After the Euphoria

When Indira Gandhi mounted the sandstone ramparts of Delhi's Red Fort last week to deliver the traditional address marking the anniversary of India's independence, the heavy monsoon sky was a somber gray. But at least it provided rain and relief from a disastrous two-year drought. That was more than Indira Gandhi and India's 575 million people could hope for concerning the nation's social and economic outlook.

The country is in the midst of its worst crisis in 26 years of independence.

Only Prime Minister Gandhi herself seemed to be unaware of this. She devoted her speech to criticizing farmers for hoarding, middlemen for gouging, black-marketeers and those who patronize them. For the food shortages that have pushed millions to the brink of starvation and caused widespread riots and looting, she offered shallow explanations, blaming the weather rather than mismanagement by India's central and state governments. Perhaps it was not surprising that Blitz, a rambunctious left-wing weekly, began its Independence Day editorial with the question:

"Can India be saved?" Blitz, a supporter of Mrs. Gandhi, continued: "Political and economic problems of Himalayan dimensions threaten to crash upon the Indira Gandhi government unless it wakes up to the awesome realities."

What was more surprising was an out-of-character blast by India's ceremonial figurehead, President Varahagi-ri Venkata Giri. He said the government had failed to use the immense power that Mrs. Gandhi had won in 1971 in the national elections and in 1972 in the state elections--and, he might have added, the unmatched popularity she had gained after India trounced Pakistan and freed Bangladesh. Little more than a year ago, India and Indira alike were in a state of seemingly enduring euphoria.

Bloody Clash. Indira then warned her countrymen that military victories do not come cheap. She was right. The costs and dislocations of war have combined with drought to produce near famine, water shortages, power failures, price increases, labor strife, unemployment and street crime. Power failures caused by drought and labor sabotage of power plants have left New Delhi, the nation's capital, blacked out or browned out three times in as many months and many factories unable to operate. Unemployment is hard to pinpoint statistically in a land of perpetual underemployment (estimated at 24%). The jobless are now numbered at some 20 million, or about 9% of the total work force. Worse yet, of the jobless about 5.3 million are educated men whom India needs most to put to work:

engineers and other professionals.

Inflation is rampant. Retail prices have soared 24% in twelve months. In Uttar Pradesh state, 20,000 policemen struck in May for better wages and conditions, leading to an ugly and bloody clash with the army in which 34 men were killed. Government officials from the highest to the lowest local levels have become unashamedly corrupt. It now takes a bribe to get a child into school, to get a milk card, even to get a long-distance railway ticket, let alone any of the innumerable licenses that India's pullulating bureaucracy demands. One capital resident said last week: "It used to be that you paid an official to do something that he was not supposed to do. Now you pay him just to do the job that he is supposed to do." Cynical Indians detect one ray of hope: because so many officials are taking bribes, they are competing against each other and lowering prices in the buyer's favor.

As a developing nation, India has made strides in heavy industries and in such esoteric fields as nuclear power, and still more notably in military prowess. But the monolithic Congress Party government has yet to carry out in any significant way economic and social reforms for which the nation's impoverished millions would be grateful.

The gross national product has grown not at all for two years, while the population continues to increase by about 15 million every year. So the standard of living for the multitude has actually declined. In a glaringly pennywise, pound-foolish move, the government decided several months ago to cut back on its family planning, birth control and sterilization programs. Though land-reform laws have been passed, they have been carried out spottily if at all.

Along with her initiative, Indira Gandhi has lost much of her charisma.

Contrary to her usual custom, she has rarely been out of New Delhi for the past two months and has displayed little leadership this year. Opinion polls, which gave her a whopping 93% approbation after her electoral and military victories of 1971-72, dropped her to 50% last June; and as conditions worsen, so do her ratings. India is suffering from a nationwide sense of depression, frustration and malaise. Yet, Mrs. Gandhi's only advice to her Independence Day audience was to stop complaining and instead "work to build a new India." But to that end, her own government has delivered more promises and slogans than productive work.

Actor Burt Lancaster, 59, was ready to play Moses, whose eye at 120, according to the Bible, "was not dim, nor his natural force abated." Announcing his role in a six-part TV series written by Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), Lancaster said, "Moses will be very different from the version put on the screen by Cecil B. DeMille." None of that larger-than-life stuff. "My Moses will be a real man," declared Burt, whose son William plays the young Moses in Egypt. "Not a hero, not a leader, but a man who is aware of his own and other people's failings."

Busily at work on a series of drawings and lithographs based on Stonehenge, Henry Moore, 75, was summering at his house in Italy. Back home in England, Mme. Tussaud's Wax Museum was getting ready to unveil a likeness of Moore leaning against a pillar, on the other side of which is a wax figure of Pablo Picasso. Moore had already donated a navy blue suit, shirt, tie and handkerchief for his efRgy and had been photographed and measured by Jean Fraser, the museum's chief sculptor. But after recording the last statistic, she confessed to Moore that she really works 3 by eye. "Oh, that's the right thing to i do with measurements," said Moore, whose own sculptures are strictly free form. "Ignore them."

He was one of the founders of bebop in the 1940s. Now Dartmouth has asked Dizzy Gillespie to become a professor of music. For Gillespie, 55, and for a generation of jazz musicians, this recognition of the cultural importance of jazz was "a long time comin'." Added Dizzy, who is currently playing in Belgium: "A lot's changed since I began. A jazz musician can play with symphonies now. Jazz will be the classical music of the future."

Nicaragua's biggest fashion export thus far has been Rock Singer Mick Jogger's lookalike wife Bianca, who sports a walking stick and tuxedos. Bianca is not the only clotheshorse Nicaragua is betting on. The postal service has issued a series of "Famous Couturiers of the World" stamps that reflects a more staid image than Bianca's. The series of eight includes a five-cordoba stamp ($2.00) for Balmain of Paris, a one-cor-doba stamp for the French designer Givenchy, and a 15-centavo stamp for Halston, the only American honored.

"I have great confidence in the polygraph. If this machine says a man lied, he lied." So said Philadelphia's law-and-order Mayor Frank Rizzo shortly before submitting to a lie-detector test. Rizzo was being tested along with Peter J.

Camiel, city Democratic Party chairman, who accused Rizzo of trying to bribe him in his choice of a Democratic candidate for district attorney. The mayor lied on six of the ten questions, said the lie detector, while Camiel told the truth on all. After the test, Rizzo proclaimed his innocence, reaffirmed his confidence in the polygraph--then demanded a re-evaluation of the results by his own experts. Flattery, it seemed, got Rizzo nowhere with the machine.

Suspended from the dome of Manhattan's Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum were five 6-ft.-long airplanes that had been painted with huge biomorphic swirls of red, yellow, blue and black by American Artist Alexander Colder, 75.

Calder had been asked to use the DC-8 as a canvas by Braniff Chairman Harding L. Lawrence, who broke commercial flying tradition by ordering up his jets in brilliant colors. Calder, who invented both the stabile and the mobile, starts painting an actual plane this fall in Dallas--with his signature eight feet high on the nose. It's a bird, it's a plane--it's a Calder!

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