangoli" program on Sunday mornings, watched by some 100 million early literates.

SLS is cost-effective, needing only installation of the software. Kothari calculates that it comes to less than one paisa per head per year.

He has big ideas for SLS. "We want to take it internationally. Even in the U.S. ~ there are pockets where people have a ~ reading problem, as statistics show. We 'i can use their popular songs in the same il way. In fact, it can be used anywhere in ~ the world. We've formed a group called ~ Planet Read, which will take forward the ~ ยง idea to other countries."

Brij Kothari uses captions on popular film songs to teach reading in a slum in Ahmedabad.

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The SLS idea won Kothari an award in 2002 at the World Bank's Development Marketplace, a development forum, giving him enough funds to implement the program nationally. It was recognized as the Best Social Invention of 2000 by the U.K.-based Institute for Social Inventions. Kothari is also a Fellow of Ashoka: Innovator for the Public, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that recognizes leadership qualities in making a difference to society.

About his experience at Cornell, Kothari says, "I learned about the power of the media for social change and also research skills to assess the impact of media. During my doctoral studies I had my first taste of fieldwork in villages and understood more deeply the core place of literacy in overall human development."

Today, Kothari has moved to other projects to improve reading, especially among children. He is CEO of BookBox, Inc., which creates children's books in digital media to be aired on TV. It is available in 18 languages. While the visuals remain the same, a narrator tells the story in the local language.

"The whole idea is that children around the world can have a good variety of stories. A Brazilian story can be told in Hindi, for example, and vice versa."

Kothari has more plans brewing. One is a project drawing on the rich reservoir of Indian folk songs to spread the message of literacy through translation and trans-creation. These songs will be available as downloads on the Internet, he says. "We plan to create a vast digital library of children's books for TV and digital media in all the world's major languages. We'll sell these books in markets that can afford them and put them on TV in markets where individuals cannot buy these products but do watch TV. That way we 0 are able to create a reading experience for aiL" About the Author: Ranjita Biswas is a Calcutta-basedfreelancer

translates literature and writes fiction.

who also

This giant DNA double helix and the life-sized whale behind it are interactive sculptures meant to be climbed upon by visitors in the Lawrence Hall of Science entrance plaza.

By controlling the flow of the central "Sierra Nevada" waterfall in "The Forces that Shape the Bay" exhibit, children learn how water flows.

paper to fold or cut up, ask students to translate a fractions problem into colored pen drawings, engage the class in cooperative games or use blocks and beans to demonstrate algebra problems.

And she will probably invite her students' families to join in the fun. The use of objects, space and movement helps students visualize and understand mathematics, even the most abstract concepts.

A program called Family Math is fundamental to the EQUALS approach.

To Franco, used to working with disadvantaged kids, especially those of Hispanic migrant workers, Family Math was a way to get help from the community. It also gave parents tools to help their kids. "I thought if I could get parents to help me out in different ways, we might be able to reach more of the kids, have more success with the kids, not just in mathematics," Franco says. Studies such as that by Robert Leitman, Katherine Binns and Akhil Unni (NACME Research Letter, June 1995) reveal that lack of parental involvement in determining the direction of their children's math program contributes to poor results for the kids. For instance, 93 percent of parents surveyed said they were not informed about the decisions their children must make about future

math courses and the implications of these decisions. Consequently, the students make uninformed decisions. Many plan to drop math and science as soon as they can. They hold misconceptions that a special talent is necessary to do mathematics. Family Math outreach tries to make parents advocates for their children by giving them enough informa-

tion so they can help their children in decision-making. The textbook Family Math for the Middle School Years has a chapter with the catchy head, "Dropping Math? Say Goodbye to 81 Jobs." Parents and children are shown the impOltance of math as a prerequisite for entrance into university and diverse careers-and a steady, respectable income later. They

YES PROGRAM hirty-five high school students have been chosen from India for the first time as part of a Youth Exchange and Study (YES) program to visit the United States to foster better understanding between the peoples of both countries.

The Indian students are among 675 selected worldwide after an open, merit-based process by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

As in the past two years, the students selected for the YES program-which is administered by the American Field Service-will attend American high schools, stay with a host family, join social and cultural activities, develop leadership skills and tell Americans about life in India. They will also get to tour the Capitol and the White House to learn about the workings of the federal government.

"There are already some 80,000 Indian students studying in the U.S.," said American Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Robert O. Blake while honoring the students from New Delhi, Pune and Ahmedabad. "You are the pioneers" of the YES program, he said.

"People-to-people contact," Blake later told journalists, "provides the perfect platform for the relationship between two countries. They are all so excited and happy and will surely become goodwill ambassadors for this country."

YES students go through a three-tiered selection process: written application, interview and final screening by a national selection committee.

Such programs are part of an effort to reach out to a younger, wider population, said Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Patricia S. Harrison. The program "helps these young people discover an America beyond the myths and misconceptions and the headlines."

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Left: The first batch of Indian students selected for the YES program interacting with U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission Robert O. Blake.

Below: Students find the cities they will visit.

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learn that everyone can succeed at mathematics with the right approach.

At a lO-day training workshop in San Leandro, California, a group of teachers are given the core concepts and led through the cooperative exercises they will use with their students. In order to give everyone a chance, classes are organized into six groups with varied responsibilities, which are rotated. The shy and the outgoing alike have the opportunity to develop different organizational skills.

"Confidence building" and "equity in classes" are among the important goals, says Grace Davila Coates, Family Math director. During the session, teachers grouped at tables share their problemsolving methods, raise questions and bend their minds to new ways of seeing numbers. "It's not enough for teachers to know content. They must be good crafters of lessons," says Coates. At the break, special education teacher Claudia Stafinski declared, "This is the best thing that has happened to me at this time in my life. It's making me become flexible, to solve other problems besides math."

The teachers will take their tools back to the classroom, but Family Math sessions may take place anywhere. Sessions may be led by a teacher, a parent or interested community member; they might be held in the school library after class, or at a venue like the Kids Breakfast Club, where Franco and his team were asked to present math programs. This twice-monthly meeting informed kids and parents about community resources, health and nutrition. "We worked with parents, talked to them about why it was important for kids to know mathematics."

He notes that many adults didn't have a good experience with math in school.

The resulting negative attitude can be detrimental to their children if they give the message that math isn't important, or that they don't really need anything beyond basic arithmetic. Surprisingly, Franco says, "The parents were very interested in being there to learn more mathematics. They were very interested in helping their kids learn." Some parents who never earned their college degree wanted to go back to school. "It's one of

those heartwarming stories that we really like to hear," he says.

Taking EQUALS programs to where they are needed most-the inner cities and other places where families have social and economic hurdles to overcome-is one of the great challenges.

Povelty, fragmented families and crime, coupled with generations of bad school experiences, take a toll on the children, making them hard to reach. "We tell people who are working with these families they have to think out of the box," Franco says. "We tell our trainers or site directors that they don't have to do the work at a school site. They should be going to the places where the families congregate ....They should be hooking up with the churches, community centers, libraries or science museums."

Children who might otherwise fail respond well to learning the principles through movement and experience, instead of traditional memorization and working out abstract concepts on paper, he says. Games and puzzles that involve physical activity allow children to absorb the spatial component of math, so that it makes more sense in a real, practical way.

EQUALS and Family Math Coordinator Karen Mayfield-Ingram says that for girls, particularly, this is critical. "One of the things that they found in recent research was that there was a difference in gender with regard to spatial reasoning, that there was a difference in the ability to look at things and move them around in space."

She says giving girls more experience with spatial reasoning at an earlier age will help them with mathematics. The difference stems from the way boys and girls are socialized. Boys tend to get toys that expand their spatial awareness: "They

Children who might otherwise fail can learn through experience instead of memorization.

Boys examine and experiment with bones at the Beastly Botanicals summer camp at the Lawrence Hall of Science. Kids learn about forest and desert habitats, how animals adapt to harsh climates, observe useful and interesting plant species and try to identify the animal that left its tracks, gnaw marks, scat or bones behind.

are building, breaking things apart, Legos, construction, Tinker Toys. Girls have things, traditionally in society, that reinforce their language skills, playing with dolls, writing, music and drama."

Spatial reasoning and mathematical thinking are learned from an early age, Mayfield-Ingram says. "If you wait until the college level, you've got a lot to catch up." Which is why gender parity at the graduate level remains a goal rather than an achievement in most U.S. universities.

"The earlier you start with expectations, or the same expectations, with regard to what girls can do mathematically and in science, the better," she says.

Besides implicit conditioning, or messages that "maybe a child should try something else," adolescence brings

emotional and peer pressure into it, she says. "Sometimes you get into girls not wanting to appear smart," thinking they will be less popular or attractive to boys.

"Math anxiety is widespread in society," she says. Changing perceptions about math is no small task.

The latest outreach project, a linkup with local science, math and Spanish language media, has Franco and others at the Lawrence Hall of Science excited.

"We will be writing up our activities and dropping them into Spanish language newspapers." California's Hispanic population is now a majority in the state.

They read their community newspapers.

"We are a resource for the community. It's just another way we are trying to reach the families. We hope that once we get the project rolling we'll be able to bring on radio and TV." The program will begin in the San Francisco area, in Houston, Texas, and in Miami, Florida, where EQUALS has linked up with newspapers and science centers. There is potential for doing this in other languages. It is a question of dollars. Franco smiles, "We

j JJ in South Asia Although English is widely spoken in India, it is still aforeign language to many in this and neighboring countries. The U.S. Embassy Office of Public Affairs has appointed Richard Boyum in the new position of Regional English Language Officer (RELO) to share techniques and ideas on different ways to teach English and better prepare South Asia's youth for higher education and employment. Boyum came to New Delhi from Bangkok, where he received an award from the King of Thailand last year for his contributions to education as the RELO in that country. He has a master's degree from Georgetown University in teaching English as a foreign language and bilingual education, and a certificate in distance education from Texas A&M University. He has been a classroom teacher, trainer and program administrator in Africa, the Middle East, South America and Europe. Boyum gave details on his work.

What is a Regional English Language Officer?

RICHARD BOYUM: A RELO is a State Department Foreign Service Officer specialized in the teaching of English as a foreign language. Our division is part of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and located in the Office of Academic Programs. As RELOs, we promote and support the teaching of English and the training of English teachers in our region. For example, we might work with a ministry of education to offer training courses for English teachers, or coordinate with a university on teacher training curriculum development. We also place visiting American professors at selected universities, or identify Indian English teaching professionals to go on training programs to the United States.

are going to see how far we can stretch this dollar." He adds, "We are also going to put these activities on the Web so that anyone who has a computer can download them and start doing them at home." That means anyone, anywhere. If a Spanish language newspaper wants to develop an education section, EQUALS will provide the materials online. Franco says, "They can download it, plop it into their newspaper and start running with it. We are also going to try to provide instructions on how to start up the program in your community. We want to extend it beyond the communities we are working with directly." The program will get underway in the next few months.

The original intent was to work with multiethnic media, so if the Spanish language pilot project is successful, Franco hopes to expand to other languages.

What are the countries in your region?

I cover India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

Why is the U.S. Embassy opening up a RELO office now?

English is a critical life skill for students in South Asia. The State Department is responding to requests for developing English language teaching expertise in the various countries.

Most people consider India an English-speaking country.

Why is there a RELO assigned to India?

India has a particularly interesting linguistic history.

English has played a central role, obviously. Many Indians are virtually native speakers of English, having attended bilingual or English-medium schools. However, in many schools

The "Prove It!" exhibit teaches young detectives how to discover hidden facts using forensic scientific techniques at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

Besides teaching math, the EQUALS program instills the idea of equity among teachers, addressing the biases that hinder learning.

~ Richard Boyum receives an award from the King ~ of Thailand in November 2004 for his contributions ~ to Thai education through distance learning.

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throughout the country, initial instruction is in the native language and Hindi. Then later, English is offered for a few periods a week as a subject. So in those situations, with limited contact with the language, familiarization with the methods and materials used in modern foreign language teaching may be useful. Under those circumstances for language learning, it may also be useful to share what we have learned about teacher preparation for the English as a second language environment we have in so many communities in the United States.

Can you give some examples of the kind of work you've done in other countries?

One of our most useful resources is the English Language

That would fit well with the international network of EQUALS sites, which are often based in schools or universities, but are not limited to institutions. "We are trying to reach the community at large with whatever tool we can. I think that would be the advice I would give anybody." Be creative, he says, "The school is not necessarily the only place you should hook up with. Other members of our community are involved in education and they can contribute."

Besides teaching mathematics, instilling equity is part of the EQUALS mission.

Franco says, "We try to address the biases that we all have toward groups of people, for whatever reason. The first thing that comes to mind is the color of our skin, but that's not the only bias we have. There are so many biases out there." Awareness of

Fellow program, which places an American professor spe8 cialized in English language training at a university to work with future teachers of English. We will have four EL Fellows in India this year, two in Bangladesh and one in Sri Lanka. Another program is the English ACCESS program that offers scholarships to underprivileged youth to pursue extracurricular English language study, to better prepare them for the post-secondary school world of employment or university entrance exams. We also offer teacher training via distance learning. In Thailand we worked with the University of Oregon to offer a monthly series of training programs via satellite for teachers of English all over the country. In Egypt we got English classes to link via the Internet with classes in other countries and engage in a variety of projects using English as the common language.

What are your objectives for your work in India?

Well, I'd first of all like to get acquainted with the English teaching environment in all its different forms here, and then bring some of our resources to contribute to English language teaching and training as desired or requested.

Can you tell a bit about your background and where you have lived overseas?

Like many Foreign Service Officers I have a "checkered" career. My first experience abroad was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal. Later, after I got my MA, I worked in Saudi Arabia. When I joined the State Department I got assigned to Egypt, Brazil, Thailand and now India.

0

this is critical to teach effectively. "If you have a bias toward a student, that can easily influence the expectations that you have of that student and your interactions with that student." He admits, "Equity is not an easy issue to talk about. In fact, if you are doing equity work and everyone is on the same page and everybody says, 'Oh, everything is fine,' you are not doing something right. When you are doing equjty work there is going to be a certain level of discomfort." Dealing with it brings change. Especially with children from minority language groups. "We have to raise our expectations of what they can or cannot do."

Franco is a crusader in a world where too many teachers still cling to the old ways. The statistics on kids who go on to advanced math are not encouraging.

''Teachers have to step back and look at how they teach mathematics," he says.

"One way doesn't necessarily work for every child. There are so many learning styles. To do the same thing the same way year in and year out with all these different groups of kids just isn't going to work. It's not going to reach all these kids."

Manipulating a bunch of toothpicks or paper squares, combining them to see how numbers relate to each other, is an easy way to make palatable what has long been bitter medicine to lagging math students.

Math should be fun, Franco says. ''I'm a firm believer that everyone can learn. We just need to find the way to reach every student."

0 About the Author: Lea Terhune is afreelance writer based in California and aformer editor of SPAN.

The Teacher of the Year

lessons learned A Conversation with JASON KAMRAS

by MICHAEL BANDLER

ason Kamras, named the 2005 National Teacher of the Year by President George W Bush, has spent the past nine years teaching seventh, eighth and ninth grade students at John Philip Sousa Middle School in Washington, D.C., where he developed a digital photography program to make the students more aware of the world around them and to impart, in a practical way, lessons in mathematics.

"Teaching is very demanding work, very difficult, " he says, "but the opportunity to work with my children is one / cherish every day."

Kamras chose teaching as a profession, and focused his attention, even while a college undergraduate, on the inner city. "/ decided early on," he explains, "that / wanted to be a part of the process of extending educational opportunity to all children, which / believe is their birthright. " So he joined the faculty of an inner city school in the nation s capital-one of the most daunting challenges on the American educational landscape. /n April, he became the 55th National Teacher of the Year, the oldest and most prestigious awardfor elementary and secondary school educators in the United States.

Among Kamras' innovations has been EXPOSE, a program in which students learn to use digital cameras, edit images and work with digital video software to fashion autobiographical photo essays about their lives and their communities. He uses the program to help them learn mathematics.

Kamras was born in New York City, grew up in Sacramento, California, and attended Princeton University in New Jersey, where he received his undergraduate degree. He began teaching at Sousa under the auspices of Teachfor America, a national, nonprofit organization that recruits top university graduates and asks them to commit themselves to teaching two years at inner city or rural schools in mostly poor communities, where it often is difficult to fill teaching positions. When his two years ended, Kamras remained at Sousa, leaving only for the /999-2000 academic year to earn a masters degree in education at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

Recently, he discussed his career choice, and his perspectives on the evolution of his students.

What are the opportunities facing kids entering their teenage years today in the United States?

JASON KAMRAS: What is amazing about this country is that when children have the opportunity to have an excellent education, they can go on to do almost anything they would like to do. So I think it's a very exciting time, that age, to know you have that future waiting for you.

When you first walked into the classroom how did you win the students' confidence?

One of the things I suggest to new teachers as they enter the classroom is to demonstrate that they're really serious about the business of learning, and about setting a high standard for the students and the classroom. That immediately sets a tone of, "We're really going to achieve this year." Children actually want that. They're thirsting for that push, for that order, for that notion that someone is going to lead them in a very systematic way. But then there are also all sorts of other things you can do: spending time with children outside the classroom, going to chess tournaments and basketball games, making home visits, getting to know the families, so that you do develop a sense of rapport and trust that you can then draw upon in the classroom.

What are the challenges facing kids today in their daily lives and daily routines that are important for you, as a teacher, to keep in mind?

This is the age when they begin to develop a sense of their own identity. I think that's an extremely turbulent time. If you ask any adult to look back, he or she can recall very difficult experiences while negotiating social changes and physical changes, and deciding which crowd to be part of. I'm still fairly young, but it does seem that the pace of our culture has accelerated a great deal, everything from news to the video games, everything along that spectrum. It's a less reflective culture, and that may be something our children are missing as they grow up.

How do you try to get them to be more reflective?

You can contextualize mathematics and make it relevant to

create autobiographical photo essays that they then shared with the larger public. So, through these two mechanisms, there was an exchange across the city.

It also was a great way to teach math. When you talk about angle of view, it's geometry. Shutter speeds are fractional comparisons. Pixels per inch are ratios. We started with blackand-white film, and now we're all digital. There also was a double math initiative. I came to the conclusion that to really push achievement, we needed to double the amount of instructional time for mathematics. So I proposed that to my principal, and we worked out a system whereby every student has two math classes a day. There are two separate courses being taught, but all students take both of those courses-the idea being that each teacher can slow down and focus on a smaller number of objectives and thereby really get much more in depth.

And student retention goes up.

their lives. It forces reflection [on] its application. It's true in non-academic areas, too-just talking with them, taking the time to listen, and slow down and have a conversation.

Talk for a moment about the role of parents, in terms of school and academics. How do you involve them in the lives of their kids?

It starts with phone calls and letters home, home visits, meeting family members, sitting down and spending some time, having parents come into class and participate, making myself available before and after school to discuss anything that's going on with their child, really making every possible effort to establish those lines of communication. It's crucial for parents or guardians to be involved. We need to make the schools more welcoming to them.

Tell me about the program you've initiated, EXPOSE. EXPOSE is a digital photography program for the seventhand eighth-grade students in my school. The genesis was, first, that I had always loved photography and wanted to share that with my students. At the same time, when I came to the school, I was struck by two phenomena: one, that most people living in the Washington region did not know very much about my children, other than what they would read in the newspaper; and two, my students, for a variety of reasons, didn't really have the

Let's go back, for a minute, to what influenced your choice of an inner-city school.

I'm still in the school in which I taught during Teach for America. I believe that education is the cornerstone of opportunity in this country, and there are too many children, particularly from low-income communities, who do not have access to an excellent education and are therefore being denied opportunity.

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How do you spot a child in crisis when it isn't immediately

iâ‚Ź or overtly discernible?

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I think when you spend enough time with children, you ~ develop a sense of what their normal operating equilibrium is. ~ It's different for every child; what might be a signal for one is 6 I completely benign for somebody else.

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President George W Bush welcomes Jason Kamras, the 2005 National Teacher of the Year, to the Oval Office of the White House on April 20, 2005.

chance to take advantage of all the opportunities in the city. I wanted to create some way to bring these two worlds together.

So I thought photography would be a good way to do that. We'd take the students on field trips so they got to see more of the city, and we also had the students-using digital photography-

Can you pinpoint an example?

I have a student I'm very close with who was in my first sixth-grade class in 1996. As a fresh teacher that year, I was really challenged by him. He was often, as they say in education, "off task." And I had great difficulty handling that.

But I realized, after talking with him, that I wasn't challenging him enough. So I started working with him after school, to develop a rapport. We played chess, and he actually would routinely defeat me. By no means am I a great chess player, but he was 11 years old! I didn't teach him in seventh or eighth grade, but we continued to work after school, and I developed a good relationship with his mother as well. He ended up as valedictorian of the school, and I continued working with him throughout high school. He just finished his sophomore year at Morehouse College in Atlanta [Georgia]. He's an electrical engineering major, and he's thinking about doing a joint master's [degree] program with the Columbia University School of Engineering [in New York City].

D About the Interviewer: Michael Bandler writes for the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs.

I

I

By JUSTIN EWERS

oug Sprankling doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the new SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test.

"I'm not that big a fan," says the junior at Davis Senior High School in California. He is just one of the uneasy students facing a much-revamped version of the test that 330,000 high schoolers took for the first time this year.

It's not that he thought the exam was going to be harder, necessarily. It's just so diflerent. "The old one was such an institution in high school culture," says Sprankling: Get a 1600, earn a shot at Harvard. "We all know what it means."

But the prospect of an entirely new exam-with three sections now boosting the perfect score to a more mysterious 2400-makes Sprankling and his classmates feel like guinea pigs. "Everyone's always freaking out about this test," says Mallory Richards, a junior at Davis who tackled the SAT for the first time in May. "Being the lab rats-well, that reinforces the overreaction."

And believe her when she says the new SAT has gotten quite a reaction. Some 2.2 million students take America's most popular college entrance exam each year, and this year's group, more than most, seems to be scrambling for answers. Kaplan Test Prep, one of the biggest companies offering SAT preparation, has reported a 78 percent increase in the number of students signing

up for its practice tests this year. But as test takers prepare to sharpen their No.2 pencils, many still wonder just what is on this new exam, why it changed in the first place-and what exactly colleges and universities are going to do with it.

What students are encountering is the biggest change the SAT has undergone in at least a generation. The verbal section has been dramatically rejiggered: Analogies-lambasted for years by test critics who felt they emphasized word memorization over analytical skillshave been dropped. Short reading passages have been added, and the entire section has been renamed "Critical Reading" to reflect its new emphasis. The math section, too, has been changed, with the elimination of quantitative comparison questions in favor of more advanced math.

Extra credit. Stealing the spotlight, though, is the test's new writing component. The 6O-minute section includes multiple-choice questions on improving sentences and identifying errors in diction or grammar, as well as a 25-minute essay, which accounts for 30 percent of the 800point total. The essays will be graded on a scale of one to six by some 10,000 high school English teachers and college professors trained to evaluate students' work.

Why all the changes now? Critics have long said that the exam was too focused on IQ instead of achievement, too gimmicky, too vulnerable to test-prep and that too

many minorities struggled to score as well as whites. The College Board, which owns the test, insists that it has been mulling over how to respond to these critiques for years but that, especially when it came to writing, the technology was never available to grade more than 2 million tests taken all over the United States.

Ultimately, it was a speech in 2001 by Richard Atkinson, the president of the University of California (UC), that proved to be the tipping point. After learning that his granddaughter, then in seventh grade, was already prepping for the SAT's analogies, an outraged Atkinson announced at an American Council of Education conference that UC was considering dropping the SAT in favor of what he felt were the less prep-prone subject tests called SAT lIs. A few months later, two University of California researchers working for Atkinson provided evidence that the SAT lIs, which test what students have actually learned in class, were somewhat more predictive of success in college than the SAT. Atkinson's speech put the College Board in an uncomfortable position. After all, California students made up some 12.6 percent of SAT customers at the time. But when Atkinson's researchers backed up his bark with the bite of their data, it was clear something needed to change.

And the SAT has changed, in a few whirlwind years, into a test that Atkinson, now retired, is unabashedly proud of. He should be: Much of what he proposed is on the new

exam. "I think it will be a fairer test," he says, "and kids who have [fewer] opportunities will have a much clearer understanding of what they should be doing."

Still, many universities seem to be leery of the new exam, especially the writing

This new section quizzes students on grammar and includes an essay question like the one below: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following quotations and the assignment below.

1. Whi Ie secrecy can be destructive, some of it is indispensable in human lives. Some control over secrecy and openness is needed in order to protect identity. Such control may be needed to guard privacy, intimacy, and friendship.

Adapted from Sissela Bok, "The Need for Secrecy"

2. Secrecy and a free, democratic government, President Harry Truman once said, don't mix. An open exchange of information is vital to the kind of informed citizenry essential to healthy democracy.

Editorial, "Overzealous Secrecy Threalens Democracy"

Assignment: Do people need to keep secrets or is secrecy harmful? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue.

Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

The section gets harder with the addition of advanced material-like this question on absolute value-from Algebra 1/:

section. "We're not sure what we'll be able to do with it," says John BamhiII, director of admissions at Florida State University.

"Is a 600 on the writing a good score, a bad score, or what?" For the fIrst year of the new exam, many schools will be accepting both the old and the new SAT. And most plan to use the writing scores only for their own records-to see how well, down the road, the numbers match up with admittees' college success. "I really think we're two or three years away before this becomes a major factor in college admissions," says Frank Sachs, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

There are exceptions to that rule, of course. Some highly selective schools, which already require the SAT II writing test, plan to immediately factor in all three new scores. "We know it's a different test," says John Blackburn, the dean of admissions at the University of Virginia, but "we have a pretty good grasp of what it means." (The University of Virginia will also still accept old SATs.) At Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington state, admissions officers will consider the writing section, but "we wiII look at it in the context of everything else," says Tony Cabasco, the school's dean of admission and financial aid. "If someone's got a 700 verbal but the essay isn't very good, we'II ask, 'What's going on here?' and then look elsewhere."

Prepped. For all the striking changes to the SAT, some naysayers think it still comes up short. "For me, this is more a [public relations] face-lift than a fundamental reconstruction of the test," says Andy Lutz, vice president for program development at the Princeton Review and an outspoken clitic of the SAT. The math and verbal sections are still largely the same tests, he insists, and they can still be test-prepped. So can the writing section; the College Board has posted its scoring rubric online. In an Atlantic Monthly article last year, Lutz and two colleagues noted that use of the phrase "for example" seems to improve essay scores.

Eradicating test prep may be too much to hope for. "No matter what the test, it will always be possible to study for it, and those with more disposable income and higher motivation will benefIt," says Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard who has followed the testing battles for years. Money, in other words, may always be able to buy a better SAT score. But test prep is fine with even its most vehement critics as long as it's teaching high schoolers useful skills. Richard Atkinson's granddaughter, the one who precipitated all this fuss, is stiII doing SAT prep. That's OK, says Atkinson. She writes an essay a week for her private lessons, he says. ''I'm sure she's probably getting somewhat better as a result." 0 About the Author: Justin Ewers writes on education and other subjects for U.S. News & World Report.

omit Basak's tutoring style is Teachers. Van Meter says she's concerned American schools and hardly unusual. The engineerabout the lack of quality control for all tuparents are using skilled but tors hired under No Child Left Behind, but ing graduate spices up lessons "the offshore tutoring raises that issue even with games, offers rewards for inexpensive tutors based in more dramatically than we've seen here in excellent performance, and tries to India to keep children from keep his students' interest by linkthe States." falling behind their ing the math formulas they struggle Still, while the teachers federation and with to real-life examples they can relate to. others have been quick to pounce on the classmates, especially Unlike most tutors, however, Basak lives practice, its proponents wonder why qualin science and math. But thousands of kilometers away from his stuified teachers should be kept from helping kids, just because they're in a foreign dents. He is a New Delhi resident who goes to some U.S. teachers groups work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with country. have raised questions "With this, there's an added wrinkle in American students doing their homework about qualifications and around dinnertime. the outsourcing debate, because the beneAmericans have slowly grown accustomed to ficiaries are not just the teachers," says cultural gaps. the idea that the people who answer their cusFrancesco Lecciso, a spokesman for tomer-service and computer-help calls may be BrainFuse, an online tutoring firm in New on the other side of the globe. Now, some students may find their York City. "The beneficiaries are the students who are getting the tutor works there, too. tutoring." Still, BrainFuse has been "cautious" about outsourcWhile the industry is still relatively tiny, India's abundance of ing-about 50 of its 850 tutors are located overseas-because of math and engineering graduates-willing to teach from a distance the political questions as well as technical challenges and confor far less money than their American counterparts-has made cerns about culture gaps, he says. the country an attractive resource for some U.S. tutoring firms.

"We would be reluctant right now to put a tutor from India It's a phenomenon that some hail as a triumph of technology, a with a fourth grade student from North Carolina, for instance," boon for science-starved American students and the latest demonsays Lecciso. On the other hand, he says, a high-schooler with stration that globalization is leveling the playing field, particularly specialized science needs might benefit from such tutors, many when it comes to intellectual capital. But critics worry about a of whom have superb math and science backgrounds. lack of tutoring standards and question how well anyone can teach "In spite of all the criticism of leaming by rote, the Indian teachover a physical and cultural gulf. The fact that some of the out- ing system has produced some of the greatest professionals in the sourced tutors may be used to fulfill the U.S. government's No new world economy," says Anirudh Phadke, an official at Career Child Left Behind supplemental education requirements-and get Launcher, where Basak, the math tutor, works. federal funds to do so-has been even more controversial.

Career Launcher is one of just five Indian firms currently tutor"We don't know who's tutoring the students, we don't know ing U.S. students. Some contract with American e-tutoring what their qualifications are, and we're concerned about their fa- providers, and some work directly with schools and students. miliarity with the curriculum in the districts of the students they're Phadke estimates that Indian tutors are now working with some tutoring," says Nancy Van Meter, director of the Center on 20,000 American students, but he hopes the market will increase as Accountability and Privatization at the American Federation of technology improves and demand from No Child Left Behind rises.

One big reason for the outsourcing is, of course, cost. Take Reprinted by permission from The Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com).

Growing Stars, a small company that has its headquarters in Copyright Š 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

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Fremont, California, and a center with 20 tutors in Kochi, Kerala (all of whom start their workday at 4:30 a.m.). Lower labor costs allow the company to offer one-on-one services for $20 an hour, significantly less than the $45 to $80 an hour charged by big-name tutoring companies LikeSylvan and Kaplan.

"My teachers are all highly educated, come from math and science backgrounds, and have prior teaching experience. American teachers of comparable quality would be doubly expensive," says Biju Mathew, who started the company last year.

When San Antonio resident Johan Verzijl decided to hire an online chemistry and math tutor for his 11th-grade son, Nick, he had no clue at first he'd be working with someone from India.

The cost of Growing Stars attracted him; so much so that he wondered at first if it was for real. "When I found out it was based in India, my initial concern was-whoa!" he says, citing worries about technical problems and language barriers.

But he decided to give it a try, and now says his son and his two tutors developed a good relationship after a week or so of getting used to the tutors' accents.

Twice a week Nick sits down with a headset and a whiteboard tablet to write upon, working through problems with the tutors over the Internet. The tutors received copies of his textbooks so they

could see the assignments, and got information ahead of time about Nick's interests and activities to help build a rapport. "They've bent over backwards with us to make this work," says Verzijl.

Still, while Growing Stars works directly with families, other U.S. companies provide most of their services to children at failing schools. After the school spends three years on the "needs improvement" list, No Child Left Behind requires tutoring to be offered. The fact that tutoring providers are allowed to hire overseas just underscores an overall lack of oversight of the industry, say critics. They point to what they say is a gross double standard: allowing such loose hiring practices while prohibiting some failing districts, including Boston and Chicago, from offering their own tutoring, even though that may mean fewer children receive the services.

"Our members who are working with kids every day in the classrooms are, in some cases, being told by the Department of Education, 'Your school has been labeled in need of improvement; therefore your district can no longer be providers,' but at the same time they're turning around and saying we can send tax dollars overseas without knowing the qualifications or materials that tutor is working with," says Van Meter of the teachers federation.

As technology develops and the barriers to communication erode, most agree that tutoring is likely to join the list of other jobs facing global competition. Some hurdles remain, of course. Indian tutors undergo training to learn an American accent and U.S. teaching methods, but still face some cultural gaps. And just dealing with students online, rather than face to face, can be tough.

"Empathizing with students, motivating them and promoting higher-level thinking are all challenging when the student can't see the tutor but only listens to her voice," says Swati Chopra, a finance graduate who joined Career Launcher as a math tutor a year ago. Her colleague Basak had to get used to another challenge of working with U.S. students. "I find that we tutors also need to shower a lot of praise for the students' good work," he says, "which is very uncommon in India."

D About the Authors: Anupreeta Dos is a New Delhi-based journalist.

Amanda Paulson writes for The Christian Science Monitor from Chicago.

W

hen news

executives look at the decline over the past few decades in the number of people who read or watch the news, they're scared silly.

But then they reassure themselves that the kids will come around. Conventional wisdom runs that as young men and women gain the

trappings of adulthood-a job, a spouse, children and a house-they tend to pick up the news habit, too. As CBS News president Andrew Heyward declared in 2002, "Time is on our side in that as you get older, you tend to get more interested in the world around you." Unfortunately for Heyward and other news executives, the evidence suggests that young people are not picking up the news habit-not in their teens, not in their twenties, not even in their thirties.

When they aren't reassuring themselves, editors and publishers are lying awake at night thinking about the dismaying trends of recent decades. In 1972, nearly half of 18- to 22-

Left: Tony Morales enjoys his lunch break while reading The San Francisco Chronicle.

Morales says he is probably the only lawyer in town who has time to read the entire newspaper.

astonishing 77 percent. If you are in sixth grade and sitting alone in your room, you're probably not watching [the nightly news].

One of the clearest signs of the sea change in news viewing habits was the uproar following the appearance last fall by Jon Stewart, host of "The Daily Show," a parody of a news program, on CNN's "CrossfIre," a real one. With a median age of 34, "The Daily Show's" audience is the envy of CNN, so when Stewart told "CrossfIre's" hosts that their show's predictable leftJright approach to debates of current issues was "hurting America," one could have guessed that CNN bigwigs would pay attention. But who could have foreseen that CNN President Jonathan Klein would cancel "CrossfIre?" "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise," he told The New York Times.

News executives are so desperate to get to consumers before the American Association of Retired Persons does that they're willing to heed the advice of a comedian.

year-olds read a newspaper every day, according to research conducted by Wolfram Peiser, a scholar who studies newspaper readership. Today, fewer than a quarter do. That younger people are less likely to read than their elders is of grave concern, but perhaps not surprising. In fact, the baby boomers who came of age in the 1970s are less avid news consumers than their parents were. More ominous for the future of the news media, however, is Peiser's research showing that a particular age cohort's reading habits do not change much with time; in other words, as people age, they continue the news habits of their younger days. Thus, the real danger, Peiser says, is that cohort replacement builds in a general decline in newspaper reading. The deleterious effects of this phenomenon are clearly evident: In 1972, nearly threeMef1i;ÂŁ.quarters of the 34- to-37 age group read a paper daily. Those thirtysomethings have been replaced by successive crops of thirtysomethings, each reading less than its predecessor.

Today, only about a third of this group read a newspaper every day. This means that fewer parents are bringing home a newspaper or discussing current events over dinner. And fewer kids are growing up in households in which newspapers matter.

A similar decline is evident in television news viewership. In the past decade, the median age of network television news viewers has crept up from about 50 to about 60. Tune in to any network news show or CNN, and note the products hawked in the commercials: The pitches for Viagra, Metamucil, Depends and Fixodent are not aimed at teenyboppers. Compounding the problem of a graying news audience is the If the young (and not so young) are not proliferation of televisions within the typ- reading newspapers or watching network ical household, which diminishes adult television news, many assume that they influence over what's watched. In 1970, are getting news online. Not so. Only 18 six percent of all sixth graders had TV s in percent of Americans listed the Internet as their bedrooms; today that number is an a "primary news source" in a survey

released earlier this year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. And the theory that younger people are more reliant on the Internet for news than their elders doesn't hold up.

Certainly an engaged minority of young people use the Net to get a lot of news, but studies show that most use it primarily for e-mailing, instant messaging, games and other diversions. You only need to wander into a computer lab at your local college or high school and see what the students have on their screens for the dismal confirmation of these choices. the youth f audience is tuned out of newspaper, television and Internet news, what, exactly, is it tuning in to?

To answer this question, I traveled the country in 2002 speaking with groups of young people about their news habits.

My research confIrmed what many people already suspect: that most young people tune in to situation comedies and "reality" TV to the exclusion of news. I was surprised, though, by the scope of the trend: Most of the young people I interviewed had almost no measurable interest in political news. At Brandeis University in Massachusetts, one student explained that watching the situation comedy "Fliends" creates a "sense of emotional investment" and "instant gratifIcation."

This engagement contrasts with the "detachment" young people feel from public issues such as campaign finance reform and news sources such as CNN. And when the news and its purveyors are seen simply as alternative forms of entertainment, they can't compete with the likes of "CSI," "Las Vegas," "Amelican Idol" and "Fear Factor."

The entertainment options competing with the news for the attention of the youth audience have multiplied exponentially. In the 1960s, there were only a handful of television stations in any given market. When Walter Cronkite shook the nation by declaring in a February 1968 report on the Vietnam War that the United States was "mired in stalemate," he spoke to a captive audience. New York City, for example, had only seven broadcast sta-

I

tions. At 10:30 p.m. on the night of Cronkite's remarks, channels 4 and 11 ran movies, channels 5 and 9 had discussion shows and channel 7 was showing "NYPD," a cop show. In this media universe of limited competition, nearly 80 percent of all television viewers watched the nightly news, and from the late 1960s on, Cronkite won the lion's share of the total news audience. Today, young people can choose from hundreds of stations, less than a 10th of which are devoted to news. And that's not to mention the many competing diversions that weren't available in 1968, from video games to iPods. Amid this entertainment cornucopia, the combined network news viewership has shrunk significantly-from some 50 million nightly in the 1960s to about 25 million today. (In comparison, CNN's audience is minuscule, typically no more than a million or so viewers, while public television's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" generally reaches fewer than three million viewers.)

The effects of this diet are evident in how little Americans know about current events. True, Americans have been extremely uninformed for a long time.

Most follow public affairs only in a vague way, and many don't bother to engage at all. In the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, a poll revealed that only 55 percent of Americans knew that East Germany was a communist country, and less than half knew that the Soviet Union was not part of NATO, report political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter in What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (1996).

In short, there was never a golden age of informed citizenry. But in recent decades, Americans' ignorance has reached truly stupefying levels, particularly among young adults. A series of reports published over the past two decades by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (and its predecessor, the Times Mirror Center) suggest that young adults were once nearly as informed as their elders on a range of political issues. From 1944 to 1968, the interest of younger people in the news as reported in opinion surveys was less than five percent below that of the population at large. Political

debates and elections in the 1940s, the Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, and the Vietnam War in the 1960s generated as much interest among the young as among older people. But Watergate in the 1970s was the last in this series of defining events to draw general public attention. (Decades later, in 2001, the bombing of the World Trade Center towers revived general public engagement, at least for a few weeks.) Soon after Watergate, surveys began to show flagging interest in current affairs among younger people.

There is no single explanation for this

lated lives, spending long hours commuting to work and holing up in suburban homes cocooned from the rest of the world.

The extent of this withdrawal from civic involvement is evident in a poll conducted during the height of the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries. In response to the question, "Do you happen to know which of the presidential candidates served as an army general?" about 42 percent of the over-50 crowd could name Wesley Clark. Only 13 percent of those under 30 could. While these results reveal a general lack of political knowl-

The failing health of America's news media is a threat to political life itself.

(From left) Danny Lewin, GeojJ Shenk, Katherine Lewin and Katie Lewin read an Extra edition put out by The Redwood City Daily News after the murder trial of a local man, Scott Peterson, convicted of murdering his wife and unborn son.

sudden break. Many of the young people I spoke with in doing my research were disaffected with the political process and believed that it was completely insulated from public pressure. Why, in that case, keep up with public affairs? The blurring line between entertainment and journalism, along with corporate consolidation of big media companies, has also bred in some minds a deep skepticism about the news media's offerings. At bottom, however, the sense of community has declined as Americans are able to live increasingly iso-

edge across ages, they also underscore the growing gap between ages.

The shrinking audience for news is undermining the health of many major news media outlets. The most recent symptom was the revelation last year that a number of major newspapers, notably The Chicago Sun-Times and New York's Newsday, had cooked their books, inflating circulation figures in order to mask declines and keep advertising revenues from falling. More insidious-and less widely decried-is the industry-wide

practice of bolstering profits by reducing news content. In newspapers, this is done by cutting back on the number of reporters covering state government, Washington and foreign affairs, and by shrinking the space in the paper devoted to news. The news media are, in a very real sense, making our world smaller. On the broadcast networks, this shrinkage is easily measurable: In 1981, a 30-minute nightly newscast on CBS, minus commercials, was 23 minutes and 20 seconds, according to Leonard Downie, Jr., and Robert G. Kaiser's The News about the

People" our check on power. Reporters dig up corruption and confront power; they focus the public's attention on government policies and actions that are unwise, unjust or simply ineffective. It was the news media that exposed the Watergate burglary, and the cover-up engineered by Richard Nixon, sparked the investigation of the Iran-contra affair during the watch of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, ferreted out Bill Clinton's Whitewater dealings, and turned a searchlight on George W. Bush's extrajudicial arrests of American citizens suspected of terrorism.

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News: American Journalism in Peril (2002). In 2000, the same newscast was down to 18 minutes and 20 seconds.

That's a lot of missing news.

The failing health of the nation's news media is not only a symptom of Americans' low levels of engagement in political life, it is a threat to political life itself. "The role of the press," writes news media critic James W. Carey, "is simply to make sure that in the short run we don't get screwed." Independent, fair and accurate reporting is what gives "We the

A

shrinking audience impairs the news media's ability to carry out their watchdog role. It also permits the powers that be to undermine journalism's legitimate functions. Where was the public outrage when it was revealed that the current Bush administration had secretly paid journalists to carry its water, or when the White House denied a press pass to a real journalist, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, and gave one to a political hack who wrote for purely partisan outlets using a fake identity? The whole notion of the news media as the public's watchdog, once an unquestioned article of the American civic faith, is now in jeopardy.

A recent study commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation showed that more than a third of high school students feel that newspaper articles should be vetted by the federal government before publication.

If we are entering a post-journalism age-in which the majority of Americans, young and old, have little interaction with mainstream news media-the most valuable thing we are losing is the marketplace of ideas that newspapers and news broadcasts uniquely provide, that place where views clash and the full range of democratic choices is debated. You usually don't get that on a blog. You don't get that in the left-leaning Nation or on rightwing talk shows. But any newspaper worth its salt, and there are plenty, presents a variety of views, including ones antithetical to its editorial page positions.

These papers are hardly immune from

criticism-they sometimes err, get sloppy or succumb to partisan or ideological bias-but they do strive to be accurate and independent sources of fact and opinion, and more often than not they fulfill that indispensable public function.

America's newspapers and television news divisions aren't going to save themselves by competing with reality shows and soap operas. The appetite for news, and for engagement with civic life itself, must be nurtured and promoted, and it's very much in the public interest to undertake the task. It's not the impossible assignment it may seem. During the course of my research, I met a group of boys in New Orleans who were very unlikely consumers of news: They were saturated with television programs and video games, they were poor, and they were in eighth grade. Yet they were all reading The New York Times online. Why? Because one of their teachers had assigned the newspaper to them to read when they were in sixth grade, and the habit stuck.

There's no reason why print and broadcast news shouldn't be a bigger part of the school curriculum, or why there shouldn't be a short civicslcurrent affairs section on the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) for college-bound students, or why all high school seniors shouldn't have to take a nonbinding version of the civics test given to immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens. And why shouldn't broadcasters be required to produce a certain amount of children's news programming in return for their access to the public airwaves? These are only the most obvious possibilities.

Reporters, editors, producers and media business executives will all need to make their own adjustments to meet the demands of new times and new audiences, but only by reaching a collective judgment about the value and necessity of vigorous news media in American democracy can we hope to keep our public watchdogs on guard and in good health.

0 About the Author: David T.z. Mindich, aformer assignment editor at CNN, is an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at St. Michael's College in Burlington, Vermont, and the author of Tuned Out: Why Americans under 40 Don't Follow the News (2005).

CJOesi<in otainment urfing channels in his New Jersey apartment on a Sunday afternoon, Shashi Kant couldn't help but marvel at the burgeoning options for news and entertainment from South Asia. When he moved from Bangalore to the United States 20 years ago, a homesick Kant spent his days longing for familiar images. "There was just one channel that would screen news and entertainment from India, but the offering was brief," he reminisced. "If! overslept on a Sunday morning, I would miss it."

Now, he says, the number of South Asian television programs available is "simply mind-boggling." While a lot of these programs come from India, an increasing number are being produced in the United States.

Sreenath Sreenivasan, a journalism professor at Columbia University in New York City, says, "There are only a handful of actual Indian American networks. But there are at least 100 Indian American TV programs. There are also lots of Pakistani and Bangladeshi programs." These reach viewers through leased-time programming, an arrangement whereby channels lease airtime for community use. The programs often last only a couple of hours a day.

Zee TV tops the list among non-Hispanic ethnic television channels in terms of paying subscribers in the United States. The channel started its U.S. operations in July 1998. A year later, it launched Zee Gold, a 24/7 South Asian movies and music channel. The channel airs 44 movies every week, seven of them during the weekend, providing an "unadulterated glimpse of Bollywood."

In December, South Asia World Inc. launched South Asia World, a 24-hour English-language news and infotainment channel. The channel has operational arrangements with

Television Eighteen India Limited (TVI8), a company founded

by Raghav Bahl that also runs CNBC-TVI8, a business news channel based in India. South Asia World offers subscribers a mix of live news from the Indian subcontinent and coverage of the South Asian community in the United States and Britain.

The channel, Bahl noted during the launch, was the "realization of a dream we've had for five years-to create a television forum for Indians the world over." The Indian American community is among the fastest growing in the United States, especially among the middle and upper class. "This channel is not only a celebration of the life success of these people, but will also act as a platform to highlight issues that impact their progress," Bahl said.

Indira Kannan, New York-based editor of South Asia World,

Vimal Verma, American Desi chairman alld CEO.

notes a growing demand for programs on the latest happenings in South Asia, Bollywood and cricket, though not necessarily in that order. While channels like Zee TV, B4U and Sony Entertainment cater to the "entertainment needs" of the community, Kannan said there was a distinct lack of news and infotainment programming in the United States. South Asia World will cover not only various segments of this community but also the interface with fellow Americans.

for the More TV programs for people of South Asian heritage are being produced in America by journalists and entrepreneurs with roots in the subcontinent.

South Asia World is not alone in its endeavor. New Yorkbased Vimal Verma parlayed his experience at American Express to start American Desi, which, he says, "is the only Americanowned 24-hour, English-language television network for South Asians living in America." The network, which is run from studios in New Jersey and New York, caters to "pre-teens, teenagers, Gen X and Y, the 40-plus crowd that has been in the United States for a few years and whether desi or not, all those who appreciated movies like Bend It Like Beckham .... American Desi will provide the desi public with entertainment of the quality and sophistication they have become used to."

Some channels have been around for a while. One such is TV Asia, founded in 1993 by Amitabh Bachchan and acquired by NRI entrepreneur H.R. Shah four years later. 'TV Asia was the

English-language station but has introduced programs in Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali and other regional languages.

Kannan at South Asia World feels, however, that outside India, English seems to be the common language for South Asians.

South Asia World is exclusively available on the DISH Network in the United States and on Sky Channel 450 in Britain. The channel covers political and business news from the Indian subcontinent, including the latest news from the cricket pitch and Bollywood, profiles successful Indian Americans, features celebrities and debates issues that matter to the community. A "Frequently Asked Questions" program offers guidance and advice on investing and information on job and business opportunities in India. Its anchors include such well-known names as theater personality Sanjana Kapoor, dancer Mallika

$.aghavBahl,Joundet ()fSquthA~ia W6rldand India',yTVI8. first major Indian-owned network," recalls Rohit Vyas, a founder and vice president. "Our goal was to beam throughout North America so every single South Asian American could watch programs that were tailored to his needs." Two generations of South Asians grew up watching TV Asia, says Vyas. "The second generation knows their roots are in India. What I attempt to do is to bring together their heritage and their life here." TV Asia airs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It started as a predominantly

Sarabhai, TV talk show host Karan Thapar and sportscaster Harsha Bhogle.

Another Indian channel on DISH is American Desi, which hopes to set new standards. "We are achieving many firsts," says Vyas. "We will have the first televised music contest for a Hollywood film, and we will be bringing the game of cricket to the U.S. in a new way," he says. It offers its viewers desi-themed daily morning newscasts, presents a multi-generational lifestyle

talk show for women, showcases international and American sports and covers Bollywood and Hollywood. The network will also exclusively cover ProCricket, the first professional cricket league in the United States, with minor variations in the rules of the game.

A number of other channels have been eyeing the U.S. market.

Channel 7 in India recently announced its intention to tap the Indian community in the United States, Britain, Canada, the Middle East, South Africa and Australia.

ETV channel's ETV BangIa, Telugu and Gujarati are also set to air in the United States. The government-owned All India Radio and Doordarshan are also eyeing overseas Indians. K.S. Sarma, CEO of the Prasar Bharati Corporation, says his plan to "reach everyone" was born from a long-standing demand for Doordarshan and All India Radio programs from the Indian diaspora.

South Asia World's live coverage of the Indian budget was a big draw, as was the Republic Day parade footage. Many viewers wrote letters to the network describing their joy at being able to have an "emotional connection with India."

The proliferation of TV channels is in direct proportion to the success and the size of the South Asian community in the United States-estimated to reach 6 million by the end of the decade.

"In the end there will be only a few big players left," Vyas says.

"This is just a temporary phenomenon because everyone seems to think there is a lucrative pie here ... but it's a small pie. The market has been highly overrated by all the networks that want to spring up over here." South Asia World executives believe the market is a big enough base to work with as long as they keep costs down.

Profitability, they feel, may depend on whether content and expenses can be shared. Media analysts say channels that tend to rely on programs from the subcontinent might be forced to rethink their strategy.

Growing up watching American TV, the community has come to expect a different standard from the emerging networks. "Des is want NBC- and ABC-quality shows," says Verma, referring to two of the oldest American TV networks. "How the heck do you give them that?

You go hire NBC, ABC people ... .It is only a question of time before the team starts producing NBC- and ABC-quality shows that the people want."

Most agree that it's only the first-generation immigrants from South Asia who avidly watch these programs.

Subsequent generations are simply not interested. The younger generations, born and raised in America, cannot relate to shows set in an Indian context.

Verma says immigrants are more interested in knowing how events in America will affect them. "It is a perfect time for this important segment of the population to have its own television network that will stand as a virtual meeting place in which to keep touch with desi culture and share it with others," he says. "As desi people, we are well aware of our roots, but we are also aware that our lives are intertwined with the American culture that we have adopted," he adds.

D About the Author: Ashish Kumar Sen is a Washington-based journalist working with The Washington Times. He also contributes to The Tribune and Outlook.

hy on earth would 10,000 people pay an advance monthly subscription for a non-existent TV channel?

Yet, just months after Bridges TV was launched, tens of thousands of viewers signed up for the first American Muslim channel.

Its founder and CEO, Muzzammil Hassan, says, "Every day on television we are barraged by stories of a 'Muslim extremist, militant, terrorist, or insurgent.'

But the stories that are missing are the countless stories of Muslim tolerance, progress, diversity, service."

Although foreign language channels are available to Muslim immigrants interested in keeping in touch with the countries they came from, the content was路 not relevant to the new generation that has grown up in the United States and for people trying to underAasiya Zubair (left) thought up the idea of an American Muslim lifestyle network and urged her husband Muzzammil Hassan (right) to develop a business plan. The result. a variety of programs relevant to a new generation.

stand Muslims from their ideological perspective. The planners of Bridges TV instead focused on highlighting the lifestyle and culture of English-speaking American Muslims.

Hassan, 41, parlayed his experience as a banker with M&T Bank in Buffalo, New York, to generate funding from more than 50 private investors, 10,000 paying members and Ropart Asset Management, a Connecticut-based equity fund.

"We cannot think of another television network that garnered paying members before it was available," says Hassan.

"This outpouring of support from American Muslims shows not only that there is an audience for Bridges TV; but also that American Muslims are deeply committed to changing perceptions of Muslims around the world."

The channel was initially available in Detroit, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio, and "everybody put in a good word" about it, says Hassan. Former world boxing heavy-

weight champion Mohammad Ali, who was one of the early subscribers, said at the inauguration, "This TV channel has provided Americans with an opportunity to observe Muslims closely and, thereby, understand their psyche. In other words, this endeavor may be defined as an easy effort to develop intimacy with your neighbor without knocking on his doors."

Hassan and his team tried to make the channel's content all-embracing, including entertainment and everyday issues and keeping it clear of religious or political extremism. Soon the channel successfully hit New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington. By the end of this year, the broadcasts are expected to be available in Canada and next year in Britain.

The round-the-clock English programs-cookery, travel, history, womenand youth-related issues-are all streamlined on the lines of successful contemporary channels, with the help of media experts such as Executive Producer Tayie

Rehem, a former CBC executive in Toronto; Asad Mohammed, a former NBC producer who hosts Bridges News; Jameela Fraser, who was associated with CBS in North Carolina; John Sehu, an eminent news editor; producer Katie Ward and editor Brittany Cain.

Hollywood producer Sheldon Altfeld, a four-time Emmy winner, told the audience at the inaugural function that he was impressed by the quality of programming on Bridges TV. "It is simply spectacular."

Hassan told SPAN he has managed to generate enough capital "for the next three years" from several private equity firms and accumulated monthly subscriptions from thousands of viewers.

"The cooperation this channel received from American Muslims is, on the one hand, an explicit manifestation of the people's aspiration," he says. "It is on the other hand, a clear indication of the utmost concern to bring positive change in the image of the Muslims in general."

D

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1:5 ne April evening in 2002, U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders invited the citizens of Vermont to a town hall meeting at Burlington. The topic was media reform in a democratic society. Teachers, parents, artists and plumbers passionately and intelligently criticized the media for becom.ing part of the "best government money can buy" system and called their coverage of political campaigns dreadful.

People do not want political campaigns to be centered entirely around expensive, inaccurate and insulting political advertising, media activist Robert McChesney told the meeting that night.

"They do not want America's democratic discourse reduced to poll-tested sound bites and arguments about which television anchor is wearing the biggest flag pin," he said.

How people perceive the media depends on how it tackles important ethical and moral issues. Aly Colon, columnist for the Poynter Institute Ethics Journal, says: "Reporters watch candidates during elections but viewers watch reporters. And what people see journalists saying, or doing, may affect how much credibility they

Media ethics runs parallel to public trust and credibility. The loss of one results in the loss of the other. Chanchal Manohar Singh, executive editor of Indian Reporter, warns journalists: "Quit assuming that the public doesn't care about media ethics. As any journalist who has ever been cornered at a cocktail party can tell you, they are interested. Deeply."

One ethical issue facing the media in both countries is the use of hidden cameras as news gathering tools. American journalists have used hidden cameras for a long time. But in 1995, the practice came under intense scrutiny when ABC's "Prime Time Live" telecast a story alleging unsanitary food handling practices at Food Lion, a major supermarket chain. To investigate the story-Food Lion was not likely to give ABC camera crews unfettered access to its property-ABC employees submitted phony resumes and went undercover as supermarket staff. They used hidden camera video footage to expose malfeasance by Food Lion. The supermarket chain sued ABC for trespass and fraud. The jury's verdict-$5.5 million against ABC-touched off a wide-ranging debate on ethics.

In India, the Tehelka news portal started the trend, fIrst with an investigation of bribe-taking and matchfIxing in cricket, then a more far-reaching sting: two Tehelka journalists posing as arms dealers tried to sell non-existent military devices to politicians, defense officials and bureaucrats, luring them with bribes and prostitutes. The journalists captured the transactions on a hidden camera and showed the footage at a news conference.

Some critics say this is "cowboy journalism," a search for "gotcha" more At the Patiala media ethics workshop, (left to right) moderator Navjit Sillgh Johal, than the truth. Hidden cameras, says Bob Taranjit Singh of Punjabi University, moderator Shakulltala Rao, Hindustan Times Steele, author of Doing Ethics in correspondent Anuradha Shukla,Punjab Today TV news reader Rajnish Sehgal.

Journalism, "should be the last tools out of attach to what journalists report." the bag, to be used only when we have already ruled out all other Just over 35 percent of Americans consider journalists to be options for obtaining the same information. Such deception must "moral," according to the Pew Research Center. One in fIve meet the 'importance' threshold only in pursuing a highly readers believes newspapers "distort" and "manipulate" facts, says important and otherwise elusive truth."

Journalism Studies. The erosion of credibility and confIdence in These cases point to the ethical dilemmas the media face. the media is often related to the public's perception that the media Media ethicist Clifford Christians says, "Moral thinking is a ship is sailing without a moral compass. systematic process: a judgment is made and action taken. Moral The United States and India each have a vibrant and free press; 0 decisions made by the journalist need to be transparent." both media receive similar public rebuke on ethics. At a series of media ethics workshops sponsored by the U.S. Embassy that we About the Authors: Shakuntala Rao is professor of communication at moderated this year, Indian journalists expressed concern about State University of New York in Plattsburgh and was a senior Fulbright ethical standards. "Public trust in Indian journalism is at its lowest," scholar at Punjabi University, Patiala, in 2004-05. Navjit Singh Johal is senior lecturer at the department of journalism in Punjabi University. said Bajinder Pal Singh, a senior correspondent for Indian Express.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE

"And this is my last and final offer before I start to beg. " Copyright

© Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

"This is the artist's last painting, prior to enrolling in an MBA program. " Copyright

© Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Could you suggest some place to go where my husband's cell phone won't work?"

Copyright © 2004 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted with pem1ission.

"Your father just learned how to change the time on his digital watch. " Copyright © 2004 The Saturday Evening Post Company.

Reprinted with pem1ission.

The Inspiration of

India in Current American Contemporary Responses and Hybrid Forms mericans have had a rich history of engagement with Indian artistic, cultural, philosophic and spiritual traditions since at least the mid-19th century, when notable American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau found common threads of thought in the non-dualistic nature of Indian spirituality.

Interest in India has continued to broaden and deepen since then.

Significant museum collections were developed throughout the United States by seminal figures such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, who became the keeper of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1917. They were reinforced by the introduction of university programs in Indian philosophy, religion and art and major exhibitions such as the Festival of India, which brought Indian art, music, dance and film to museums all over the United States in 1985.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries artists who learned Eastern practices of

expanding the consciousness felt that abstraction was the most effective way to express transcendent levels of reality.

Tantra, an esoteric system of ritual belief using abstract diagrams such as the yantra and mandala, became an important influence.

While some artists borrow from the formal qualities of Indian art, others as diverse in style and intent as the abstract expressionist painter Ad Reinhardt and the contemporary video artist Bill Viola create works based on philosophical and spiritual aspects of Indian art and ritual practices.

Art that is made when diverse cultures influence each other provides rich experiences of exchange, the creation of hybrid forms and the discovery of new processes and symbols. Effectively balancing and negotiating those relation ships remains a challenge. In his book An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Roger Lipsey comments that artists drawn to ancient forms and techniques often must struggle to reenact them without ceasing to be of

their own time. New Delhi-based American artist and curator Peter Nagy warns of "the dangers of exploitation ... and essentialist misinterpretations with any encounter between two cultures." While some are wary of cultural theft or superficial understanding, others encourage artistic efforts of hybridity as examples of global interest and awareness.

In his seminal book Orientalism, Edward Said wrote of the damaging and misguided efforts that can be the lasting result of even the most well-intentioned engagement with other cultures, but he also continued to have faith in "the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation."

The Fulbright Foundation, funded by the U.S. State Department, is one of the few granting agencies that supports the creative projects and research of individual artists and has directly helped Indian and American artists share influences and techniques, as well as lasting friendships.

Five contemporary artists, Michael

Works by Michael Peter Cain in collaboration with Guard Kacera, Om Prakosh Kacera, Rajesh Kacera, Papou Vishwakarman and Rakesh Aggrawal.

sEVEnIEVElsOVEn, (left) digital simulation of work in progress, patinas and flock on copper repousse, 29 cm X 30 cm x 13 cm, 2005.

becOMingsoURcesEEsOut, (below) patina on brass repousse, cast brass and bronze.

150 cm x60 cm x60 cm, 2001.

Peter Cain, Charlotte Cain, Nancy Bowen, James A. Cook and Robert Kirschbaum, continue a tradition of artistic and intellectual engagement with India, providing prime examples of the diverse and highly individual ways in which American artists have responded to India.

Seeking models for artistic practice at the beginning of their careers in the 1960s, Michael Peter Cain, then a graduate student in painting at Yale University, and his wife, Charlotte, were inspired to learn more about Indian art and culture by the writings of Coomaraswamy, the lives of Indian religious leaders and concerts of classical Indian music. Coomaraswamy's descriptions of the aesthetic experience as "twin brother" to the experience of enlightenment motivated the Cains to explore creating art that expressed and evoked pure consciousness. This aspiration gained momentum with the 1968 release of Ajit Mookerjee's Tantra Art, which reproduces a range of Indian artworks mapping the cosmic into the everyday world as a spiritual practice. The Cains traveled to India in 1970 for a

meditation course and returned many times. In 1996 and 1997, when Michael was on a Fulbright fellowship, they spent 17 months in India, Michael studying and practicing the "living traditions" of Hindu sculpture while Charlotte worked with traditional miniature painters in Chamba and Jaipur.

Michael was particularly interested in the process and function of Hindu idols or "murthies." He worked with traditional sculptors in Chamba, Swami Malai, and most recently Varanasi, creating works that juxtapose Western minimalist forms with mixed references to aspects of India's sacred arts. He became fascinated with traditional Indic and Indo-Islamic ornaments that juxtapose images of water, mythic animals and intertwining vegetation to suggest nature in harmonious abundance and evoke principles of cosmic manifestation. Repousse, the art of hammering sheet metal into threedimensional forms, a largely forgotten technique in the West, has become his chosen method for scaling relief patterns into geometric volumes such as the sphere

and cone. His elemental forms reference primary abstraction of 1960s minimalist art as well as the geometry of tantric diagrams and early European alchemical and cosmological symbols. Working with as many as 12 specialized artisans on each sculpture, Cain and his collaborators configure ornamental motifs to enliven the surfaces of each sculpture as in becOMingsoURcesEEsOut. Cain's most recent work-in-progress, sEVEn IEVEIsOVEn, uses a fragment to suggest the whole, letting an exposed inner surface present relief imagery appropriated from the mane of a bronze leonine beast in Varanasi's Durga temple.

The art made when diverse cultures influence each other provides hybrid forms, new processes and symbols.

Herod's Gate, Robert Kirschbaum, oil on wood, 41 em x 38 em.

Love Loves Love, Charlotte Cain, gouache on paper, 30 em X 22 em, 2003.

American Book of the Dead: The Mechanics of Prayer, James A. Cook, kinetic, interactive piece, 2001.

"I like to think that the tiny bridges that our works create convey local image making into emerging world culture and thereby counteract the leveling tendencies of globalism," says Cain.

Working with master miniature painters Vijay Sharma of Himachal Pradesh and Bannu Sharma of Rajasthan, Charlotte Cain, who has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship for 2006, developed painting techniques suited to images that can evoke "inner silence and a feeling of the infinite."

She feels her use of miniature painting techniques, particularly the layering of minute brush strokes, has enabled her to focus consciousness at the point of contact between the tip of the brush and the paper to achieve "a flow of awareness from the heart through the hand into the painted surface."

Many of Cain's gouache paintings on

Wonder, Naney Bowen, plaster, steel, clay and silver leaf; 226 em X 191 em x 84 em, 1999-2000.

Boundaries are less strong between functional objects and art in India.

antique Indian paper reenact ritual images, especially elaborate linear forms called kolams or rangoli that Indian women make on their thresholds each day before the sun rises, forms in which the lines "turn back on themselves endlessly," evoking a sense of the infinite. She has also drawn freely from the intuitive ritual geometries of tantra art. One can see ritual imagery in pieces such as Kolam #7.

Recreating folk images like kolams and tantric diagrams with classical miniature painting techniques allows her to express her tactile love of muted, precisely balanced and articulated painterly surfaces that resonate with a sense of the infinite.

Sometimes, however, her process bypasses appropriated ritual imagery to create new designs that focus attention on the layering of delicate forms and colors, as in her recent piece titled Love Loves Love.

The Cains are emeritus professors at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

Sculptor Nancy Bowen finds India a vital source for contemporary sculptors.

On her first visit several years ago she saw the Ajanta caves, the erotic temple sculpture of Khajuraho and the stone works of Mahabalipuram. As much as she was deeply moved by these historical works, she was even more inspired by the profusion of objects she encountered in the streets, village markets and roadside shrines, where the boundaries the West has constructed between functional objects and art, the sacred and secular, ritual and work did not seem to be so strong. She formed a deep appreciation for the care brought to the making of objects both sublime and mundane and encountered contemporary sculptors who continued to find validity in ancient forms while responding to the complexities of contemporary life.

Returning to her studio in Brooklyn, New York, with a renewed sense of freedom to combine disparate materials, and disparate visual vocabularies, Bowen began combining decorative structural, figurative and abstract elements while using the language of applied arts such as pottery and furniture. In Wonder, based on the forms of the chakras, an ancient

system of anatomical knowledge, she sensed a correlation in her process of coating the form in a repetitive manner with silver leaf and the daily worship of the Jain sculptures she observed at Ranakpur.

Regarding her works as contemplative objects, Bowen feels they "weave a decorative impulse into physical interpretations of various systems ranging from anatomy to Eastern religion," evoking forms that seem "unnamable, simultaneously strange and familiar." Bowen is professor of sculpture at the State University of New York in Purchase.

A deep respect for the creation, function and reception of sacred objects and structures informs the research and work of sculptor James Cook, who since 1980 has studied the creative practices of traditional artists and artisans in India and Nepal. During his initial stay in South India, a number of intriguing, unfamiliar experiences stimulated his inquiry into the traditional formulation of sacred images and temples. His complex multi-media works attempt to parallel as well as recognize essential differences between the traditional South Asian artist, icon and worshipper, and the artist, work of art and spectator in the West. He believes the iconic form realized through Hindu philosophy is able to penetrate to more "essential levels of being," and is inspired by reading the Vastusutras, where it is maintained that an image or form can be "apprehended at one and the same time by all the organic and intellectual faculties without having to be mentally connected through a sequence of impressions."

Cook's recognition of the difficulty the Westerner faces in comprehending form in this all-encompassing manner is exemplified in an interactive sculptural installation, American Book of the Dead: Mechanics of Prayer. In this piece the visitor spins a pulley wheel using a foot treadle, the spinning wheel activating a long pulley rope. At the other end the rope activates smaller pulleys and linkages with an old cast iron sewing machine table, causing a gold-leafed steel rod to slide up and down. A white hand mechanically arcs back and forth over the

Plenty, Nancy Bowen, resin, glass, wax, steel and mixed media, 198 cm X 140 cm X 140 cm, 2002.

table in front of a small framed mirror, forming the gesture of prayer with its own reflection. As the rod reaches the peak of its upward motion, it grazes another rod, shorting out an electrical circuit and causing a small shower of sparks above the prayer machine. For Cook, this piece and many others serve as "an absurd critique addressing the difficulties of bridging to esoteric experiences relying exclusively upon rational strategies and empty, mechanically performed rituals." While his work at times demonstrates keen frustration, the depth and range of his multi-level investigation of Indian art, spirituality and philosophy are continually nourishing and rewarding. Cook is a professor of sculpture at the University of Arizona in Tucson and held a Fulbright fellowship to India in 1996.

Robert Kirschbaum's life and work have been enriched by Indian art and culture and led him to a deeper understanding of his own Judaic heritage.

"While the dynamic of artistic practice in the West has thrust more secular pursuits upon the contemporary artist, many of us are seeking to reclaim and reinterpret the primary spiritual foundation of our heritage as artists and artisans." Sacred

space in Judaic and Indian culture were a central focus of Kirschbaum's prints, drawings and sculpture well before a Fulbright fellowship in 1996 gave him an opportunity to experience a wide variety of materials and forms used to visualize the divine in diverse regions of India from Tamil Nadu to Ladakh. A syncretic response was further inspired by his visits to the Bene Israel community of Mumbai and their sacred sites along the Konkan coast. Extensive research on the structures of the Jewish temple, Hindu fire altar and Tibetan chorten revealed fascinating similarities.

Drawing from Judaic and Indian abstract ritual art such as the yantra, mandala and cabala as well as from the Judaic concept of shelters for the spirit and models for the heavens, body, portal, altar and temple, Kirschbaum effectively layers his architectural shapes and diagrammatic forms with flat saturated color informed by Indian posters, signs, popular prints and textiles.

His specific interest in the yantra, which began in 1978 and has lately dominated, led him to create sacred diagrams as the underpinnings for his Portal and Altar Series. In these prints and paintings, the doorway is used as a metaphor for spiritual passage. In a group of large-scale etchings called Squaring the Mount, Kirschbaum has delineated the geometric transformation of Jerusalem's Temple Mount and the various historical versions of the temple from quadrilateral to square and from square to circle, once again "squaring the circle" as a means of integrating the spiritual and the material, the earth and the cosmos, establishing a ritual dimension in his work. Echoing the repetitive process of rangoli or kolam, Kirschbaum's drawings can be recreated in the same manner again and again. Kirschbaum is professor of fine art at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he teaches printrnaking and drawing.

D About the Author: Kathryn Myers is a painter and professor of art at the University of Connecticut in Storrs and held a Fulbright fellowship to India in 2002. The topic of this paper was presented as a panel discussion for the annual College Art Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2005.

By bringing new Web technologies into their stores, retailers are changing shopping in ways few anticipated. isit the REI flagship store in downtown Seattle for the fIrst time, and you'll stop in wonder. On the grounds surrounding the store, which spans an entire block of otherwise ordinary urban landscape, a hiking trail and mountain bike test track meander around a waterfall and brook. Inside the main entrance, a 20-meter-tall rock climbing pinnacle looms over shoppers. And on the shelves and display stands that sprawl across two gigantic floors of retail space are stacks of backpacks, hiking boots, canoes, kayaks, tents, jackets # and just about every other outdoor clothing item or accessory you can name. You feel younger, stronger and more adventurous just being here.

On any given day, somewhere between backpacks and winter socks, a man and a woman who are soon to be married will be roaming the aisles. One will be carrying a handheld device about the size of a cell phone and pointing it at something he or she likes.

The device is an infrared reader: push a button, and a laser beam reads the bar code of the targeted item. When the reader is synchronized with a specially equipped cash register, the item is added, instantly, to the couple's online REI gift registry. Eric Thorson, operations manager at the store, smiles when he thinks about the couples he's seen. "We have one scanner per couple, and we'll have the future wife run upstairs to women's clothing, and [the groom] wants to be downstairs in the climbing department picking out an ice axe," he says. "It's almost like it becomes the ultimate shopping adventure for the two of them rather than thinking about what would be a practical wedding gift." The scanner can record some 300 items, but Thorson notes, "I've seen scanners come back that we have to upload and send back out because they fIlled the memory."

It may seem strange, but those couples traversing the aislesdownloading, uploading and fusing in-store interactions with w-------------------------

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Customer kiosks in REI stores help customers order online local outlet doesn't have just what they want.

8 if the

Web site maintenance-are the future of e-commerce. Other retailers provide similar scanners, but the resulting Web registries must be manually updated. REI is one of those making e-commerce far more interactive-automating updates and using the Web to make registries available to all its stores and business channels.

The benefits for REI customers are real. Any customer can view the registry, either at an in-store kiosk or online. And if an item is purchased-whether through mail order, over the phone, on the Internet, or in any of REI's 77 stores-the list is instantly updated at all those locations. Customers can buy online but decide to pick up or return at a store. Discounts are the same in all locations, and every item offered on the Web can be ordered through the store or catalog, and vice versa.

The business jargon for this model for integrated retail sales is "multichanneling"-that is, fusing digital services with in-store, mail-order and telephone sales, and with any other retail channels. The digerati have called it "clicks and mortar" since the Internet boom of the 1990s. No matter the term, it is now the driving force in retail. For while the Internet works fine for some types of goods-such as books, computer products, and musicmany shoppers don't want to purchase and pay shipping costs for things like canoes, cars, clothes and entertainment systems without trying them out, trying them on, touching them or maybe even talking to a knowledgeable salesperson.

New technologies and ideas are allowing retailers to remove the wall between online shopping and in-store shopping, and to make the gathering of customer data both easier and more valuable. ~ Advanced data-mining and Web analytics techniques now ~ examine not just what you bought online but what you viewed, ~ helping retailers design promotions that will entice you to shop Daniel Nissan, who founded the first nationwide interactive grocery store online and in stores. These enticements will themselves arrive on the Web in 1997, with products available online through NetGrocer Inc. over multiple channels-through magazines, regular mail, e-mail, the Web and wireless transmissions to your car or shopping cart. 2009, Jupiter predicts, online spending will reach six percent of By looking at just a few of a customer's purchases, a retailer will total retail sales. even be able to predict how much she'll spend over her lifetime, But that's just a small part of the e-commerce story. Last year, and adjust the deals and promotions it offers her accordingly. another $355 billion in retail sales took place in physical stores The ultimate goal is more customized, personal service. The after consumers had done their homework online. Overall, says best retailers have always striven to provide the most tailored Jupiter, for every $1 consumers spend online, they spend $6 service possible; however, as more and more retailers expand offline as a result of research conducted on the Internet. nationally and even internationally, building close relationships That is why retailers want to find better ways to exploit the with customers is increasingly difficult. "Retailers can't do that many ways in which people shop, so that customers research and now because they have millions of customers all over the buy from them, not their competitors. "It's a leaders and laggards country," says Dan Hopping, senior consulting manager for thing," says Jonathan Reynolds, director of the Oxford Institute IBM's Retail Store Solutions Division. "So they use technology of Retail Management at the University of Oxford. "In nearly to make the connection." every country, you've got one or two particular companies that are ahead of the game. The message to the laggards is, you better have a good story or else risk losing market share to those firms The sales figures for 2004 are in, and e-commerce is on a roll. who are setting the multichannel standard."

Online retail spending soared 26 percent last year, to $66.5 billion, Few companies are better at such integration than REI. Case according to business analysis and advisory firm Jupiter Research. in point: in June 2003, the company began offering customers That's four percent of total retail spending--compared with the option of ordering products online and picking them up at nothing about 10 years ago, and with three percent in 2003. By stores. The concept grew out of an examination of the in-store

REISpeedWaaol

Web kiosks that REI began using in 1998. The kiosks had proven a good source of product information to supplement what the sales staff could provide, but customers also used the kiosks to place orders when stores didn't have items they wanted-which meant they would have to pay shipping costs for the goods they had just come into the stores to buy. Says Joan Broughton, REI's vice president of multichannel programs, "You don't want people to feel penalized by the fact the store doesn't happen to carry that item they're looking for."

Providing in-store pickup seemed a good way to minimize that frustration, and also to serve other online customers leery about paying to have, say, canoes delivered to their doors. Still, REI trod cautiously. The program wasn't advertised, so shoppers found out about it only when it came time for checkout on the REI Web site: in-store pickup was offered alongside shipping options. REI had 66 stores at the time. On the first day, 60 of those stores received pickup orders. Today, such orders are trucked out of REI's central warehouse on distinctively colored pallets and are packaged in special dot-com wrapping, so that when a shipment arrives at a store, employees can easily tell what should be held for customer pickup.

When an item comes in, its bar code is scanned to register its arrival. An e-mail notification is sent to the buyer. During a normal week, 600 products ordered online come into REI's flagship store. Over the holidays, says Thorson, the number is four times that. That represents $2.2 million, about four percent of annual store sales. But online customers who choose to pick up their orders in stores spend an average of $30 more once inside.

The principle behind REI's approach-understand what people want and use technology to make shopping easier-is recognized by retailers worldwide. Change, however, has come slowly. Many companies set up online stores in the mid- to late 1990s, often building proprietary systems that were not integrated with other parts of their operations.

Later, harmonizing operations seemed expensive and difficult. It's only since the economy has improved that some retail executives have been investing more heavily in integrating their sales channels.

In the labs and strategy rooms where the next generation of ecommerce is being shaped, firms are looking at new ways to use technology to become more profitable. Here's a look at what's in the works.

people's doors-aimed to put a serious hurt on their physicalstore counterparts, not to work with them.

Now, a different approach to supermarket e-commerce is emerging. The most successful retailer in the United Kingdom is the Tesco supermarket chain. An estimated one of every eight pounds spent in Britain on retail, whether in store or online, goes to Tesco, says Reynolds.

In contrast with companies such as the now defunct Webvan, which supplied online orders from central warehouses, Tesco services Internet orders in its stores. This arrangement is extremely profitable, because it builds on spare capacity within the store network, and orders are filled by store staff during quiet periods. Whether customers purchase online or in stores, the data about what they buy is linked to Tesco's loyalty card, so the company "knows who you are irrespective of the channel you come in on," Reynolds says. If you log onto the Web site through a home computer or PDA, it lists your favorite or recently purchased items-whether you bought them in a store or online.

In this manner, Tesco has amassed a mountain of data about its customers, which it uses in various ways. Regularmail statements to all loyalty card customers include quasipersonalized coupons tailored to their buying habits. Some coupons might provide discounts on products a customer has recently purchased. Others offer discounts enticing customers to try new items Tesco thinks they might like. In addition, Tesco puts out five editions of a quarterly hard-copy "magazine," each of them tailored to a broad audience segment: students; young adults without dependents; young families with children; people aged 40 to 60; and those over 60. Finally, the retailer offers a number of further segmentations, or clubs-World of Wine, Baby and Toddler, and so on-that customers choose to join, and which enable even more precise delivery of promotional offers.

A farther out approach-bringing e-commerce to the supermarket shopping cart-is being tested by Stop and Shop of Quincy, Massachusetts, which operates 350 supermarkets in the Northeast. Dubbed Shopping Buddy, the technology consists of a wireless computer and data management system developed by IBM in partnership with the supermarket chain and software maker Cuesol, also of Quincy.

The paperback book-sized device, introduced early last year at three stores near Boston, is installed in shopping cart handles. To use it, a shopper scans in his loyalty card; a simple graphical interface then appears, displaying such features as sale items and a customer favorites list. On the favorites list are the names of the things the shopper buys most frequently, whether he buys them in the store or has them delivered to his house by Peapodwhich, in a neat post-bubble twist, Stop and Shop's parent company now owns. The device creates a map of the store and

Five years ago, online shopping was something you did from a personal computer. You didn't expect to find the future of e-commerce in the aisles of your neighborhood supermarket.

Check Out the Supermarket Five years ago, online shopping was something you did from a home or office computer. You didn't expect to find the future of e-commerce in the aisles of your neighborhood supermarket.

Indeed, dot-com upstarts such as NetGrocer, Peapod and Webvan-all of which delivered goods ordered online to

IBM's Veggie Vision at the IBM Industry Solutions Lab in Hawthorne, New York, recognizes types of produce, weighs and prices the purchase.

displays a suggested route. Infrared beacons on the ceiling track the cart's location, so the device can automatically alert the customer if any of his favorite items are on sale in the aisle he is currently browsing.

The interface also lets the shopper wirelessly order cold cuts from the deli; an alert sounds when they are ready. Finally, an attached imaging scanner lets the shopper scan items as he puts them in the cart; as the cart fills, a running total is displayed. When it comes time for checkout, the cashier scans the shopper's loyalty card, and all of the items in the cart are listed on the register screen. This saves time for both the shopper and the cashier.

Stop and Shop is expanding the program to 20 more stores in Massachusetts and Connecticut, says marketing director Peg Merzbacher. The company is also working on new features-one of which will allow customers to create online shopping lists that will automatically appear on the Shopping Buddy when they arrive at a store. Merzbacher says integrating physical store presence with Peapod helps both businesses by adding convenience and building loyalty. "Hardly anybody converts to total online shopping," she says. "They go back and forth, [and] when you get people to use both channels, they spend more." IBM is also pushing the limits of the Shopping Buddy technology, hoping to better tailor advertisements and promotions, and generally improve the shopping experience. Rakesh Mohan, senior manager of IBM Research's Industry Solutions group, says there's no reason such a device can't suggest a wine to go with a meal or provide dietary guidance by reporting an item's fat or carbohydrate ~ content. It could even sound a warning if a product ~ Š that a shopper scanned contained ingredients to which b he or she was allergic. ~ This technology could do for in-store advertising ~ what Google did for online advertising. As search ~ technology has improved, Web-based advertising has ~ evolved to include paid contextual advertisements:;S linked to search terms. If, for instance, you use Google to search for digital cameras, paid advertisements from camera makers will probably appear on the right-hand side of the Google page.

Similarly, Mohan says, when a shopper is in a supermarket's laundry detergent section, that's the time for detergent ads to appear on the shopping cart screen. "It's really bringing the Google-type activities into the physical environment," says Mohan.

But is that something we really want? Mohan thinks it is. He argues that these new ads will not feel intrusive, because they will be directly related to what the customer is doing at any

given moment. What's more, they have the potential to be far more effecti ve than online ads, because they can be tailored to the person's buying history. And best of all, Mohan adds, they simply appear on-screen without the shopper's ever having to click a mouse. Nor is their application limited to supermarkets; IBM believes such services will be attractive to any retailer.

IBM's Industry Solutions group building in Hawthorne, New York, where Mohan works, houses a big customer demonstration area showcasing new concepts and technologies, many of them

A Shopping Buddy portable computer, attached to a shopping cart in a Quincy, Massachusetts, supermarket, guides customers to what they want, alerts them to special offers and allows them to tally their purchases, saving time at the cash register.

aimed at e-commerce. A telematics demo shows how directions, traffic alerts and promotions can be sent over the Internet to cars, based on their Global Positioning System location. And all around are systems for payment and authentication-from a cryptographic chip for wireless transactions to conversational biometrics, which perform voiceprint analysis while asking questions only authorized users should be able to answer.

The e-commerce technologies pursued here, and at other labs worldwide, cover an ever expanding range of areas. However, underlying virtually all the personalization and customization

efforts are Web analytics and data mining.

"We are paying close attention to the tendency of shoppers to visit our online store and then, within a week or so, come in and buy at our retail stores," says REI's Broughton. "We want to get better at providing our online customers whatever they need-product information, store locations, articles about the activities they'd like to enjoyso that they shop our retail stores as well."

Even when customers don't hand retailers detailed information about themselves, a lot can be gleaned from what they do online. For instance, geolocation and data-mining company Digital Envoy of Norcross, Georgia, tracks two billion Internet addresses a day, culling demographic data that advertisers and retailers love. Working like a search engine that studies the Web's infrastructure rather than its content, the firm's system can track an Internet transaction backward from a Web site to the network node at which it originated in order to answer two I questions: what city is the user in, and ~"- how fast is her Internet connection? ~ From that information, the system ~ can make a good guess about what ~ business the user is in, Digital Envoy ~ can also identify a person's local area ~ code, time zone and zip code-and UJ determine what language she speaks.

The hunger for such information is growing fast, in large part because of e-commerce, notes Digital Envoy cofounder Sanjay Parekh. For one thing, the information improves fraud detection.

If a buyer claims to be in Florida, but his Internet address shows he's in Wisconsin, that's a tip-off that something is amiss. Even more to the point, Parekh notes, if a retailer knows that a customer is in New York, not Palm Springs, it might display a different style of clothes on its home page-or dispatch a coupon good at a store in Manhattan. But the biggest force driving data mining is the push to provide better context for the paid keyword

ads linked to search terms. Online marketing and advertising service provider DoubleClick, for instance, uses Digital Envoy's technology to help companies create ads that are location specific. The goal, says Parekh: "Drive to a sale much quicker.

That's what everything is about."

IBM researchers tackle many of the same issues, though differently. One of the company's projects involves recording a customer's mouse clicks and tracking what was viewed-a red blouse, say. From that data, it's possible to get a good idea of a visitor's feelings about price, color and size preferences-even his or her gender. If the shopper makes a second visit, the retailer might offer a discount on an item already examined, or something similar. Every purchase gives the store more information about its customer.

Such efforts, of course, raise privacy concerns. In 2001, Big Blue founded the IBM Privacy Management Council, a coalition of privacy and security leaders from health care, finance, retail and government that seeks to find ways-through technology, standards setting and business practices-to get ahead of looming privacy issues. A big push is related to database management-so that when you enter personal information like your name, income and tastes in lingerie into a company database, it is stored in such a way that none of the company's employees can put all the pieces together and trace them to you. Instead, customers are profiled in the aggregate and grouped into broader categories that allow retailers to tailor (and even personalize) offers to people as members of a class but not as specific individuals. Privacy concerns are at the top of the list for retailers, says Hopping, of IBM's Retail Store Solutions Division, "because if privacy blows up, that's the kiss of death for a retailer."

predict from just a few visits where a new user was likely to end up a year or more down the road. "We compared the customer ranking that was generated by our model to the true ranking of the customer according to their purchases," says Fisher. In trials involving groups of more than 1,000 users, he notes, the model correlated almost perfectly with actual data collected from the auction site. Programs that seek to assess a customer's lifetime value are not new; however, IBM says that Fisher's model, which is being developed for commercial use through several of IBM's businesses, is the first to make an accurate assessment of a customer's future value based on just a few visits. What's more, such a model is "domain adjustable," Fisher says. It could be used in banking to determine whether to issue a loan or a credit card. Or it could be employed by retailers to target promotions to potential best customers and gi ve priority to those customers during times of peak demand.

Fisher's model works with minimal personal data and takes into account only a few variables. But for retailers bent on amassing much more complete data about their customers-and then using that information to "maximize" lifetime customer value through highly targeted ads and promotions-the data-mining challenge is far trickier, says Edwin Pednault, a staff researcher in IBM's data analytics research group. "Now I want to take much more information into account," says Pednault, who has been working on a model that would do just that.

Instead of looking at effects of marketing campaigns separately, as traditional data mining has done, Pednault's model examines the patterns of a customer's activity, such as the types of products she likes, how she responds to promotions and her price sensitivity. When a company has that kind of information about its customers, says Pednault, it can begin to ask, "How are my actions motivating them to change from one [buying] state to another?" In studies of one major department store chain, IBM showed that using Pednault's model to predict the effects of snail mail marketing-alerting customers about sales, store events and new items from their favorite product lines or styles-resulted in a 7 to 8 percent increase in store revenues.

Some of what customers want can be deduced from their activity alone, but when a store can get people to willingly tell it what they are seeking, its returns can be even better. "You can do it passively, but if you have to buy in, that gives extra value," says Pednault.

That's a key point. In the end, says Oxford's Reynolds, whether companies successfully adapt to the changing face of e-commerce will depend on how well they employ new technologies to go beyond personalization to customization, which means letting their clients shape their own profiles and classifications. "Personalization is what companies do to us," Reynolds explains. "Customization is what we want to do." D

"Drive to a sale much quicker.

That's what everything is about."

Giving them Something Retailers must also make the gathering of information about shoppers worthwhile to the shoppers themselves. "To get the customer to opt in, the retailer's going to have to give them something," says Hopping. That can be a discount, he says, but often it is something else-special parking or other services, or a piece of technology like Shopping Buddy that makes shopping easier.

One of the most intriguing areas of research involves figuring out which customers are worth the trouble of wooing in the first place. In its Haifa, Israel, research lab, IBM is designing advanced statistical and machine-learning models that will differentiate customers according to their future value.

Researcher Amit Fisher developed one such model by studying a year's worth of activity at one of Israel's leading e-auction sites. From such factors as the number, frequency and value of their transactions, Fisher was able to classify Internet the lines of bargain hunter, users into different categories-along repeater, one-timer, defector, valuable customer-and assign an economic value to each category. The model then sought to

The boy, Anis Ahmad, and his father, Hafiz Muhammad Siddiq, seated at far right with other Indian and British government officers at New Delhi:s Red Fort in 1946, al',(!, forefathers of U.S. Counselor for Cultural Affairs Adnan Siddiqi. ( e page 42.)

VINAY CHAWLA

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mmigrants'son comes back as diplomat: That story can only be told in America," says VINAY CHAWLA, 29, a consular officer in New Delhi.

"My parents were the bypro ducts of Partition," says Chawla. The two families fled Pakistan and landed in neighboring villages in what is now Haryana. After their marriage Chawla's parents moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "They went for what everyone goes to America for, a better opportunity, having a stake in society, making your own way," says Chawla, adding that in the 1960s and 1970s, when his parents emigrated, opportunities to "control your own destiny" were rare in India, although "it is changing now."

Chawla's father had earned a PhD in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur.

"Before that, no one in the family had gone to college or university," says Chawla. "One of my uncles still runs a sweet shop. My dad worked there when he was young. He made burfee in huge vats of sugar."

Having grown up on blander American flavors, Chawla says he finds the Indian candy too sweet. He did live in New Delhi for a time as a child, when his father taught at IIT, Delhi. Chawla studied Hindi for six months during his Foreign Service training and progressed well because of his exposure to the language when he was young. He picked up even more working at the visa window in the Embassy in New Delhi. His only problem, Chawla says, is "when an Indian American comes to the window and says, T d like to speak to an American officer,' and when I tell him I am, he demands, 'Show me your passport.' " Chawla's wife, Ritu, who worked in New Delhi as a TV journalist, was born in Chicago, where the two met at Northwestern University.

"There was no arrangement," he says. "For that I'm thankful for being American. From different castes, different parts of India, if we had lived in India and followed cultural norms we wouldn't have gotten together."

It's easy for the Chawlas to fit in India, he says, until they betray American cultural habits. "We always are the first to show up at any party and people say, 'It must be the Americans.' " The Chawlas were married in India. "It was a Hindu wedding, but very American: short ceremony, efficient crowd control. But we did have elephants and horses and it started late CJ and ended late," he says. "There were uncles 9

from two generations back, with long mustaches, and embassy officials in suits. I was proud to see all these categories come together."

He laughs recalling the offer from their parents: "We'll come and take care of everything."

Instead, he says, "They had no idea how to get things done, they had to learn how to negotiate from us. Our parents had become too American. They expected to find a wedding planner and the Yellow Pages," an American phone directory listing stores and services by category and location.

Chawla said one of his most gratifying jobs has been interviewing people in the last step of the immigration process. "I enjoy telling them they're on their way to becoming an American citizen," he says.

The greatest reward is one he did not anticipate. "I can explain America in a way that may not be accepted coming from another American. I can tell them, 'You can't say it's not a country that gives everyone a chance. I'm a living example.' " D

"What everyone goes to America for, a better opportunity, having a stake in society, making your own way."

ADNAN SIDDIQI

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.S. government-funded Fulbright scholarships, which bring people from other nations to study at American universities and send American scholars abroad, have played a role in the family histories of many of the American officers in India.

For ADNAN SIDDIQI, the U.S. Counselor for Cultural Affairs, the story has come full circle. It was a Fulbright that brought his Indian-born father to the United States from Pakistan in the 1960s. Now Siddiqi is chairman of the board of USEFI (the United States Education Foundation in India), which administers the

Fulbrights, providing opportunities to others.

On Siddiqi's office wall at the American Center in New Delhi is an old photograph of his father, Anis Ahmad, as a boy, and grandfather, Hafiz Muhammad Siddiq, among other British and Indian government officers at the Red Fort in 1946. Anis, born in Kanpur, earned his law degree from Aligarh Muslim University, moved to Karachi where he married Delhi native Qamar Sultana Mirza, and in 1959 Adnan Siddiqi was born.

Siddiqi was just four when he and his mother joined Anis, who was studying at Columbia

"I feel connected to both countries, India and Pakistan.

It was all one country."

Above: The 1946 photo of his father and grandfather in Adnan Siddiqi's office.

Right: Anis Ahmad Siddiqi of New York, visiting his granddaughter, Nilofer, 5, and son Adnan Siddiqi in New Delhi.

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2005

University Law School in ew York as a Fulbrighter.

"Now you have large Asian American communities. Then, there were just a handful," says Siddiqi, who felt isolated and different growing up. "My first school was a nursery school in a church. In junior high I went to a Catholic school, because the standards were higher."

After six years in New York, his parents felt Siddiqi and his U.S.-born brothers "were getting too Americanized."

The boys and their mother went back to Pakistan. "I remember being reduced to tears the first time I took an Urdu test for school. I couldn't even understand the question," says Siddiqi, who had used a more colloquial version of the language at home in New York. He later studied Hindi at university and practiced by writing letters to relatives in India. Now both languages "make it much easier for me to make friends. People are more frank with me," he says.

In Karachi, Siddiqi learned to play cricket, enjoyed flying kites, something kids in New

York City don't do, and was a celebrity among his neighbors because of his strange-looking American "barracuda" bicycle.

The family was undecided about whether to emigrate permanently, but living through the 197071 India-Pakistan War settled the question. They returned to the United States after just two years in Pakistan. In 1980 Siddiqi, then 19, joined his parents in becoming citizens. "I didn't think it would be an emotional thing until I was asked to give up all ties to the region," he says. "I looked around the room at these other people doing the same thing. But it took a couple of years until I started feeling American."

During undergraduate study at Columbia College he joined the India Club and, as a hobby, tried his hand at translating Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib's poetry into English. "I thought it was a way to bring the cultures together," he says. "It wasn't published or appreciated." Siddiqi earned a master's degree in international relations from Columbia University. But he hit the job

PUSHPINDER DHILLON market during the U.S. recession of 1981-82 and couldn't find work for five months. He went to work for a publishing house, at a lower salary than he was expecting, but in a beautiful office overlooking New York City with a chance to develop his expertise in cultural relations and eventually travel to Europe as a sales representative.

"It was a dream job in terms of corporate America," he says. "This is how you start. That company experience later helped me pass the Foreign Service exam. As a mid-level manager you have to handle an in-box, delegate, hold a meeting and decide what to do."

Siddiqi has spent much of his 22-year diplomatic career in the Middle East. He speaks Arabic and met his wife in Tunisia. But he wanted his children to "discover their roots, see what the other half of the family looks like" and obtained the posting to India in August 2004.

"I'm not from here, but I do have a historical affinity.

My roots are from Delhi and Uttar Pradesh," he says. "I feel connected to both countries, India and Pakistan.

It was all one country. More doors are opened to me and people feel comfortable around me. But I went through 15 years of isolation from this part of the world. It was a surprise to me, but in some ways I'm just as much learning the ropes and discovering new things as any other American."

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P

USHPINDER DHILLON, the Economic Affairs Officer who helped bring about the new India-U.S. open skies agreement, says the process of becoming an American was a gradual journey, based on becoming comfortable with the society and value system.

"What I really like about the U.S. is it's as pure a meritocracy as you can find anywhere," he says. "If you do your job well, whatever it is, it doesn't matter where you are from, what your color or background is. In many societies, the identity of someone is as the son of or daughter of so-and-so. People ask, 'Who is your father, what is your background?' In the U.S., it's, 'What do you doT" Born in the Punjab village of Badal in 1957, ~~.

Dhillon went to the University of Chicago to g; earn his master's degree in finance. "I had full :"i I n I"us a1fi ce, Ph" I Dh"ll " B d I us pinG er I on pOints out a a. intentions of returning to India," he says. "But their grandparents. The children "threaten to it's a process that creeps up on you. After four years in college I realized it was the place I disown me if I leave," says Dhillon. The family wanted to live. I liked the system. It unbundles loves to visit Badal, where Dhillon's mother still you from a lot of the constraints and limits that lives. exist in India. I would come back here to India "I missed my parents when I first went to the U.S. Telephone rates were very high. Travel was and would like it, but after a few weeks I would very expensive. I missed a certain slow pace that long for my life in the United States."

When it came time to become a U.S. citizen, is India, where the line between work and leisure he says, "It wasn't that difficult. I felt it was my is sort of blurred. I missed the afternoon siesta. I country. It was where I belonged." missed a whole generation of cricket!" he By then, Dhillon had lived in some of the laments. "When I went to Barbados I watched most beautiful parts of the United States, in some of the best cricket, and made up for it."

Dhillon's job is "to show up, fly the flag, to Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. One of his advocate for American interests and to promote first jobs was for the Alaska State Legislature. and deepen the economic ties between India and "The oil pipeline had come on line. Oil revenues Indian were flooding in. They were looking for the United States. We encourage economists, professionals to help develop the economic reform, because Indian growth and prosperity are in the U.S. interest. We are on the state. I thought it would be a very good opportunity for a year. I stayed five years, the cusp of a radically new partnership between the two countries. We have many differences, but I longest I stayed anywhere."

He then worked in Seattle, Washington, and fully agree with observers who liken the two countries to natural allies, bound together by Portland, Oregon, and married another Indianborn American. "I have always been open to shared values, identical threats and common alternate careers and I took the Foreign Service interests. " Dhillon says, "I like being a citizen of a exam as a lark," Dhillon says. When he first country that has been a benign power for joined, his wife stayed behind as she had a good job in Portland. the most part, not unlike India. I disagree Dhillon was posted to Barbados, Berlin, sometimes with policy, but when all is said and Washington, D.C., Bangladesh, Washington, done, it mostly uses its power for good, for D.C., then India. He has two daughters, 13 and doing many things because they are the right 8, who are picking up Punjabi and seeing a lot of things to do for mankind."

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"It was my chance to do good by the quintessential American taxpayer for the implicit faith he had given that I would do welL" Left: Ravi Candadai interacts with young visitors to the American Corner in Bangalore.

Below: Candadai speaks at a u.s. Navy Band concert.

RAVI CAN DADAI

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AVI CANDADAI is the Public Affairs Officer in Chennai, handling speakers, programs, international visitor exchanges, overseeing the American Information Resource Center and acting as a spokesman for the United States in southern India, a region that includes his birthplace, Hyderabad.

"I attribute all of this to my grandmother," says Candadai.

"She wrote to my uncle, who had gone to the U.S. as a Fulbrighter from 1958 to 1963, returned there in 1969 and was living in Ogden, Utah. 'Do something about this boy,' she said, asking if there was an opening in the U.S. for me to continue my studying."

There was. Candadai went to Weber State University in Utah, earning a bachelor's degree in business administration as he worked as a part-time janitor, changing light bulbs and buffing classroom floors to save money to attend Idaho State University, where he earned a master's degree (MBA) in marketing.

Candadai's subsequent career was a mix of teaching business and management while working in executive marketing and sales positions in the telecommunications industry in Seattle. At the time he became a U.S. citizen and got his passport he was encouraged to take the Foreign Service exam. Candadai had a house overlooking Puget Sound and was chairman of the business school at North Seattle Community College. "My plate was full. My cup was running over," he says. "However, it was my chance to do good by the quintessential American taxpayer

for the implicit faith he had given that I would do well."

He joined the Foreign Service in 1991 and worked in Monterrey, Mexico; London, Egypt and Chile. Following 9/11 he felt a strong urge to do right by the country that had adopted him as one of its own. He left his family behind in Texas when he volunteered for an assignment in Islamabad as the Deputy Economic Counselor, overseeing trade, intellectual property rights and World Trade Organization issues.

Candadai says colleagues at the State Department have teased him sometimes, asking, "Were you recruited for the Chennai job because you were an Indian?" But he answers, "I had to compete for this job." He speaks Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Arabic and Spanish. The language ability "may give me the first minute of being able to get past the gatekeeper, but that's just an edge in the full dialogue of diplomacy."

Candadai jokes that he is never mistaken for an Indian, however, because at 47 he has silver hair, and doesn't dye it. His wife is a Texan of Mexican heritage and the family speaks Spanish at home, although his children have discovered the "magic" of getting things done if they speak Tamil.

Coming to Chennai has given him a chance to catch up with family and friends, but he says his mother doesn't have time to spoil his children because she is "busy teaching computer skills to housewives in the house where I grew up." She's carrying on the family tradition of valuing education, epitomized by his grandmother.

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BHASKAR RAJAH friend's offer of a movie and a ride on a motorbike enticed BHASKAR RAJAH to listen to a speech on American education by a Foreign Service officer in his hometown of Chennai some 25 years ago. Now Rajah, the U.S. Assistant Public Affairs Officer in Calcutta, gives similar speeches, encouraging young Indians to widen their horizons.

Rajah's friend wanted to go to the United States to study, and asked his buddy to come along to a seminar at the American Center. "I said I am not going," Rajah recalls. "But he said, 'Well, we can go to a movie afterward.' And he had a wonderful motorbike and I always wanted to ride his bike, so he said, 'Maybe you a: can ride it on the way back.' After hearing ~ the American officer speak, a lot of us in ~ the audience broadened our perspectives ~ on higher education in the U.S. As luck '"~ would have it, two years later, I went ~ to the U.S., to Ohio, as an exchange visitor, and my friend who took me to the seminar never did go."

Rajah's first experiences weren't all pleasant. "Cleveland was cold, and the wind off Lake Erie started blowing too early in October," he recalls.

"Also, in 1982, the university was in deep financial problems and during my first semester they said they would not be able to offer me a continued scholarship for my MBA program." So Rajah turned to Oklahoma, which was experiencing an oil boom, and accepted an offer from the State University, where he earned his degree. "I got a wonderful education and above that, it gave me an insight into those parts of the U.S., the heart of America, which otherwise I would never have understood," he says.

When his studies ended, Rajah attended the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles and toured as much of the United States as he could, thinking he would never get a chance to come back.

In Colorado, a horseshoe distributor offered him room and board in return for setting up some computers. The man's business was suffering, so over

"I liked what America stood for, the multiculturalism, democracy that is ingrained in the society, the independence, the quest for fairness, the support of individual rights."

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Above: Bhaskar Rajah and daughter Vijaishri at the Calcutta Consulate swimming pool.

Lejt:Rajah gives a booklet on U.S.-India relations to Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi.

breakfast, Rajah used his knowledge from his MBA program to suggest avenues for diversification.

"One of them was manufacturing and that has kept him going for the last 20 years. We are good friends, still," says Rajah. "We would go horseback riding on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains and that is one of my best memories."

When Rajah returned home, however, he found it hard to get work. "The typical response I got was, 'You are overqualified; you have been to the U.S. and we don't think you will really stay here for long.' " Eventually, an Indian company sent him to Chicago to start up a U.S. office. It was there that he met his wife to be, with whom he now has three daughters, and where he

later became a U.S. citizen. "I felt I was completely in sync with U.S. ideals and philosophies and I saw myself as culturally an Indian and in politico-economic perspectives an American," he says. "I liked what America stood for, the multiculturalism, democracy that is ingrained in the society, the independence, the quest for fairness, the support of individual rights."

He worked in international business, banking and information technology in Australia, Dubai, San Francisco and India before he was encouraged to join the Foreign Service by Hugh Williams, then the U.S. consul in Chennai. There were some bureaucratic glitches in the process. At one point, Rajah said, he was told his application was denied and closed, because the Immigration and Naturalization Service still had him listed as a student in Oklahoma and could not verify his citizenship.

Rajah responded, "That's the one thing I can prove."

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JAI NAIR "The way my grandmother and aunt remembered it would have been inaccurate .... 1was expecting to see their rural India. But here in New Delhi, a big city is like any big city.

JJ

J

AI NAIR, the child of immigrants from Kerala and Scotland, is part of a "tandem couple" program in the U.S. Foreign Service. He and his wife, Siriana, have each taken a turn at jobs as consular and political officers in New Delhi since they arrived in February 2004.

The visa work can be stressful, says Nair. "You have to make quick decisions all the time. You try to make the right decisions. With the growth in U.S.-India business relations there has been an enormous growth of visa work. With so many people traveling back and forth, we're having a hard time keeping up. We are adding new windows as fast as we can in consulates and the embassy."

His political work involved talking with Indian officials, academics, other diplomats and reporting to Washington on "India's priorities, where the U.S. can match up and interact." Nair has a physics degree from Harvard and a master's in nuclear engineering from the University of Maryland. He worked as an analyst in the natural gas industry and in aircraft avionics before joining the Foreign Service.

In India, his first posting, Nair says, "People are tickled that I'm halfIndian and have responsibility ~ in the U.S. government. It's a 9 good thing for American policy ~ for people to see I'm doing the ~ same thing as someone of an all- ; European background."

Nair says he is most proud of "my parents' and grandparents' actions, more than just where they came from. My dad started working his way through school, became an electrical engineer, got into computer systems starting out, then quit his job, and said, 'I can do it on my own.'''

It wasn't until Nair got a chance to visit his father's boarding school, Lawrence in Tamil Nadu, that he fully understood why he was so incredibly disciplined. "We went to the school and (f)

the motto is on all their blazers: 'Never give in,' " says Nair.

Nair's father, Prasad, a native of Chengannur in Kerala, emigrated to the United States with his parents and younger sister at the age of 16, when his father, V.S.P. Nair, an Indian Air Force squadron leader, was posted to the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C., as an assistant air attache.

When V.S.P. Nair died of a hemt attack, his wife stayed on to let her children finish their studies. Prasad Nair decided to remain in the United States after flllishing college. He married an immigrant from Scotland and their three children were born in America.

"My grandmother and aunt would tell us stories" about India, Nair says. He had a chance to visit Kerala last November, "see the old family home, see where the coconut fields were, and the politics. It was interesting seeing red hammer-and-sickle flags."

Nair had not visited India before. "Something that was shocking for an American, even growing up knowing about it, is the really strong class differences. I'm not refen'ing just to caste," he says. "It's surprising how people here treat their superiors and subordinates. It would make most Americans uncomfortable.

It's a surprise when you go into a wealthy home, ornate, wellfurnished, then you step into the kitchen and it changes; it's not the space of the residents of the house. But the growth of the middle class is breaking that down."

He says, "The India I learned about growing up has really changed, now especially with the economic changes. But the way my grandmother and aunt remembered it would have been inaccurate whether India had changed or not. I was expecting to see more of their rural India. But here in New Delhi, a big city is like any big city."

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VIRAJ LEBAILLY "Part of the fun of being here is people are so interested in what is going on, and they want to talk about the U.S. and India."

Left: Viraj LeBailly enjoying Jhansi, in Uttar Pradesh, and in her office at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

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IRAJ LEBAILLY, who worked as a consular and political officer in New Delhi, was born in Connecticut to parents who went to the United States from Gujarat as students. LeBailly took the Foreign Service exams when she was a graduate student, and joined soon after she received her master's degree in international relations from Yale U niversity.

"What interests me most about the Foreign Service is America's foreign policy. I'm interested in travel and seeing places, meeting people and explaining what we're about and the U.S. perspective on issues," she says. "I get out and speak with government officials and others about U.S. policies. Part of the fun of being here is people are so interested in what is going on, and they want to talk about the U.S. and India."

LeBailly's husband, Etienne, is also a Foreign Service officer, who worked in the consular and economic sections in New Delhi. His mother is a first-

generation American from France. The couple met at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and married after graduate school. "We had a Hindu wedding ceremony, modified to what we could get done in Connecticut," she says, "so no elephants, and it took one afternoon."

They've enjoyed traveling throughout India and exploring less visited parts of the country.

LeBailly's parents met in the United States and settled in Connecticut, where they found job opportunities, after her father studied engineering and her mother microbiology.

LeBailly first came to India very soon after she was born, to meet her grandparents. She came a couple more

times growing up and after graduating from college.

"I remember coming here and meeting aunts and uncles whose names I knew," she says. "We tended to come in the summer when it was very hot, and we would bring water toys to give to our cousins. We also brought foods from home that we missed and could share with the other children."

Coming back as a diplomat, she says, "has given me an opportunity to emphasize to people I meet that America is full of people like me, with backgrounds of all kinds, who can come from all over and can do anything, including represent their government.

America is not a homogenous place."

When she has children, LeBailly says, "I would want them to know about their grandparents and India's history, which perhaps will be part of what they learn in school."

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typical day at Palna, a children's home set amid lush gardens in New Delhi, is full of activity. An Indian couple sits down with their adopted son to discuss adopting a second child. A Western couple walks into the doctor's office, cradling their new Indian daughter and getting medical advice on how to keep her comfortable in the summer. Young girls giggle, babies cry and the 116 children living there are getting ready for lunch.

Palna's general secretary, Aruna V. Kumar, remembers when it was not so busy. A few decades ago, the adoption scene in India was inactive and one-sided at best. Raising children not born in the family was considered unacceptable by most Indians, and even though some Indians wanted to adopt, most orphaned children went abroad. But 1984 brought the country's first adoption regulations, and by 1989 a quota system was introduced that required 25 percent of all orphaned children to be adopted within India. Since then, a social revolution has taken place, and more orphaned and abandoned children have a waiting list of parents who want to take them home.

According to the Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA) 1,707 children were adopted in India last year. (This figure does not include agencies not registered

with CARA, but with state governments for domestic adoptions only. Because of the large number of such agencies, CARA estimates the actual domestic figure is two to three times as high.)

In addition, 1,021 children were cleared for foreign and nonresident Indian families to adopt.

Kumar smiles when she identifies the most visible indicator of progress: Hindi television serials no longer consider the topic unmentionable. "It is used as a ridiculous, sensational plot device," Kumar says, "but at least it is being discussed in the open."

It's not that adoption didn't take place in India before. In the epic Mahabharata, the archer Karna was adopted by Adhiratha and Radha and raised as their own son. Many childless couples adopted children from other family members. However, children from outside the family were generally looked on as risky, and if an adoption did take place, it was kept secret for fear of disapproval. The extent to which that has changed is illustrated by Above and left: Children at Palna orphanage in New Delhi.

Above, right: G Natara) and S. laishree play with their adopted daughter, Cauri, at home in New Delhi.

Shivani, one of the first single mothers to adopt in northern India.

Shivani, who uses only one name, adopted her daughter, Yamini, in the late 1990s. Shivani's father accepted her choice and her friends were supportive, but her mother was concerned.

When Shivani initially approached adoption agencies in New Delhi, they told her they would give preference to waiting couples. She then traveled to Chennai, where, she had heard from friends, adoptions were more liberal. She was welcomed by the agencies. However, a social worker encouraged her to go back to New Delhi and push her case. So she returned, and after six months the same agency that initially rejected her gave her a girl.

And when the baby came home? "The pediatrician said, 'Let there not be too many visitors. Let the baby get to know your face,'" Shivani recalls. Yet, she just couldn't keep people away.

And once everyone saw her new daughter, all the concerns just melted away. "It was all excitement and joy."

But for every acceptance, stigmas remain elsewhere. Though encouraged to tell children the truth about their adoption, some parents still keep it a secret. Says Kumar, "By not telling, you risk the child hearing it from someone else ....Children have felt it is a huge betrayal."

Shivani was truthful with Yamini, who she says is "absolutely cool with adoption." Though there were awkward questions posed by her classmates, Shivani or Yamini would explain the

situation, and the other children understood.

Shivani always knew that she wanted to adopt, but many parents do not consider it until they find they cannot have a biological child. Leila Baig, who heads an adoption coordinating agency in New Delhi, says: "Unfortunately, many parents have waited out 10-12 years of infertility when they come to us." Baig counsels couples that infertility is not their fault and that there is no shame in adoption. Her survey of 500 families showed that only 5 percent of them adopt babies just because they think it's a good idea. Most Indian families want a healthy child who shares the same physical traits as their own family.

And it is in this area that foreign adoption plays an important role. Social workers say most Indian parents do not want older children or those with extremely dark complexions or children with special needs, such as physical, emotional or mental disabilities.

Also, the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act of 1956 allows only one child of each sex to be legally adopted from a family; the rest of the siblings must be taken under guardianship.

This makes it difficult to keep together sisters and brothers. A child eligible for adoption who is not taken by Indian parents after a certain amount of time, usually six months, can be cleared for foreign adoption. The United States receives the largest share of Indian children.

One agency that has been in India for 25 years helping special needs children is Americans for International Aid and Adoption.

Since the agency began, parents like Johanna and Tom Overstreet have been welcoming these children into their homes in the United States.

The Overstreets are in the process of adopting four-year-old Chetan, who has hemophilia. They have three biological children and one adopted child from Sierra Leone, who is also considered a special needs child because he lived through that country's long civil war.

To get ready for Chetan's arrival, Johanna is poring over adoption books, as well as keeping in touch with the doctors who will treat him. They have sent care packages and are keeping a collage of Chetan's photos in their livingroom so that the other children can become familiar with their new brother.

Many people look at adopting special needs children as an act of charity, but Mrs. Overstreet feels differently. "We aren't afraid of children with special needs ... .I think we are the ones who are blessed. We didn't enter adoption to rescue a child or be praised.

Finding India ndian children who have been adopted abroad often want to return to India to search for their roots. Most never find information about their birth parents, but that doesn't mean they can't find pieces of their origins.

Nilima Mehta, chairwoman of the Child Welfare Committee in Mumbai, runs a program for these returning children. She counsels those who are frustrated by the lack of information and takes them to the adoption center they lived in, the cradle they slept in and the people who cared for them.

In the United States, there are special camps for children adopted in India, such as those run by I-Child. Children and their families learn about Indian arts, dance and history

Charles (left), who was adopted at 6, with his father Terry, mother Maureen and sister Mara, adopted at 11 months, attending Camp Masala Indian Heritage Camp in Minnesota.

Charles, 9, and Mara, 5, take classes in modern Indian dance and Charles attends the School of Indian Languages and Culture.

We did this because we love children."

A trained nurse who now stays home with her children, Mrs. Overstreet had always wanted to adopt from India, but feared that India's adoption process would be cumbersome. Instead, she found it "easy to understand and easy to handle." In fact, CARA is working to establish a fast-track clearance process just for special needs children so that they get into family care quickly.

Challenges from special needs aside, children adopted internationally also experience a degree of culture shock. But Leiden University in the Netherlands, which analyzed 50 years of adoption data from across the world, found adopted children were only slightly more likely than non-adopted children to have behavioral problems, such as anxiety and aggression. The study found they were less likely to have behavioral problems than children adopted within their own country.

International adoptions are set to become easier, safer and more transparent when the Hague Adoption Convention is implemented in India, the United States and other countries. The treaty, signed by 66 nations, is designed to facilitate ethical adoptions and develop uniform procedures for all signatories on international adoptions. In doing so, it helps prevent child trafficking and exploitation. It includes standards for authorizing adoption agencies and procedures for making children available for international adoption and will aid in immigration and naturalization. The United States, which signed the convention, is expected to ratify it soon. Considering that India, like the United States, has different adoption regulations in every state, the convention will do a great deal to create more uniform procedures throughout the country.

Differences abound in India's domestic adoption scene. The demand for boys still remains significantly higher in northern India, but that's balanced by the southern states, where girls are more in demand, according to CARA chairperson Aloma Lobo.

Also, across the country, more girls are available because more girls are abandoned. But even that situation has improved. Says Baig, "Earlier we would say that close to 80 percent of the children in institutions were girls; now that's closer to 60 percent."

There are also different rules for different religions. According to the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, only Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists can adopt legally. Adoptions by Indian Christians and Muslims, as well as foreigners, come under the Guardians and Wards Act of 1890 and are classified as guardianship, which officially ends when the child reaches 18.

This distinction can affect a child's inheritance rights, so adoption workers recommend parents in such cases deposit money in the child's name immediately.

This added monetary worry, and the frustration of not being able to fully adopt under the law, has not deterred Christians and Muslims from parenting orphaned children in increasing numbers, says Meena Kuruvilla, project coordinator for Kerala's adoption coordinating agency. She assures the prospective parents that the religion and upbringing of the child is up to them after they become guardians, but she feels a uniform adoption law would better protect the rights of the children. "There should

John, 16, poses at home in Tennessee behind his parents, Wayne and Carol, who adopted him in India in 2000. At left is his sister Jennifer, 7, born in Korea and adopted in 1999; and at right is his sister Cecilia, 17, born in Guatemala and adopted in 2004.

be a bill so that a child can be ours if we want it," agreed Baig, a Christian. The Human Rights Law Network, a legal group in New Delhi, is working on public interest litigation in the Supreme Court that aims to liberalize adoption laws.

The waiting time for a child differs from state to state. Parents in New Delhi wait an average of three to four years for boys and one to one-and-a-half years for girls. However, in Maharashtra, the most progressive state for adoption, the courts move faster and the waiting time is often reduced.

While the city of New Delhi has 10 adoption agencies, the populous states of Rajasthan and Bihar have none. Because of a well-meaning law to prevent chjld trafficking, which bans children from crossing state lines for adoption purposes, orphans and abandoned children in those states end up spending their lives in institutions, says Baig. Some illegal adoptions are probably taking place there, but Baig would love to see a legal infrastructure in place to better meet the needs of children and families. Besides being within the law and giving inheritance rights, legal adoption gives parents access to a child's medical information so they can make an informed choice.

Another huge swath of the country with little adoption infrastructure is the Northeast, where many children have been orphaned by a wave of HIV /AIDS-related parental deaths.

However, even there, one can find success stories, like that of Laishram Dhiraj Singh's family in Manipur. They found their daughter at the Missionaries of Charity, which has branches across the country, even in the most under-served areas. The process took just three months. The family's experience motivated three other couples they know to adopt.

And as more families adopt, more examples will inspire. S. Jaishree and G. Nataraj, a South Indian couple living in New Delhi, decided to adopt their daughter, Gauri, after spending time with a friend's adopted child. "Her daughter cleared up any doubts in our minds," Jaishree says.

They applied in January and found the required home study by a social worker friendly and easy. (Home studies check to see whether the prospective parents are stable and capable of child rearing.) After some delays with agencies, they were advised in May to approach their local coordinating agency directly. They did, and as soon as they said they had no preference for a light complexion, Gauri came to their home within a week. When she arrived, like most new parents, they had quite a bit of learning to do. Nataraj says, "We were on the phone asking, 'How do you fold a nappy?' 'How do you use a bottle?' It's been fun."

Delighted with her new baby, Jaishree acknowledges that adoption is a tough decision for some families. "The most difficult part is knowing your own mind," she says. "The rest is just destiny."

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Corporate Response to

n the war against HIY/AIDS, India's private sector has begun to realize the dangers that the pandemic can cause to economies.

The business community was initially in the old mind-set, believing that the onus of handling the disease lay with government agencies, volunteer groups and public health organizations. But now that the virus has grown to monstrous proportions-and the country's 5.1 million infected adults put India in the red-alert zone-the private sector has realized the dangers and the impact it will have on the economy.

"HIY /AIDS is more than a heal th crisis," U.S. Ambassador David C. Mulford told business leaders at a conference in Calcutta in August. "It can cause major damage to economies, with far-reaching implications.

In highprevalence countries, HIV /AIDS erodes economic growth through its negative impact on labor supply, productivity, savings and the delivery of essential services. AIDS increases the costs of doing business, especially for small businesses."

For many businesses the impact of HIY /AIDS is noticeable. They lose the ability to be competitive if workers infected with HIY are in the productive age group. Frequent absenteeism and premature retirement from service reduce business profitability. Mulford emphasized: "HIY/AIDS has potentially cata- ~ strophic consequences. It has killed ~ Š 20 million people throughout the 8 world, leaving in its wake grieving ~ families, millions of orphans and @z damaged economies." ~

O

Globally, more than half of the nearly 40 million people with illY/AIDS are workers, according to S. Y. Quraishi, director-general of India's National AIDS Control Organisation, or NACO. Hence, it is an issue for both the workforce and the management.

At a July conference in Chennai of the Confederation of Indian Industry, Tarun Das, its chief mentor, asked industry for sharing of ideas about how corporations, small businesses and the government can help protect their employees and create a momentum for a comprehensive and broad national response to the threat posed by the disease.

To help India scale up initiatives to prevent and control HIY /AIDS at the workplace, President George W. Bush announced a package of $7 million in July when he met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Washington, D.C. They recognized that the pandemic is one of the greatest challenges facing humankind in the 21st century and reiterated their commitment to combat the disease on a global scale.

During the meeting, the Indian and American leaders agreed to speed up the

review of generic antiretroviral drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (Eight of the 10 drugs approved so far are made in India.) They also explored new opportunities for public-private collaboration on the development of HIV/AIDS drugs and for clinical trials in India.

The U.S. concern about this global menace is highlighted in President Bush's 2003 Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a five-year, $15 billion initiative aimed at turning the tide against illY/AIDS in more than 120 countries. The plan has been providing facilities for the support and treatment of two million people living with illY/AIDS, preventing seven million new infections, taking care of 10 million people infected with and affected by illY, spreading awareness among people and promoting research.

In India, NACO statistics say that 90 percent of the 5.1 million infected people are aged 15-49. Only 7,000 of the estimated 600,000 people who need antiretroviral drug therapy were receiving such treatment through government programs as of March. By the end of this decade, the number of Indians with the disease is likely to grow to 25 million, according to NACO's Quraishi.

Quoting estimates of the Asian Development Bank, Quraishi told a Chennai industry seminar that businesses lost $7 billion due to illY/AIDS in 200 I. If the trend continues, the figure could reach $17 billion by 2010. There are varied estimates of productivity loss from absenteeism by diseased workers, but all studies agree that economic costs due to the

President Bush and Prime Minister Singh address a press conference on July 18 at the White House, after Indian and American leaders reached several agreements, including a commitment to work jointly to combat the global challenge of HIV/AIDS.

epidemic are significant.

Industrialists are worried. Recently, the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in collaboration with the Indian Association of Occupational Health and the Avert Society, organized a conference on "Workplace Interventions for the Prevention of HIV/AIDS." Representatives from more than 445 companies expressed their concern about the deadly virus.

In his keynote address at the Mumbai conference, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy, Robert O. Blake, spoke about the need to bring into the fight not only the big corporations but also the medium, small and unorganized sectors. "We need to expand our efforts to include the workers in the unorganized sector who are highly vulnerable to the disease but who have the least access to health care. We cannot leave out the unorganized sector, which makes such a huge contribution to the Indian economy," Blake said.

The participants agreed to prepare a common workplace policy for industry and to frame workplace protocols. This is aimed at educating workers and managers about HIV /AIDS so that they do not fear contracting the virus at work and will not dismiss or shun workers with the disease-actions that make it much less likely the infected will seek medical testing and treatment. The industrialists agreed that workplace policies and programs are good ways to educate the staff, though providing needed treatment to the sick is more complicated. That will depend on programs that companies provide to take care of workers' health and welfare in the organized and unorganized sectors and develop a multi-pronged response to HIV /AIDS in the workplace.

The leaders agreed that the private sector has to frame policies that provide information about preventing or controlling the epidemic, and also ensure improved morale of the workforce.

The leaders also discussed these points:

• There is a need to engage in ongoing workplace programs devoted to educating and training employees about HIV/AIDS. Social stigma attached to the disease persists, inhibiting alteration of behaviors that contribute to the spread of the disease. There should be confidentiality about the medical condition of a worker and nondiscrimination against those who have the disease.

• The AIDS workplace program has to be implemented in all corporations, but to sustain the policy, advocacy groups within the businesses should take the lead.

• The health care and related costs incurred by companies having employees with HIV /AIDS can be a significant burden, particularly in areas where incidence of the disease is high. The private sector must earmark funds to meet those expenses.

• Industry must employ and train doctors to deal with positive cases, provide free testing and counseling on a confidential basis, and provide antiretroviral drug therapy to employees.

• The private sector must partner with voluntary organizations to provide employment. Job seekers should not be discriminated against or stigma attached to them on the basis of real or percei ved HIV status. Job applicants must not be screened or tested for the disease.

• The private sector must establish a fund that will be used by micro-enterprises that are subsidiaries of big corporations, but not economically sound enough to pay the medical bills of their employees.

• Counseling helplines must be set up and HIV /AIDS peer educators appointed for ongoing awareness training and counseling. The private sector must help form local AIDS committees that will develop AIDS awareness and prepare prevention materials.

• Multinational corporations and big industrial houses must build partnerships at the global level with governmental and non-governmental agencies and medical institutions.

• Corporations must ensure better rela-

tions between the employer and the employees, since a successful HIV /AIDS policy and program requires cooperation, trust and dialogue.

• AIDS can be prevented through information and education, attitudes and behavior; training women to protect themselves can help contain the spread of HIY. While business leadership and action on AIDS is crucial, these cannot solve the AIDS emergency, but only supplement the role played by governments, medical service agencies and political leaders.

The business community can be more effective as a support and pressure group for the government to act through examples of good practices.

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leading bv Example f!\ glimpse of the U.S government's comL.i.lmitment to combat HIV/AIDS is seen in its Embassy workplace policy announced in December. More than 1,800 employees in the Embassy in New Delhi and the three consulates in Calcutta, Chennai and Mumbai will be trained in prevention and in provision of care and support for the infected and their spouses. Highlighting the mission's policy toward HIV/AIDS, Ambassador David C. Mulford says: "I want to underline that AIDS prevention is everyone's responsibility. I have made this one of my top priorities as a manager of a large corporation. I am concerned about the health and the welfare of the U.S , Embassy employees."

The workforce policy provides a nondiscriminatory atmosphere for Embassy employees infected with the disease, and gives information on how they can be assisted by the mission to remain healthy and productive. The Embassy management will maintain absolute confidentiality of existing employees' medical information and information submitted by new recruits.

About 50 peer educators, who will be appointed from among the staff, will spend time with their colleagues discussing and providing information about the disease. The Embassy is also planning to hold four workshops for peer educators over the next year.

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American interest in Indian music has exhibited itself in the musical innovations of two artists from Michigan. Combining guitar and sitar with computer and vocals, they showed audiences in Calcutta, New Delhi and Chennai how purist classical Indian music can be the basis of an experimentation process textured by technology.

Robert Newcomb (above) and Si (right), accomplished musicians .

Hindustani and Camatie music Arbor, Michigan, displayed innovati in a Contemporary Fusion MusIC concert organized by the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi in August. Newcomb is a sitar player and a classical guitarist and Rush is a keyboard specialist.

Far right: Students from Delhi University's Faculty of Music and Fine Arts perform at the concert and workshop conducted by Newcomb and Rush.

Indo-American

Text by SUBHRA MAZUMDAR Photographs by VIKAS NARULA

obert Newcomb is a classical guitarist and sitar player; Stephen Rush plays the laptop computer and sings along.

Enthusiastic crowds came to their concerts out of curiosity but remained rooted to their seats, transfixed by the sheer quality of the presentation. The techno ambient music takes birdsong, the laughter of children or the sounds of a geographic situation and improvises them with digitized sounds to a subtle and recognizably Indian link.

With a common musical philosophy and a genuine love for Indian music, the duo have kicked off a revolution of rhythm that The Statesman newspaper describes as "a rewarding insight into the world of sound created by their combined skills, ably supported by information technology."

Though musical mixes are a routine happening on the Indian musical front, such an eclectic repertoire is still novel.

Indian music, for Rush, is far from a casual acquaintance garnered from recordings or concerts of visiting musicians. Rush, an associate professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has

been learning Carnatic music since 1992 from Sharada Kumar, a vocalist from Mumbai who teaches the South Indian classical music in Michigan. Before this, Rush's exposure to this music had been somewhat spiritual. "It was a decision made from the heart when I was a student in residence at the Eastman School in Rochester," New York. Ten years later, he was in Chennai for a week. This was followed by a collaborative stint with the Bharatanatyam dancer Navtej Johar.

Last year, Rush was chosen to host a 90-minute interview of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. "He shared interesting asides, like his interest in dance, theater, film, and even stated that he hadn't finished what he has in mind. It was a humbling experience, to say the least," Rush recalls. As a fallout from this fortuitous session, Rush came in contact with Nita Kumar, who directs Nirman, a volunteer group in Varanasi that integrates popular, folk and classical arts into formal education. She "mentioned that perhaps I would like to teach in residency at Nirman. We then developed a program that I would bring students to Varanasi/Nirman and I would teach them the relationship between Western and Indian music, focusing on the late 20th century. My students would also study with gurus, the flute, violin, sitar, tabla and voice." Kumar also began to explore possibilities for the two American musicians to give live performances for Indian audiences. "We asked the embassy in India for help," she says.

The initial journey to Indian music in Newcomb's case was through what he calls a "poet's path." He had been interested in spirituality since his teens and a splintered family background had prompted him to find spiritual guidance through music. "In all, I have just three months of

Music formal music instruction. Since the age of 17 or 18 I have been a completely selftaught musician," says Newcomb. During his 30-year sojourn in music, he has explored several instruments and navigated through the differing moods of American, Irish and British musical folk traditions and listened to Indian classical music greats such as Nikhil Banerjee and Ali Akbar Khan. "I finally settled for the classical guitar, which I realized was very accessible, and through which the exploring of different genres and replicating different genres ...became possible for me."

Then, as the guitar evolved to suit his needs, the sitar work progressed toward experimentation, with the amplification process and link with electronic sound, says Newcomb, who is director of information technology at the University of Michigan School of Music.

During their tour in India-presented by the Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Embassy and sponsors such as the University of Delhi and the Calcutta Chamber of Music-the audiences were quick to appreciate the spontaneous musical exchanges. To Indian ears, the factor of improvisation is the key to all Indian compositional music, and that remained in the forefront of the Rush-Newcomb scheme of things. At one concert, the padam that Rush voiced in the manner of Carnatic musical exchanges was aptly counterpoised by the adept sitarist Newcomb, unfazed by an attempt to test his skills. Newcomb then flagged off a traditional Indian beat on his guitar and completed it with an effortless electronic context. "The exchanges ... were replete with many magical moments," said The Telegraph newspaper.

D About the Author: Subhra Mazumdar is a New Delhi-basedfreelance art and music critic.

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Ordinary people record and share their life stories in booths at train stations and in mobile trailers. o you have something to catch the baby?" a woman asked Joe Caracciolo, a New York City transit foreman riding the subway on his way to work. He didn't, but the birth on the C train was not about to stop. "It just flew out," Caracciolo recalled. "It was like catching a football." When he announced "It's a boy," the whole car erupted. "Everybody was kissing and hugging."

That miraculous moment is one of hundreds collected by StoryCorps, an unusual oral history project that encourages people to share their life experiences with one another in a tiny recording studio in New York City's Grand Central Terminal. The boxy 8- by 10-foot structure, which opened two years ago, stands in a busy passageway near Track 14. The booth's translucent walls, covered with little human figures in yellow, red and orange, emit a spaceship glow.

Travelers stop and gaze at a changing electronic sign ("Listening is an Act of Love," "Listen Closely") or listen to snippets of recorded interviews at the press of a button.

A peek through the soundproof booth's narrow window usually gives a glimpse of two people seated at a table, talking, a pair of microphones between them. Here, an old man revealed to his nephew his awkwardness as a youth, confessing that he met his wife of 60 years only because a locked door kept him from

fleeing their blind date. A teenage girl told her older sister how she contemplated killing herself during her confinement in a psychiatric hospital. "The only reason that I didn't is because of you and Mom," she confided, almost inaudibly. A young woman tried to stifle her laughter as her Hindu father, who is from India, recalled his first visit to an American restaurant 35 years ago. He was shocked to see "hot dog" on the menu. "I couldn't believe it!" he said.

"How could people eat the dogs!"

StoryCorps was created by David Isay, a 40year-old radio producer who says he wanted to

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Below: Annie Perasa, 63, and her husband, Danny, 66, recounted the warmth of their 27-year marriageand how they became engaged on their first date-in the StoryCorps booth in Grand CentraL Terminal in New York, then came to Washington, D. C. to promote the project, which is housed in a mobiLe traiLer (above) in the nationaL capital.

Above: Liz Feehan, Tara Davan and John Feehan (left to right) in a StoryCorps booth at the World Trade Center train station in May share memories of their father, First Deputy Commissioner William M. Feehan, the highest ranking officer of the New York City Fire Department to perish in the line of duty on September 11, 2001.

Below: Sam Harmon, 75, is interviewed by his grandson Ezra Awumey, 12, while his daughter Vivian Awumey, 48, listens inside the StoryCorps soundproof booth in Washington, D.C. in May.

Below: Richard Graham, 86, and his sister Sue Mingus, 76, chat after their StoryCorps session in Washington, D.C. in May. Mingus remembered her brother leaving their home in Milwaukee when she was eight and said their recorded conversation "was an opportunity to bind us. We think extraordinarily alike. "

Author Studs Terkel (left), whose books celebrate "the lives of the uncelebrated, " with radio documentary producer David Isay at the opening of the StoryCorps booth in New York's Grand Central Terminal on October 23, 2003.

"take oral history and put it in the hands of regular people." That's in contrast to traditional oral history conducted by academics and journalists. "You can bring your mother or grandfather or neighbor-anyone you choose-and conduct a 40-minute oral history interview with the help of a facilitator."

Isay has built a career on listening. Among his National Public Radio documentaries are a 1993 chronicle of life in a Chicago housing project, "Ghetto Life 101," and 2002's "The Yiddish Radio Project," featuring interviews with Jewish-American radio stars and excerpts of shows from the 1930s and' 40s. In 2000, Isay was awarded a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, which cited him for "drawing raw human responses from a diversity of voices."

The so-called genius award of $500,000 over five years freed him to develop the "crazy scheme," as he puts it, that would become StoryCorps.

A Connecticut native and longtime New York City resident, Isay had his eye on Grand

Central from the start because at one time or another every kind of person passes through.

"It's the epicenter of New York City."

Since opening, StoryCorps has recorded some 600 interviews. Studs Terkel, the author of Working and 10 other books based on interviews, was on hand to help launch the project.

Terkel, 92, praised StoryCorps for "celebrating the lives of the uncelebrated." Gazing up at the terminal's vaulted ceiling, he said, "We know there's an architect, but who hung the iron?

Who were the brick masons? Who swept the floors? ..They are the ones who make the world go around, these millions of people who have never expressed themselves."

OStStoryCorps participants make an interview appointment on the project's Web site (www.storycorps.net). which also offers a "question generator." What's your first memory? Who were your favorite relatives? What have you

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"These millions of people who have never expressed themselves. "

learned from life?

Louisa Stephens, a high-school teacher, has conducted about 20 StoryCorps interviews with family, friends or students. "Every time I go I feel I've been lit from within," she says. "I like hearing the details of a person's life that are not public: what a grandmother said to you or what you're afraid of."

An interview session costs $10, and participants get a CD of their conversation. If they grant permission, a copy goes to the Library of Congress, which plans to make the recordings available for in-library listening by year's end.

Isay says he was inspired by the 1930s Federal Writers' Project, a Works Progress Administration program that collected thou-

was a surprise marriage proposal. She was Brazilian, he a Brooklyn native. In the interview's last five minutes, he pulled out a ring and placed it on the table. "This is the ring that my father gave to my mother," Michael Wolmetz said. "I thought I would give it to you." His voice broke as he continued, "Debora, will you please marry me?" She said yes.

"It was the only time I cried in the booth," says the interview's facilitator, Kayvon Bahramian.

With plans to put StoryCorps booths in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where mobile versions are available, Isay hopes to collect 250,000 interviews in the next decade, if funds are available. For now, corporate sponsors and foundations pitch in to keep the stories coming. ne January morning, Marco Ceglie, 30, and his mother, Carol, took seats in the booth.

Marco, wearing a knit cap and a tuft of hair under his lower lip, said he believes that the soul dwells in the voice. "Photos are great," he said, "but they're static." Marco had hoped to interview his father ("a man of three-word answers"), but it was his mother who made the 40-minute train ride from their home in Maplewood, New Jersey, to Grand Central.

Carol, who grew up in Slovenia in the 1930s and '40s, looked apprehensive, but warmed to her son's questions. She recalled the night Nazi soldiers held her family at gunpoint. She was about five. "I was holding on to my father's leg, hiding behind him."

She went on to say that her family survived the war and that she emigrated to America in 1964. She also told her son she's proud that he did not get mixed up with gangs.

When the two came out of the booth, her eyes were glistening. "It was good," she said. "I might bring someone myself." Isay would like nothing better.

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The glowing StoryCorps booth in New York's Grand Central Terminal has recorded and shared hundreds of interviews.

sands of life-history interviews now housed at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center. Back then the technology for creating a treasury of American life was unwieldy. In the 1930s, a state-of-the-art recording machine was the size of a coffee table and required two strong people to lift. Still, the writer's project captured a spectrum of American stories, of blacks who had experienced slavery, of destitute Dust Bowl refugees, of a Vermont farmwife butchering a hog, of a Harlem fishmonger.

Among the StoryCorps' memorable moments

About the Author: David Taylor, author of Getting to the Root of Ginseng, is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine.

World Trade Center

Remembered

o spend $13 and three hours just to see one site during a short, budget holiday in New York City was the question being debated by passengers on a hop-on, hop-off Big Apple open-roof bus tour. Several said why waste the time just to get into an elevator. Even the lady at the ticket counter warned me of the long, boring wait to reach the Top of the World Observation Deck on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center.

But since childhood I have loved collecting pictures of tall buildings, counting the stories of skyscrapers, not missing an opportunity to visit the top floors of high-rises from the Tata Centre in my home city, Calcutta, to the Nariman Point behemoths of Mumbai. It was a case of love at first sight for me with New York, and there was no chance I could leave the city without viewing it from its highest point.

So I did spend $13 and stand in that spiraling, apparently never-ending queue of tourists from across the world, waiting to be herded into the elevator for a slightly dizzying ride to the 107th floor. A year later, I was horrified as I watched on television the twin towers collapsing into a thick plume of mushroom smoke, camouflaging the tremendous loss of human lives and gouging a gaping hole in the heart of New York's financial district.

I could imagine how the New Yorkers must have felt if the feeling of a tourist could be so shocking. The face that flashed before my eyes immediately was that of the smiling, fat black lady who served me pizza in the Windows on the World The author pays restaurant. tribute to the World The next day as I rummaged through Trade Center and the the files of my New York tour I could people he met there recover only a few scraps of papers, as a tourist one year mementos of the WTC. I still had the $13 ticket, receipts from my restaurant before terrorist attacks destroyed the bill, and a brochure that boasts: "No other building on the planet allows you twin towers on to stand on a roof this high [1,353 feet]."

September 11 J 2001. On the back, the brochure says: Open Daily: 9:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. (SeptemberMay), 9:30 a.m-ll:30 p.m. (June-August).

The WTC would never open to tourists again. It is only stored in the minds of those survivors who were part of that building, or tourists like me.

I can recall some of the attractions on the Observation Deck: a 750-building minjature model of New York City, and an auditorium offering a free simulated helicopter ride through the streets. The glass-enclosed Observation Deck offered New York City's best views, second only to the outdoor viewing platform on the 1l0th floor, the highest in the world, but closed the day I visited.

T

New Delhi-based sports Waiting for the elevator reminded photographer Kamal me of the rural folks who come to Sharma was in New Calcutta and stand in long queues to York to cover the U.S. see the zoo garden or the Indian Open tennis tournament Museum. After the long wait, we when terrorists struck passed through a corridor that resemon September ll, 2001. bled an aerobridge in an airport; then He rushed to the scene a robust security guard shepherded a and took stunning, group, which included me, into the evocative elevator. We zipped upwards, feeling photographs, which he our legs become heavier with the elehas shared in exhibitions across vator's fight against gravity. Then we 1ndia. changed elevators for the final leg to the 107th floor.

The view of the great city was truly mind-boggling. If skyscrapers are representatives of a city's economic might then none perhaps surpasses New York. But from the top of the World Trade Center, the breathtaking view was not only of the steel and concrete. You got an unsurpassed vista of all the islands, separated by the Hudson and East River, that make up New York City.

The Statue of Liberty looked like a beautiful, small, decorative piece that adorns your living room. The great bridges-the Brooklyn and the Manhattan-that connect the island to the mainland remain etched in my memory. I took snap after snap to capture those views for recollections later.

Never did I imagine that the images of the twin towers would fill the pages of innumerable coffee table books, magazines, newspapers and Internet sites for posterity.

Being short of cash, I had an economical meal of hot chocolate and a slice of cheese pizza for $5.50. But I distinctly remember the beaming lady (she resembled none other than Whoopie Goldberg) who served me the food. We chatted for a while on subjects that could help me write a travel piece later. Only I did not know it would be an obit to the World Trade Center.

When the towers came crashing down, the face that floated before me was hers. Was she there that day, waiting for the last time to serve pizza and hot chocolate to thousands of tourists who would never again queue up for the elevator?

Did she perish?

Recently I went twice to see a Bollywood movie, Kat Ho Naa Ha, because it is shot in New York, a city I fell in love with. But the twin towers were missing in the frames. I am yet to come to terms with a New York skyline without the 0 World Trade Center.

About the author: Sujoy Dhar is a Calcutta-based special correspondent for the Indo-Asian News Service. He also writes features for national and international media outlets.