Down the steep cobbled streets of La Paz, coca-chewing Indians trotted under huge packs of bundled alpaca hides. In the market sun, Indian women in outlandish derby hats and bright-colored skirts haggled over little piles of shelled corn. It was winter, the good time in the Andes. The Indians were not even aware that political storms threatened the peace of La Paz. But among Bolivia's propertied rulers, the one-in-ten who have a vote, there was crisis. The uneasy coalition ...

In River of Smoke, the Indian author Amitav Ghosh banishes one of his characters, a French orphan, to a ship anchored near Hong Kong, then just a "wild, gale-swept" island off the coast of Macau. Paulette spends nearly the entire novel waiting there for news of a rare flower, the Golden Camellia, from a friend in Canton's foreign quarter — "threshold of the last and greatest of all the world's caravanserais." In the 19th century, these South China Sea ports ...

It took Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw only 14 days to secure his place in Indian history. The career officer, who died June 27 at 94, had a mystique as thick as his silvered mustache, after fighting heroically against the Japanese in World War II. But his defining moment came with the Indian army's decisive victory in the two-week 1971 war against Pakistan. For a country that had been mired in seemingly endless battles on its borders for most of ...

JAI Bangla! Jai Bangla!" From the banks of the great Ganges and the broad Brahmaputra, from the emerald rice fields and mustard-colored hills of the countryside, from the countless squares of countless villages came the cry. "Victory to Bengal! Victory to Bengal!" They danced on the roofs of buses and marched down city streets singing their anthem Golden Bengal. They brought the green, red and gold banner of Bengal out of secret hiding places to flutter freely from buildings, while ...

IRAN COVER STORIES Iran and a region of rising instability "An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries." —Zbigniew Brzezinski In the broadest and grandest of measurements, this crisis crescent envisioned by President Carter's National Security Adviser ...

These days, the battle for the Indian Ocean seems to be all about the dread pirates of Somalia. On Wednesday, the U.S. briefly became a direct player in the ongoing drama, with news that those pirates had hijacked a U.S.-flagged cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama, and taken 20 American citizens prisoner. But the crew regained control of the ship, except for the captain, who remains on a lifeboat in the hands of the pirates. But a drama ...

NEW ENGLAND: INDIAN SUMMER—Van Wyck Brooks—Dutton . During the '20s and '30s, Critic Van Wyck Brooks pondered a theory and a project. His project was to write a synthesis of U. S. culture in terms of the New England mind. The theory, used chiefly as a literary framework for the project, was German Philosopher Oswald Spengler's theory of cultural cycles: that cultures, like individuals, pass through youth and maturity to old age and death. Cultures are born in the countryside ...

THE ADMINISTRATION Indian Fighter In his office in the Department of the Interior, stoop-shouldered, intense little John Collier shuffled through a neat stack of papers, stopped occasionally to stare at a corncob pipe in an empty water glass on his desk. In his baggy old long-sleeved green sweater, he looked like a country storekeeper closing out the week's accounts. Actually, he was closing out twelve years with the Government. As U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs since 1933, John Collier has ...

Chung Mong Koo, Chairman of South Korea's Hyundai Motor, carefully scrutinizes a newly designed gearshift lever for the automaker's Sonata sedan while his entire senior-management team hovers around, anxiously awaiting his approval. The execs are justifiably edgy. Engineers added a plastic plate beneath the shifter to prevent spilled coffee and other flotsam from falling into the mechanism and gumming it up. It's a minor change, but no one treats it that way, least of all Chung, a hard-nosed, detail-oriented boss ...

Belgian Cement Worker Albert Verbrugghe was driving his wife and another woman down a quiet street in the copper town of Jadotville one day last week, when he suddenly heard the clatter of gunfire. Pulling the triggers for no apparent reason were nervous Indian troops of the advancing United Nations force. Verbrugghe slammed his little Volkswagen to a halt. His wife was already dead, the other woman dying. With an anguished scream. Verbrugghe stumbled out, blood streaming from a wound ...