URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1231 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 11, 2007 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Um, Uh, Like Call in the Speech Coach
BYLINE: By HILLARY CHURA
SECTION: Section C; Column 1; Business/Financial Desk; SMALL BUSINESS; Pg. 7
LENGTH: 1172 words
Whether to appear more confident, better organized or to stop the ''ums,'' entrepreneurs are realizing good voice and presentation skills can help them come into their own and even compete against larger competitors with big marketing budgets.

Michael Sipe, president of Private Equities, a small mergers and acquisition advisory firm in San Jose, Calif., worked with a presentation coach who helped him differentiate his business from competitors.

''If a customer can't determine who is any better or different or worse, then they are left with a conversation about price. And as a business owner, if you're only in a price conversation, that's a losing conversation,'' Mr. Sipe said. ''It is really important to paint a picture of why someone should do business with them in a very compelling way. It's easy for the customer to say 'I'll just go with the big guy.' It's the old adage -- no one ever got fired for hiring I.B.M.''

Even though business owners may be experts in their fields, that does not automatically translate into being able to market themselves verbally. Many agree that speaking concisely -- and in a compelling way -- lends credibility. While poor communication skills are not necessarily deadly, they can make it more challenging to win over potential investors, prospective clients, employees and business partners.

''Small business is leaving money on the table because it is overlooking one of the most powerful marketing skills: speech,'' said Diane DiResta, a speech and communications coach in New York. ''Speech is the way a small business builds its brand, establishes expertise, gets free publicity and gets in front of its market.''

R. W. Armstrong & Associates, a civil engineering project management company in Indianapolis, first hired a speaker trainer two years ago to help prepare it for a pitch worth millions of dollars. The company went in as the underdog but clinched the deal after working on timing, learning how to use descriptive words, introduce co-workers and present itself with poise and cohesion, said Donna Gadient, director for human resources. She said the company paid about $8,000 to $10,000 for a day of training for 25 people and that the guidance continues to help employees speak on their feet.

Tom Cole, a general partner at Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif., said good communicators had an easier time captivating investors with their verbal and nonverbal skills than do those with less polish.

''Some entrepreneurs are such poor communicators that they never get past the first meeting with us,'' Mr. Cole said. ''A good entrepreneur can give you a 30-second elevator pitch that describes his or her business. Sadly, many fail to do that in the course of an hour's meeting. We'll walk out of a meeting and say, 'I still don't know what the business does.' ''

Coaches, who may charge $100 an hour for one-on-one guidance to more than $10,000 a day for groups, work with clients on content and delivery, tone, organization, diction, timing, how to enter a presentation confidently and refining a message around essential words. They draw attention to flaws like blitzing through presentations as well as rising inflections that make every statement sound like a question from, like, a Valley Girl. They encourage people to use short sentences, speak in sound bites and pause so listeners can digest what has been said.

A less expensive option is the public speaking organization Toastmasters International, where members critique one another's presentations.

Being a good presenter is more of an acquired skill than a born-with-it gift, enthusiasts say. Techniques that work with a large audience are also effective one-on-one. Patricia Fripp, a sales presentation skills trainer based in San Francisco, says that connecting on an emotional level with the audience and telling people what they will gain, rather than what you will offer, is important. Lorraine Howell, a coach in Seattle, advises people trying to modulate their voices to sing in the shower, read to children or record their conversations.

Lawrence Dolph, managing partner of RFD Insight, a turnaround specialist and growth consultant in Ann Arbor, Mich., says that in addition to being concerned with what they know and how they present it, speakers now must be telegenic thanks to videoconferencing.

''It causes you to be assessed as if you were a television actor,'' Mr. Dolph said. ''You need to have good body control so you don't look like a stiff. And a lot of that requires coaching. Unless you have been brought through some sort of actual course, you are probably not aware of your body or speech patterns.''

David Freeman, director for client development at Ashfield & Company, a San Francisco asset manager, sought help to hone his firm's message to pension funds, financial institutions and wealthy investors. The idea was to stop presenters from rambling and have them deliver only pertinent information.

''We may fly across the country to present for 45 minutes to a pension fund or consulting firm that can be worth $25 million, $50 million or $100 million in the amount of money we are being given to manage,'' Mr. Freeman said. ''You want to increase the probability that you are going to be remembered.''

When Rebeca Mojica, a Chicago jewelry designer, started her jewelry design business in Chicago three years ago, she found herself being taken advantage of by clients who did not respect her time or wanted free private lessons or discounts. For several months in 2004 and 2005, she hired a coach to help her take control of conversations. She said she learned to be matter of fact in dealing with unpleasant situations and even got tips on how to sit when talking on the phone, with feet planted on the ground and torso leaning slightly forward. She said coaching taught her how to handle potentially uncomfortable situations, cut down on wasted time and reduce misunderstandings.

''I tended to be a people pleaser. I'm a very nice person, which is great for some aspects of customer service but not good for others,'' Ms. Mojica said. ''When you want results, you need to take conversations seriously.''

Sharon McRill, founder of the Betty Brigade, a concierge company in Ann Arbor, Mich., hired a coach, Eleni Kelakos, after agreeing to deliver a Chamber of Commerce breakfast speech in 2005. Ms. McRill said that while she was comfortable one-on-one, she felt sick addressing a group. After learning breathing and relaxation techniques, her ums stopped, confidence soared and she was able to stay on message.

''I needed to be comfortable speaking to 300 business leaders -- leaders who I don't normally get to speak to -- so it was important to come across as competent and smooth,'' said Ms. McRill, who paid $750 for the insight. ''If you can make an impression by speaking in front of a group or by meeting someone at a networking event that helps you be remembered, then it's going to continue to pay you back later.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SMALL BUSINESS (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (89%); PRIVATE EQUITY (78%); VENTURE CAPITAL (78%); SALES PROSPECTING (77%); ALLIANCES & PARTNERSHIPS (77%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING EXPENDITURE (77%); MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS (57%); TALKS & MEETINGS (72%); HUMAN RESOURCES (72%); GENERAL PARTNERSHIPS (69%); ENGINEERING (63%); CIVIL ENGINEERING (50%) Small Business; Speech
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (57%) Hillary Chura
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN JOSE, CA, USA (72%); SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (77%); INDIANAPOLIS, IN, USA (67%) CALIFORNIA, USA (88%); NEW YORK, USA (78%); INDIANA, USA (67%) UNITED STATES (88%)
LOAD-DATE: January 11, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: Rebeca Mojica, a Chicago jewelry designer, hired a coach to help her take control of her conversations. (Photo by Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1232 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 10, 2007 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

Two Places Where Readers Hold On to Their Bookstores
BYLINE: By PETER APPLEBOME.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

SECTION: Section B; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; OUR TOWNS; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 758 words
DATELINE: PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y.
Something quite unlikely happened around here 34 years ago.

On the same day, Sept. 9, 1972, two local bookstores opened -- totally independent of each other -- in this Westchester County town and in Chappaqua, the next town to the north.

And something almost as unusual still goes on. Amid Amazon.com, the Internet, Barnes & Noble and Borders superstores, iPods, Wal-Marts and the myriad factors that have killed off local bookstores, both still exist.

The death of the local bookstore is a sad, oft-told tale (most recently in these pages about Micawber Books, which is closing after 26 years in Princeton, N.J.). What lessons can be drawn from the fact that the Village Bookstore in Pleasantville and the Second Story Book Shop in Chappaqua are still alive and kicking? Not a lot of easy ones, it turns out, but maybe a few things that matter in ways that go far beyond books.

Not much remains the same, both at the shops and in the towns. Pleasantville has gone from solidly blue collar to increasingly pricey. Chappaqua, once a distant, quiet exurb of stone walls and rushing streams, now would feel like the quintessential strivers' suburbia even if the Clintons didn't live there.

During its 34 years, the Pleasantville bookstore has been operated by five different owners at six different locations, one of them twice, under two different names (until six years ago it was just the Book Store). The Chappaqua store, whose name comes from its original location above a shoe store, moved to bigger digs 14 years ago, almost lost its lease a year or so back, and still soldiers on.

The Village Bookstore, in Pleasantville, for the past three years has been owned by a local couple, Yvonne vanCort and Roy Solomon, both 62. They bought it less for business reasons than for civic ones -- they felt someone should keep it alive and they decided they could.

Mr. Solomon said his first thought was: ''Seven-day-a-week retail -- are you nuts?''

But they've found -- surprise -- that people still read, that they want a local bookstore where the owners know and care about books, and that people are willing to pay a few more bucks than they would at Amazon or Borders to support it. Mr. Solomon, in particular, clearly has a small entrepreneur's tenacity and focus. Their sales have grown every month, and they're moving yet again two doors up the street to a less expensive location where they hope to make it as a going economic concern -- if not one you could recommend to a young couple hoping to pay the mortgage and send kids to college.

The Chappaqua store, the Second Story, is owned by the woman who started it, Joan Ripley, 73. It hasn't been easy there, either, though a few Clinton book events haven't hurt. When a steep rent increase almost cost Mrs. Ripley her lease, customers signed petitions to keep the store open, and the Chubb Insurance Company, through a local resident, helped underwrite some of the rent as part of an ad hoc sponsorship.

Mrs. Ripley does her best to compete with the giant Borders in Mount Kisco, the next town up, but it's enough of a struggle that in November she took to passing out fliers to customers reminding them of the store's history and asking for their support. That led one of them, Randi Childs, to send out an e-mail, which was then forwarded around town, imploring people to support the bookstore and buy all their books there, lest Chappaqua lose it. It worked. The store had a stellar Christmas season that should help keep the wolf at bay for a while at least.

You can't find too many absolutes there. Given rising suburban rents, any business can find itself priced out of existence.

But here are a few. You can't get rich running a small-town bookstore, but smart, resourceful businesspeople can survive. If lots of trends can kill bookstores, plenty of suburbs are full of smart, literate residents who treasure having one nearby. And, to some extent, people really do get what they pay for. There are good things about the fancy Borders in Mount Kisco, but if people want the small independent with the hand-written tags recommending books real people actually read -- or the other local shops battling the big box stores -- it's their choice whether they live or die.

As Mrs. Ripley wrote in her flier: ''You, the reader, determine how long a life a book may have and you, too, determine how long a bookstore should keep its doors open. Thanks to all of you who have supported us in the past we can only continue as long as you, the readers, decide you want us to stay.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BOOKSTORES (91%); BOOK REVIEWS (90%); SHOE STORES (71%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (67%); SUBURBS (66%); LITERATURE (75%) Books and Literature; Book Trade; Computers and the Internet
COMPANY: AMAZON.COM INC (58%); BARNES & NOBLE INC (57%); BORDERS GROUP INC (92%)
ORGANIZATION: Village Bookstore (Pleasantville, NY); Second Story Book Shop (Chappaqua, NY)
TICKER: AMZN (NASDAQ) (58%); BKS (NYSE) (57%); BGP (NYSE) (92%)
INDUSTRY: SIC5961 CATALOG & MAIL-ORDER HOUSES (58%); NAICS451211 BOOK STORES (92%); SIC5942 BOOK STORES (92%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (51%) Peter Applebome
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW JERSEY, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (79%) Chappaqua (NY); Pleasantville (NY)
LOAD-DATE: January 10, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: Outside the Second Story in Chappaqua, customers pass by a statue of a fully laden book lover. The store started life over a shoe store.

At the Village Bookstore in Pleasantville, an owner, Yvonne vanCort, with a customer, Alfred Strasser, who was choosing a birthday card. (Photographs by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)(pg. B5)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1233 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 9, 2007 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Love, Bludgeoned and Bent by the Camps
BYLINE: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
SECTION: Section E; Column 2; The Arts/Cultural Desk; BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1043 words

House of Meetings

By Martin Amis

242 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.

Martin Amis's new novel, ''House of Meetings,'' tackles the same sobering material his 2002 nonfiction book ''Koba the Dread'' did: Stalin's slave labor camps and the atrocities committed by the government during the failed ''Soviet experiment.'' The novel is everything that misguided earlier book was not. Whereas ''Koba'' weirdly mixed chilling, secondhand historical accounts of Stalin's crimes with self-indulgent asides about Mr. Amis's upper-middle-class life in England, ''House of Meetings'' is a powerful, unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history's most harrowing chapters.

After his embarrassing 2003 novel, ''Yellow Dog'' -- a book that read like a parody of a Martin Amis novel, featuring gratuitous wordplay and a willfully perverse fascination with the seamy side of modern life -- the author has produced what is arguably his most powerful book yet: a novel that subjugates his penchant for postmodern pyrotechnics to the demands of the story at hand, a novel that takes all the knowledge he accumulated in the course of researching ''Koba'' and transforms it, imaginatively, into the deeply moving story of two brothers who were interned at a slave labor camp in the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union. It is a story about fraternal love and resentment, but more important, it is a story about the emotional consequences of survival, about the connection between public and private betrayals and the human costs of a totalitarian state's policies of internment.

The narrator of ''House of Meetings'' is a ''vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man'' who seems compelled, like the Ancient Mariner, to recount the story of his life and crimes as a kind of penance. His remarks are addressed to his American stepdaughter, Venus, in the form of a lengthy e-mail letter, as he makes a final journey back to Russia, back to the camp where he and his brother Lev were interned for the better part of a decade.

His monologue will become a meditation not only on his own experiences, but also on the fate of Russia and the profound differences between the East and the West, between those fully initiated into the dark side of history and those still innocent of those horrors. The narrator warns Venus that there is no such thing as ''closure'' for people like him and his brother, that their experience in the camps has taught him two truths: one, that ''nobody ever gets over anything,'' and two, that ''whatever doesn't kill you doesn't make you stronger. It makes you weaker, and kills you later on.''

This narrator, we learn, was a wounded and decorated World War II veteran, who was subsequently sent to the Norlag labor camp by his own government. He is a hardened brute of a man: he raped his way ''across what would soon be East Germany,'' and in the gulag, he methodically kills three informers.

His brother Lev is a gentler soul, a poet, who believes in the doctrine of pacifism and who married the great love of his life, Zoya, shortly before he was arrested. The beauteous Zoya also happens to be the woman the narrator has worshiped for years, and the resulting love triangle will have momentous consequences for all concerned. After he is released from the camp in the mid-1950s, the narrator goes on to become a wealthy arms dealer and entrepreneur who will use his money and connections to move to the United States; his brother, meanwhile, will return to Zoya a changed man, bereft of both his idealism and his vocation as a poet.

Mr. Amis depicts these characters' lives with an economy of language and detail, choosing, after the debacle of the overwritten ''Yellow Dog,'' to rely on an almost fablelike minimalism to evoke the horrors of Norlag. His narrator starkly conjures up the deadly class structure there, including ''the pigs -- the janitoriat of administrators and guards''; the urkas, ''socially friendly elements'' who did no work; ''the snakes,'' otherwise known as informants; and the ''politicals,'' or so-called fascists, like himself and his brother, who are regarded as ''the enemies of the people.''

He then proceeds to describe the daily calendar of violence at the camp: one urka sprinting flat-out after another urka ''with a bloody mattock in his hand, a pig methodically clubbing a fascist to the ground, a workshy snake slicing off the remaining fingers of his left hand.''

''Here,'' the narrator tells his brother, ''man is wolf to man.''

Here, terror is the first pillar of the system, and boredom is the second: ''boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one.'' The third pillar is perpetual hunger: ''Young men, after their arrival,'' the narrator recalls, ''would talk about sex and even sports for a couple weeks, then about sex and food, then about food and sex, then about food.''

''There were fluctuations,'' he says, ''but in general the death rate was determined by the availability of food. Massively and shamingly, the camp system was a phenomenon of food.

''In 'hungry '33' one out of seven died, in 1943 one out of five, in 1942 one out of four.''

Though many of the most compelling parts of this novel consist of the narrator's straightforward descriptions of life at Norlag, Mr. Amis has given his story an overarching architecture, built around the brothers' competition for Zoya's affections, and the mysterious events that transpired between Lev and Zoya one evening at the ''house of meetings,'' the little shed at the camp designated for conjugal meetings between prisoners and their spouses. Their reunion is described in a letter Lev has left for his brother to read after his death -- a letter that supposedly explains the tragic arc that both their lives will subsequently take.

This is the one bit of literary contrivance in this novel, and it's not only a tad forced, but it also turns out to be thoroughly unnecessary, given the emotionally detailed portraits Mr. Amis has already drawn of his heroes and his devastating account of their travails in the arctic wastes of the gulag.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (92%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (91%); NON FICTION LITERATURE (90%); PROFILES & BIOGRAPHIES (77%); HISTORY (75%); PUBLIC POLICY (71%); LITERATURE (78%); WRITERS & WRITING (78%); STEPPARENTS (50%) Books and Literature; Reviews
PERSON: Michiko Kakutani; Martin Amis
GEOGRAPHIC: RUSSIA (73%); ARCTIC (54%)
LOAD-DATE: January 9, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: In his novel ''House of Meetings,'' the author Martin Amis revisits the Soviet labor camps he wrote about in a 2002 nonfiction account. (Illustration by John Ritter

photograph by Nial McDiarmid/Retna)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1234 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 9, 2007 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

India and China Explore Alternatives, but Too Often The Diesel Generator Rules
BYLINE: By KEITH BRADSHER
SECTION: Section C; Column 3; Business/Financial Desk; Clean Air or TV: Paying in Pollution For Energy Hunger; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1702 words
DATELINE: BAHARBARI, India
A toxic purple haze of diesel exhaust hangs over the rice and jute fields here in northeastern India, and bird songs are frequently drowned out by the chug-a-chug-a-chug of diesel generators.

Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China have become a favorite way to provide electricity. They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world.

But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases.

''There has been a mushrooming of these decentralized diesel generators,'' said Ibrahim Rehman, a rural energy expert at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi.

While many generators are purchased initially to power irrigation pumps, they have also opened up a huge new market for television sets, which in turn creates demand for even more diesel generators.

''You either want clean air or television'' in many villages, said Nandita Mongia, the chief of the United Nations Development Program's regional energy program for Asia and the Pacific. In nearly all cases, television wins.

Rising prices for diesel fuel have improved the commercial potential of alternatives, but renewable energy sources have been in an often-losing race against smoke-spewing backyard diesel generators, and occasionally coal, to become the energy source of choice in outlying areas.

Renewable sources have made some inroads, including tiny hydroelectric dams for Himalayan streams, biomass generators for India and Southeast Asia, solar-powered lanterns for India and Africa and rooftop water tanks in southern China.

But demand for electricity has been growing even more swiftly across the developing world, particularly in China and India.

When night falls here in Baharbari and countless stars blaze from an inky sky virtually uncontaminated by outdoor lighting, many of the thatch huts glow softly with the violet light of television screens, and occasionally a small bulb providing reading light for a child.

Three years ago, practically no one had a television set in this isolated community tucked between Nepal and Bangladesh. It is an area so remote and roadless that the only access is on foot or by bullock cart, after monsoon rains turn dirt paths into bogs that become impassable even for farm tractors.

Even so, half of the 1,000 households have TV, paying about 40 cents every few days to the owner of a diesel generator to recharge the batteries that power the sets. Ranvir Kumar Mandel, a slender 22-year-old, has built a bamboo hut here just to serve as a television repair shop.

''Before, there was no market,'' he said, sitting near a pile of mostly black-and-white sets to be fixed.

Lavish government subsidies for diesel, kerosene and other fossil fuels have held down prices in many developing countries and made it harder to introduce renewable energy technologies.

While entrepreneurs and organized crime syndicates frequently raise the subsidized price of kerosene and pocket the profits, it remains very cheap and is frequently mixed with diesel to reduce the cost of running generators. The mixture shortens the life of the generator, however, and can make pollution even worse.

Given the popularity of generators, perhaps the most promising alternative is a new type like the one at the edge of the village here that contributes much less to air pollution and global warming. It burns a common local weed instead of diesel, costs half as much to operate and emits less pollution.

The main material is dhaincha, a weed commonly grown in India to restore nitrogen to depleted soils. The dhaincha grows 10 feet tall in just four months, with a green stalk three inches thick. Wood from shrubs and trees is used when there is not enough dhaincha.

''Other villagers were surprised,'' said Ravindra Prasad Mandal, a village leader. ''How was it possible that from dhaincha and wood, power was produced?''

For all its potential advantages, the toughest part of the project here has been to persuade change-resistant villagers to try it. Many projects fail in rural areas, development economists said, because governments or foreign aid organizations donate money or equipment without requiring any ongoing commitment. And they often threaten existing ways to obtain power, making it even harder to overcome resistance.

The biomass generator in Baharbari is owned by a collective of village residents, and has been supported by Hindus and Muslims alike. But local landlords, some with their own diesel generators that they rent out to charge batteries, have been wary.

The project has succeeded here partly because it has the active backing of one landlord family, the Sharans. Family members have gone on to successful business careers in big Indian cities and in Europe, and have dedicated themselves to helping their home village.

That makes it an unusual case, although the Sharans are trying to replicate it by setting up a school and training managers to establish similar cooperatives in nearby villages.

The biomass project has attracted interest and World Bank support because it appears to offer significantly cheaper electricity than diesel, at least at current prices. Another popular approach being tried in India and elsewhere -- using solar energy to recharge lanterns by day -- has run into difficulty even as diesel prices would seem to make it more competitive.

The problem is that prices for photovoltaic panels for solar energy have surged as governments in industrialized countries, especially Germany, have encouraged greater use of renewable energy, said Hemant Lamba, the coordinator of Aurore, a renewable energy service company in Auroville, India.

''It's harder to do any solar energy projects in India,'' he said.

In mountainous countries like Nepal, development agencies have focused on designing very small, inexpensive hydroelectric systems to install in streams. But deforestation has denuded many hillsides in the Himalayas and elsewhere, causing rainfall to surge into streams much more quickly. A Japanese project in Bhutan was recently destroyed this way.

''The villagers shrugged and said, 'Nobody asked us, we knew every third year there would be a flood,' '' Ms. Mongia, the United Nations energy expert, said.

Wind energy has found few applications in rural villages, because the turbines, even though far more capable than in the past, are still too expensive.

China has tried another approach: supplementing an expansion of electricity from coal-fired power plants with cheap rooftop solar water heaters that channel water through thin pipes crisscrossing a shiny surface.

Close to 5,000 small Chinese companies sell these simple water heaters, and together they have made China the world's largest market for solar water heaters, with 60 percent of the global market and more than 30 million households using the systems, said Eric Martinot, an expert on renewable energy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Wang Youyun, a 27-year-old lettuce farmer in Wangjiaying, a village of 3,000 people in southwestern China's Yunnan Province, bought one such hot water system a year ago for $360 and installed it on his family'sroof next to a spot where ears of corn dry in the sunshine.

The village now has electricity, and some residents use it for water heaters, but Mr. Wang calculates that the solar system will pay for itself in two years. There is so much competition that even without government subsidies, the same size model now costs $330 and the price is still falling, he said.

The water heaters can be installed only on a sturdy, flat concrete roof, however, and not on the beautiful but fragile tile roofs that still adorn many of the houses in the village. The systems pose another drawback as well, Mr. Wang acknowledged: ''If there is no sun for two or three days then there's no hot water.''

Big conventional power plants, even those that burn coal, are often cleaner, safer and more efficient than crude household stoves and other small systems. So many economists say that the first step in developing countries should be the construction of power lines connecting as many villagers to national grids as possible.

Cooperation across national borders can help make this happen. Vietnam has made electricity available to 84 percent of its households, up from 50 percent in the early 1990s, partly by building a high-power line from China across Vietnam's impoverished northern highlands.

But power plants have actually closed in some of the poorest and most chaotic parts of the developing world, from Africa to dysfunctional states in India like Bihar, which includes Baharbari. Causes range from corruption to a failure of government-owned electricity boards to invest in maintenance and replacement parts.

Mohamad Aslam, 21, who sells time on a shared phone in Harwa, a village near Baharbari, said that he could remember lights shining outside homes when he was a boy, and when power from the national grid was still available. ''It gradually decreased until it was gone: 10 to 12 hours a day, then five to six hours, then three to four hours and then there was no more,'' he said.

So for now, diesel generators remain the favorite choice of millions across the developing world -- so much so that the International Energy Agency plans to assess the extent of their use as part of a detailed look next year at energy use in India and China.

Mohan Lal Yadav, the 55-year-old owner of a diesel station in Vehbra, a community of 4,000 people near Baharbari, calculates residents there have bought 100 diesel generators and 100 to 150 diesel-powered irrigation pumps in recent years. ''It'll keep on increasing,'' he said.
Articles in this series are examining the ways in which the world is, and is not, moving toward a more energy-efficient, environmentally benign future. Previous articles are at nytimes.com/energychallenge.

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