Some 200 years ago, Charles Darwin declared that man evolved from apes. Some 2000 years before the English biologist put his thought to paper, the origin of species, as he described it, was already in place in our ancient scriptures such as the Puranas.

There is a curious parallel between the scientific concept and the Hindu theological interpretation of evolution. While the former, as evident from the works of Darwin, assumes that the civilized man evolved through gradual modification of life forms, starting with the fish - a process he called evolution by natural selection - the latter, as evident from the Dasha Avatar, or the ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu, also suggests that the human form descended from the sea. Further, according to Hindu theology, the Supreme Being is present in both the living and non-living on earth. And without God, the universe could never have come into existence.

Since ancient times, the ten avatars of Vishnu have been interpreted as the various stages in evolution, ultimately culminating in the emergence of the human being. According to Hindu theologists, the process of evolution started with the sea creature, thereafter progressing through the amphibian, the reptile, the mammal, the half- man, the dwarf, finally ending up as man. People who believe in the Puranic concept of evolution would agree with Darwin.

Another area where both concur is the process of creation (kalpa) and dissolution (pralaya) of the universe, which is said to occur through time-stages, known in Hindu mythology as the yugas (ages). It is in the fourth age, the Kali-Yuga, or the Age of the Unknown, that man self-destructs, thus repeating the cycle of life. Darwin too believed in a similar order and reorder of evolution.

Vedic history is replete with fascinating tales from the Dasha Avatar where Vishnu, the preserver of the cosmos and protector of life, battles with the forces of evil. He does this by descending from his home in Vaikuntha and assuming the incarnation of man or beast to set things right in the mortal world.

The first of the ten incarnations, as told in the Dasha Avatar, is the Matsya Avatar where Vishnu assumes the form of a fish to retrieve the Vedas from an evil asura, and preserve them for the next spell of creation. As the poet Jayadeva sang- "All glories to you, O Lord of the Universe, who took the form of a fish. When the sacred hymns of the Vedas were lost in the waters of universal devastation, you swam like a boat in that vast ocean to rescue them." Science too agrees that the fish was the first advanced life form to inhabit the earth during the later part of the Ice Age.

Thereafter follow the other nine avatars of Vishnu: Kurma (tortoise), Varaha (wild boar), Vamana (dwarf), Narasimha (half man-half beast), Parashurama (the warrior, Rama (the king), Krishna (the cowherd), Buddha (the teacher) and Kalki (the slayer). Of these, the fourth avatar, Vamana, or the dwarf-like monkey, comes closest to resembling the ape-man in Darwin‘s theory of evolution. Another interesting point is that Hanuman is often considered to be the missing link between ape and man. The monkey king and his tribe were, perhaps, the last but one stage in the evolution of the civilized human being. Hanuman, as we know, is considered athletic and intelligent, one capable of great physical feats.

Equally fascinating is the tale revolving around Kalki, the still-to-come tenth avatar of Vishnu. In the Puranas, Kalki is depicted as a proud warrior, riding a white horse, with a scale in one hand and a sword in the other, who slays the forces of evil as the present, Kali-Yuga, nears its end, and thus restarting the cycle of life. According to neo-Darwinists, the selfish man of today is already in the self-destructing mode. This theory has been put forth by biologists who say that human beings are so hell-bent on competing with one another in the race for supremacy that they will one day destroy themselves. Thus, ending one cycle of evolution and restarting another from the first living organism.

France‘s Ministry of Culture does not look like the sort of place where pessimism ought to flourish. The ministry occupies a wing of Richelieu‘s magnificent Palais Royal, round the corner from the Comedie Francaise and just a short walk from the Louvre and the Opera. On their way to lunch its inhabitants have to pick their way through throngs of tourists who have come from all over the world to admire France‘s cultural riches.

Pessimism flourishes here nonetheless. The ministry‘s officials are convinced that a rising tide of American popular culture is swamping France. And they spend much of their working lives administering a complex system of quotas and subsidies that are designed to protect French culture from total submersion.

The ministry has almost uniform support for its position among a French cultural elite worried about the threat that America poses, particularly to French film. Their concern is not, as sometimes claimed, that an upstart America hijacked the French national invention of Melies and the Lumieres. Rather it is that Hollywood is a Trojan horse bringing with it Disneyland Paris, fast-food chains and free advertising for American products from clothes to rock music. "America is not just interested in exporting its films," says Giles Jacob, the head of the Cannes Film Festival. "It is interested in exporting its way of life."

These French people lead a world guerrilla army, hoping to curb American cultural hegemony. In 1989, the French government persuaded the European Community to decree that 40% of TV programs should be domestic. It also strengthened their complex system of support (which taxes cinema tickets to help French film production) by extending it to television programs. In 1993, France threatened to sabotage the GATT trade round in order to exempt audio-visual materials from free trade agreements.

The French have found a powerful ally in Canada, which has long been terrified of being swamped by its closest neighbor. Of the films shown on Canadian screens, 96% are foreign, primarily American. Three quarters of the music on Canadian radio is not Canadian. Four in five magazines sold on newsstands in Canada, and six in every ten books, are foreign, mainly American.

Canada had, some time back, organized a meeting in Ottawa about American cultural dominance. Nineteen countries attended, including Britain, Brazil and Mexico; the United States was pointedly excluded. At issue were ways of exempting cultural goods from treaties lowering trade barriers, on the view that free trade threatened national cultures. The Ottawa meeting followed a similar gathering in Stockholm, sponsored by the United Nations, which resolved to press for special exemptions for cultural goods in another global trade pact, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.

Quite apart from its recommended solutions, is the "resistance" to American cultural imperialism correct in its diagnosis of the problem? Lurking here are three distinct questions. Is Hollywood as powerful as its enemies imagine? Is there an identifiable thing you can sensibly label "American culture"? And does America‘s domination extend to every corner of the popular arts and entertainment?

A strong case can be made out that America dominates world cinema. It may not make most feature films. But American films are the only ones that reach every market in the world: the highly successful films of India and Hong Kong hardly travel outside their regions. In major markets around the world, lists of the biggest-grossing films are essentially lists of Hollywood
blockbusters in slightly differing orders with one or two local films for variety. In the European Union, the United States claimed 70% overall of the film market in 1996, up from 56% in 1987; even in Japan, America now accounts for more than half the film market. "Titanic" has grossed almost $1.8 billion worldwide. "Armageddon" and "Lethal Weapon 4" play well from Belgium to Brazil.
Hollywood‘s empire also appears to be expanding by the year. Hollywood now gets roughly half its revenues from overseas, up from just 30% in 1980. At the same time few foreign films make it big in the United States, where they have less than 3% of the market. Between 1995 and 1996 Europe‘s trade deficit with the United States in films and television grew from $4.8 billion to $5.65 billion.

Striking figures, to be sure. Yet the more one looks at many of these films, the less distinctively American they become. One reason for Hollywood‘s success is that from the earliest days it was open to foreign talent and foreign money. Some of the great figures of Hollywood -- Chaplin, Murnau, Stroheim, and Hitchcock -- were imports. And now two of the most powerful studios, Columbia Tristar and Fox, are owned by foreign media conglomerates, Japan‘s Sony and Australia‘s News Corporation.

Several of Hollywood‘s most successful films have drawn heavily on international resources. "Three Men and a Baby", which helped to revive Disney after a fallow period in the mid-1980s, was a remake of a French comedy. "Total Recall" was made partly with French money, directed by a Dutchman and starred an Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger. "The English Patient" was directed by a Briton shot in Italy and starred French and British actresses.

It may even be argued that it is less a matter of Hollywood corrupting the world than of the world corrupting Hollywood. The more Hollywood becomes preoccupied by the global market, the more it produces generic blockbusters made to play as well in Pisa as Peoria. Such films are driven by special effects that can be appreciated by people with a minimal grasp of English rather than by dialogue and plot. They eschew fine-grained cultural observation for generic subjects that anybody can identify with, regardless of national origins. There is nothing particularly American about boats crashing into icebergs or asteroids that threaten to obliterate human life.

The very identification of Hollywood with American culture, particularly American high culture, is itself a mistake. So is confusing screen conduct with real conduct, although plenty of serious-minded people do seem to treat Hollywood as a ruinous influence on American manners and morals: Michael Medved, an American screenwriter turned cultural commentator, argues that, far from nurturing deep-rooted values, Hollywood helps destroy them. "Tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy," he argues, "an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children." Making a point more about art than behavior, Terry Teachout, a music critic, says that educated Americans would cheer if an earthquake reduced Hollywood‘s sound stages to rubble. "The enemy‘ at the gates is not the United States free trade or even Walt Disney," he says with deliberate effect, "it is democracy."

Instead of treating the sovereignty of popular taste as something that underpins America‘s cultural domination of the world, many of America‘s neoconservatives (and some liberals) see it rather as a perilous solvent acting on the United States itself. The country, they fear, is dissolving into a babble of discordant ethnic voices without a common cultural identity or a shared national purpose. And they put much of the blame on the proliferation of foreign-language media outlets. One of the most popular television channels in Los Angeles is KMFX 34, which broadcasts in Spanish; there are also channels which broadcast exclusively in Korean, Cantonese and Japanese, and others that rent air-time for Yiddish and Russian broadcasts. Even in the shadow of the Hollywood sign it is possible to live without bowing the knee to a majority culture.

The world‘s culture ministers might well reply that the inroads that Spanish and Korean television have made into the United States are as nothing compared with the inroads that American television has made into their home countries. The deregulation of television in the 1980s created a legion of upstart stations that were desperate for content -- and much of the cheapest and most reliable content came from America.

Yet as new stations establish themselves, they tend to drop generic American products in favor of local productions: audiences still prefer homegrown fare if given the choice. In every European country in 1997, the most popular television programme was a local production. "Navarro", an unmistakably French action drama, has never had less than a 33% market share. Across the channel, Inspector Morse", a much re-run British detective series, owes its lasting appeal to an Oxford setting and a curmudgeonly hero.

The strength of local ties is even more apparent in pop music, long supposed to provide the soundtrack to America‘s cultural hegemony. The United States has never enjoyed the same dominance of pop music as it has of cinema, having to share the global market with Britain. According to a book reporting the results of a rock-music poll of 200,000 people, aged from nine to 62, in America and Europe, "The All-Time Top 1,000 Albums", seven of the ten most popular albums were British. As the rock market fragments into niches -- from urban rap to techno -- it is harder and harder to create global brands.

A few years ago, few self-respecting teenagers would be caught dead listening to French or Swedish pop groups (The Swedish group Abba was almost the definition of naff). Now French groups such as Air and Daft Punk and Swedish groups such as Ace of Base and the Cardigans are decidedly cool. In Germany, the world‘s third-largest music market after the United States and Japan, local performers account for 48% of the DM6 billion ($3.5 billion) in yearly sales, double the percentage five years ago. Two leading music channels, Viva and Viva-2, now devote about 40% of their time to German titles. In Spain, 58% of the total $1 billion music sales are generated by Spanish and Latin American artists. In the French market, French rock groups account for nearly half the country‘s total sales. MTV makes different programs for different regions.

As America‘s pop-music industry struggles with a stagnating international market, European groups are finding it easier to cross borders. Americans buy some $2 billion worth of Spanish music a year. Ace of Base‘s first record was one of the biggest selling debut records ever, dominating the American charts. German techno bands such as Mr. President have had a string of international successes. Ibiza is the capital of global dance music. Daft Punk sold 900,000 albums outside France, earning some 77m francs ($13m). Even Iceland has a global star in Bjork.

The American empire is equally shaky in other areas of popular culture. The British have dominated popular musicals since the appearance of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" in the mid-1970s. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Macintosh revived what had become a geriatric art form with catchy tunes, clever lyrics, sumptuous sets and relentless marketing. They turned British musicals into both a major tourist attraction and an important export. "The Phantom of the Opera" has been seen by an estimated 52m people, pulling in more than $2.5 billion. Basle has a purpose-built theatre for "Phantom".

As for fashion, the great houses of Paris and Milan dominate the high end of the market; London its street-wise, popular base. Walk down Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, with its outlets for Gucci, Valentino and Armani, and America looks like the cultural colony, not Europe. Here too it is the British who are shaking up the industry. Jean-Paul Gaultier claims that he gets some of his best ideas by walking around London. Ex-punker Vivienne Westwood is a grande dame in Paris and Milan, and two big French houses recently put young British designers, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, in charge.

Even in publishing and magazines -- an area that particularly worries the Canadians -- American domination is by no means clear-cut. The best-known magazine editor in the United States is an Englishwoman, Tina Brown, who is credited with reviving (before leaving) both "Vanity Fair" and "The New Yorker". Foreign companies control half of America‘s top 20 publishing houses. Earlier this year Bertelsmann, a German conglomerate, purchased America‘s biggest publisher, Random House, provoking headlines about American culture being sold to foreigners.

In fact, Bertelsmann may well be a stronger global force than its American-owned rivals. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it built a network of book clubs, publishers and record companies across the old Soviet block. It holds a stake in Prague‘s City Radio, owns the biggest newspaper in Hungary and in Slovakia, and has launched a glossy science magazine in Russia in a venture with the Orthodox Church.

It was one of their medical observations: that human bone is one of the few tissues that can re-grow after injury. Hippocrates knew that and hoped that power could be harnessed for healing. Now, 2400 years later, reports from commercial and university laboratories suggest that scientists have begun to do just that: to grow bones and cartilage virtually at will. "This is exciting because we are mimicking the natural process of development," said Dr. A. Hari Reddi, a professor of biology and orthopedics at the John Hopkins medical center in Baltimore, who has worked on bone growth for more than thirty years. "We are following the same steps that occur in the first week after conception." The success is one of several in the new field of tissue engineering, the growing of spare parts for the body. The new power to grow human tissues and organs is a result of years of basic research followed by rapid progress in molecular biology and genetic engineering. Among the tissues now grown successfully, at least in the laboratory, are skins, bone cartilage, liver, kidney and teeth.

The new work on bones is among the most advanced, and researchers say that the new treatment will soon be available for a variety of conditions in which the body needs to grow new bones but cannot. The key to the recent success is the family of molecules known as BMPs, for bone morphogenic proteins. They are made when an injury occurs and set off the formation of new bone and cartilage by homing in on certain immature or unspecialized cells, and inducing them to proliferate and become one of several specialized tissues, like bone and cartilage. All this was learned over the last few decades, as scientists labored to find the magical molecules that would produce natural bone growth. They pulverized bones and removed the calcium from the resulting powder, working with the remaining material to isolate the factor that was causing bone growth.

"But the work for many years went like a snail," Reddi said. Then in recent years, with the new techniques of molecular biology, scientists were able to isolate both the proteins responsible for bone growth and the genes responsible for producing them. Roughly, 20 protein molecules have been identified that could induce bone growth. Each of the molecules also seems to have the power to stimulate other to begin growing. Reddi says that he and other scientists had found that the genes that made the BMPs were both ancient and general. Even fruit flies, which have no bones, use them to set off growth of specialized tissues like wings. "These are not just bone signals but are general signals to initiate differentiation in many tissues," he said, referring to a wide variety of tissues ranging from kidneys to brain to gonads. "What we are working with, is the body‘s own signaling molecules that cells tell to go ahead, 'you be bone' or 'you be muscle'," said Dr. Charles Cohen, chief scientist at Creative Biomolecules, one of the companies working on making products from bone proteins.

"There are two steps," he said. "The BMP signal to the cells says, 'Go!'" he said. "Then information the cells get from the neighborhood where they live tells them to be bone or cartilage. "Over the last five or six years, dozens of papers have shown that researchers can reliably stimulate natural bone growth in mice, rabbits, dogs and monkeys. Now the first tests from human experiments are coming in, and they show success as well, researchers say. Two small studies in humans were presented at scientific meetings last month by representatives of the Genetic Institute Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One was a study at four universities in which twelve dental patients with bone loss in their upper jaws underwent oral surgery in which BMP-2 and a sponge made of artificially produced collagen, a central component of skin and bone, were implanted in the area where was none, and all went on to get implants. The standard treatment for all these cases would have involved surgery of the mouth and also surgery of the harvest bone from the hip for implantation in the mouth. Such procedures are frequently successful, but they are expensive and lengthy and simply cutting down on surgery reduces risk. "We are talking about an outpatient procedure versus the current treatment which involves hospital stay and surgery," said Dr. Gerald Riedel, at the bone protein project.

"ARE economists human?" is not a question that occurs to many practitioners of the dismal science, but it is one that springs to the minds of many non-economists exposed to conventional economic explanations. Economists have typically described the thought processes of homo sapiens as more like that of Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock — strictly logical, centered on a clearly defined goal and free from the unsteady influences of emotion or irrationality — than the uncertain, error-prone groping with which most of us are familiar. Of course, some human behavior does fit the rational pattern so beloved of economists. But remember, Mr. Spock is a Vulcan, not a human.

Even economists are finally waking up to this fact. A wind of change is now blowing some human spirit back into the ivory towers where economic theory is made. It is becoming increasingly fashionable for economists, especially the younger, more ambitious ones, to borrow insights from psychologists (and sometimes even biologists) to try to explain drug addiction, the working habits of New York taxi-drivers, current sky-high American share prices and other types of behavior which seem to defy rationality.

Many economic rationalists still hold true to their faith, and some have fought back by devising rational explanations for the apparent irrationalities studied by the growing school of "behavioral economists". Ironically, orthodox economists have been forced to fight this rearguard action against heretics in their own ranks just as their own approach has begun to be more widely applied in other social sciences such as the study of law and politics.

The golden age of rational economic man began in the 1940s. Famous earlier economists such as Adam Smith, Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, had made use of irrationality and other aspects of psychology in their theories. But in the post-war years these aspects were mostly brushed aside by the new wave of rationalists. The dominance of rationality went hand-inglove with the growing use in economics of mathematics, which also happened to be much easier to apply if humans were assumed to be rational.

Rational behavior was understood to have several components. At a minimum — so-called "narrow rationality" — homo economics was assumed to be trying always to maximize his general "happiness", what John Stuart Mills, a 19th-century philosopher, called "utility". In other words, given a choice, he would take the option with the highest "expected utility". And
he would be consistent in his choices: if he preferred apples to oranges, and oranges to pears, he also preferred apples to pears. In addition, there is a broader definition of rationality, which includes the notion of a person‘s beliefs being based on logical, objective analysis of all the available evidence. Whether this is a meaningful definition continues to be the subject of much philosophical debate.

By the late 1970s, economic rationality was not only the orthodoxy, it began to effect events in the real world. Macroeconomic policy, notably in America and Britain, fell into the hands of believers in the theory of "rational expectations". This said that, rather than forming expectations on the basis of limited information drawn from previous experience, people take into account
all available information. This includes making an accurate assessment of government policy. Thus, when governments announced that they would do whatever was necessary to bring down inflation, people would adjust their expectations accordingly.

In the same way, Wall Street investment firms, too, increasingly, fell under the spell of the "efficient markets hypothesis", an economic theory that assumes that the prices of financial assets such as shares and bonds are rationally based on all available information. Even if there are many stupid investors, went the theory, they would be driven out of the market by rational investors who could profit by trading against the investments of the foolish. As a result, economists scoffed at the notion that investors could consistently earn a higher return than the market average by picking shares. How times have changed. Some of those same economists have now become investment managers — although their performance has suggested that they should have paid heed to their earlier beliefs about the difficulty of beating the market.

During the 1980s, macroeconomic policies based on rational expectations failed to live up to their promise (although this was probably because people rationally refused to believe government promises). And the stockmarket crash of October 1987 shattered the confidence of many economists in efficient markets. The crash seemed to have occurred without any new information or reason. Thus, the door of the ivory tower opened, at first only slightly, to theories that included irrational behavior. Today there is a growing school of economists who are drawing on a vast range of behavioral traits identified by experimental psychologists which amount to a frontal assault on the whole idea that people, individually or as a group, mostly
act rationally.

A quick tour of the key observations made by these psychologists would make even Mr. Spock‘s head spin. For example, people appear to be disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, and will often pass up even benefits within reach to avoid a small risk of feeling they have failed. They are also prone to cognitive dissonance: holding a belief plainly at odds with the evidence, usually because the belief has been held and cherished for a long time. Psychiatrists sometimes call this "denial".

And then there is anchoring: people are often overly influenced by outside suggestion. People can be influenced even when they know that the suggestion is not being made by someone who is better informed. In one experiment, volunteers were asked a series of questions whose answers were in percentages—such as what percentage of African countries is in the United Nations? A wheel with numbers from one to 100 was spun in front of them; they were then asked to say whether their answer was higher or lower than the number on the wheel, and then to give their answer. These answers were strongly influenced by the randomly selected, irrelevant number on the wheel. The average guess when the wheel showed 10 was 25%; when it showed 65, it was 45%.

Experiments show that most people apparently also suffer from status quo bias: they are willing to take bigger gambles to maintain the status quo than they would be to acquire it in the first place. In one common experiment, mugs are allocated randomly to some people in a group. Those who have them are asked to name a price to sell their mug; those without one are asked to name a price at which they will buy. Usually, the average sales price is considerably higher than the average offer price.

Expected-utility theory assumes that people look at individual decisions in the context of the big picture. But psychologists have found that, in fact, they tend to compartmentalize, often on superficial grounds. They then make choices about things in one particular mental compartment without taking account of the implications for things in other compartments.

There is also a huge amount of evidence that people are persistently, and irrationally, over-confident. Asked to answer a factual question, then asked to give the probability that their answer was correct, people typically overestimate this probability. This may be due to a representativeness heuristic: a tendency to treat events as representative of some well-known class or pattern. This gives people a sense of familiarity with an event and thus confidence that they have accurately diagnosed it. This can lead people to "see" patterns in data even where there are none. A closely related phenomenon is the availability heuristic: people focus excessive attention on a particular fact or event, rather than the big picture, simply because it is more visible or fresher in their mind.

Another delightfully human habit is magical thinking: attributing to one‘s own actions something that had nothing to do with them, and thus assuming that one has a greater influence over events than is actually the case. For instance, an investor who luckily buys a share that goes on to beat the market may become convinced that he is a skilful investor rather than a merely fortunate one. He may also fall prey to quasi-magical thinking — behaving as if he believes his thoughts can influence events, even though he knows that they can‘t.

Most people, say psychologists, are also vulnerable to hindsight bias: once something happens, they overestimate the extent to which they could have predicted it. Closely related to this is memory bias: when something happens people often persuade themselves that they actually predicted it, even when they didn‘t.

Finally, who can deny that people often become emotional, cutting off their noses to spite their faces. One of the psychologists‘ favorite experiments is the "ultimatum game" in which one player, the proposer, is given a sum of money, say $10, and offers some portion of it to the other player, the responder. The responder can either accept the offer, in which case he gets the sum offered and the proposer gets the rest, or reject the offer in which case both players get nothing. In experiments, very low offers (less than 20% of the total sum) are often rejected, even though it is rational for the responder to accept any offer (even one cent!) that the proposer makes. And yet, responders seem to reject offers out of sheer indignation at being made to accept such a small proportion of the whole sum, and they seem to get more satisfaction from taking revenge on the proposer than in maximizing their own financial gain. Mr. Spock would be appalled if a Vulcan made this mistake.

In 1980, the World Health Organization (WHO) succeeded in its campaign to rid the world of smallpox. It has never let anyone forget the fact since. And rightly so. Given the effort it took to eradicate this scourge, the WHO richly deserves to make certain that smallpox, though gone, is not forgotten. Leprosy, however, appears to have endured the opposite fate. This ancient blight is forgotten, but not gone -- an unhappy predicament for its sufferers and for the WHO, which is still fighting against it.

So far, the WHO is committed to "eliminating" leprosy but not to "eradicating" it. That might seem a strange distinction to a layman, but in the argot, elimination is defined as a reduction in the number of cases in a population to below one per 10,000 people; eradication implies that no cases exist at all. The WHO Leprosy Elimination Programme, inaugurated in 1991, aimed to complete its task by 2000.

The campaign has made a lot of progress. It has reduced the number of people with the disease from more than five million to less than one million, and eliminated leprosy from 98 countries. But several South-East Asian and African states, as well as Brazil, still report from four to six cases of leprosy per 10,000 people. So at the Asian Leprosy Congress in Agra, the target
date for global elimination was postponed to 2005.

A pity. But on the face of it, a five-year delay in "eliminating" a scourge that has horrified people since biblical times is a mere blip. There is, however, a fear that having allowed the deadline to slip once, the project‘s momentum may be lost -- and even that the eventual result may be worse than if no grand plans had been laid in the first place.

The WHO originally accepted the idea of "eliminating" leprosy because in 1989, a symposium of experts decided that eradicating the disease was not feasible. In 1998, a workshop convened by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, echoed that advice. However, it added a new worry: that eliminating leprosy might not be possible either. Given the current state of knowledge of the biology of the disease, these epidemiologists argued, an elimination campaign could not guarantee to stop transmission, and thus keep the caseload down.

That is because a lot of basic information about leprosy is still missing. Doctors cannot, for example, diagnose it before a patient starts to show symptoms. Nor do they know how likely a treated patient is to relapse. More significantly, they remain unsure exactly how the disease is transmitted, how it infects the human body, and at what point a carrier of the bacterium may infect others.

As a result, and despite its success in treating those already infected, the campaign has not had much impact on the rate of new infections. That figure still exceeds 650,000 a year, or around 4.5 cases per 10,000 individuals in the worst-off countries; it has shown little sign of falling in the past 15 years.

The solution should be more research. Given the recent unraveling, by the Pasteur Institute in France, of the genome of Mycobacterium leprae, the organism that causes the disease, science is better poised to carry out such research than ever before. But the loudly proclaimed 2000 deadline caused research funding to tail off. Funding bodies assumed that basic research into leprosy was becoming irrelevant, since the problem was being solved where it counted -- in the field. So they turned their attention elsewhere. In 1990, for example, the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations spent $6.5m on research projects. By 1998, its spending had declined to $3m. A lot of nifty public-relations work is going to be needed to repair the damage.

Fortunately, public relations is something that leprosy officials seem to be good at. They have already been pretty successful at "rebranding" the infection as ―Hansen‘s disease‖, at least in medical circles. The Hansen in question, a 19th-century Norwegian doctor, did not, of course, recognize leprosy for the first time -- the usual reason to dub an illness after an individual. But he did identify Mycobacterium leprae, and that is good enough cover for the spin-doctors. Indeed, the Brazilian government went so far as to ban the "L" word completely, even in the names of aid organizations such as the British group LEPRA.

Cynicism aside, there may be good medical reasons for abandoning the old term. Most illness attracts sympathy for the victim. Leprosy often elicits repugnance. In some clinics, therefore, patients are now told only that they are suffering from a ―skin infection‖,
and may complete their recovery without ever learning the details. Indeed, there is evidence that not telling people the whole truth gives better results than leveling with them - perhaps because they can take their medicine openly, without having to lie to their family and friends to avoid the stigma of being branded a leper.

Rebranding may also come to the rescue of the Leprosy Elimination Programme. The latest talk is not of elimination, but of "very good control" -- accepting, and being honest about, the fact that the disease will be around for the foreseeable future. As one participant in the CDC workshop remarked, "a number of us would like to eradicate the word elimination."

This would alter expectations again since "control" is not, like elimination and eradication, a euphemism for abolition. And that might backfire. For although the elimination campaign put research funding on the back burner, it did, with its promise of an achievable goal, galvanize efforts in the clinic and the surgery. The WHO programme has already spent $50m and has another $50m pledged -- but on the understanding that there is a clear end in sight. If the language changes again, and particularly if the 2005 deadline also proves a mirage, the WHO may have to work hard to keep the money flowing; 1980 was, after all, a long time ago.

Every conscious mental state has a qualitative character that we refer to as mood. We are always in a mood that is pleasurable or unpleasurable to some degree. It may be that bad moods relate to their being too positive reinforcement in a person‟s current life and too many punishments. In any case, moods are distinguished from emotions proper by not being tied to any specific object. But, this distinction is not watertight, in that emotions need not be directed at objects that are completely specific (we can be angry just at people generally) while there is always a sense of a mood having a general objective like the state of the world at large. Moods manifest themselves in positive or negative feelings that are tied to health, personality, or perceived quality of life. Moods can also relate to emotions proper, as in the aftermath of an emotional incident such as the failure to secure a loan. A mood on this basis is the mind‟s judgment on the recent past. For Goldie, emotion can bubble up and down within a mood, while an emotion can involve characteristics that are non-object specific.

What is important for marketing is that moods colour outlook and bias judgements. Hence the importance of consumer confidence surveys, as consumer confidence typically reflects national mood. There is mood - congruence when thoughts and actions fall inline with mood. As Goleman says, there is a “constant stream of feeling” that runs “in perfect to our steam of thought”. Mood congruence occurs because a positive mood evokes pleasant associations that lighten subsequent appraisals (thoughts) and actions, while a negative arouses pessimistic associations that influence future judgment and behaviour. When consumers are in a good mood, they are more optimistic about buying more confident in buying, and much more willing to tolerate things like waiting in line. On the other hand, being in a mood makes buying behaviour in the “right mood” by the use of music and friendly staff or, say, opens bakeries in shopping malls that delight the passer-by with the smell of fresh bread.

Thayer views moods as a mixture of biological and psychological influences and, as such, a sort of clinical thermometer, reflecting all the internal and external events that influence us. For Thayer, the key components of mood are energy and tension in different combinations. A specific mixture of energy and tension, together with the thoughts they influence, produces moods. He discusses four mood states:
• Calm-energy: he regards this as the optimal mood of feeling good
• Calm-tiredness: he regards this as feeling a little tired without any stress, which can be pleasant. • Tense-energy: involves a low level of anxiety suited to a fight-or-flight disposition.
• Tense-tiredness: is a mixture of fatigue and anxiety, which underlies the unpleasant feeling of depression.

People generally can “feel down” or “feel good” as a result of happenings in the world around them. This represents the national mood. People feel elated when the national soccer team wins an international match or depressed when their team has lost. An elated mood of calm - energy is an optimistic mood, which is good for business. Consumers, as socially involved individuals, are deeply influenced by the prevailing social climate. Marketers recognize the phenomenon and talk about the national mood being, say for or against conspicuous consumption. Moods do change, though. Writing early in the nineteenth century, Toqueville describes an American elite embarrassed by the ostentation of material display; in the “Gilded Age”, sixty years later, many were only too eager to embrace a materialistic vulgarity. The problem lies in anticipating changes in national mood, since a change in mood affects everything from buying of equities to the buying of houses and washing machines. Thayer would argue that we should be interested in national events that are likely to produce a move toward a tense- tiredness state or toward a calm-energy state, since these are the polar extremes and are more likely to influence behaviour. Artists sensitive to national moods express the long-term changes. An example is the long- term emotional journey from Charles Dickens‟s depiction of the death of little Nell to Oscar Wilde‟s cruel flippancy about it. “One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell”, which reflects the mood change from high Victorian sentimentality to the acerbic cynicism of the end of the century, as shown in writers like Thomas Hardy and artists like Aubrey Beardsley.

Whenever the mind is not fully absorbed, consciousness is no longer focused and ordered. Under such conditions the mind falls into dwelling on the unpleasant, with a negative mood developing. Csikszentmihalyi argues that humans need to keep consciousness fully active is what influences a good deal of consumer behaviour. Sometimes it does not matter what we are shopping for - the point is to shop for anything, regardless, as consuming is one way to respond to the void in consciousness when there is nothing else to do.