How are we to approach the larger issues of political culture in the modern world? What are the arenas in which values are changing most rapidly? What is the role of the internationalization of communication within these arenas? These are some of the questions that the Center Forum was set up to address. The group, which has been meeting over the past two years, is especially concerned with the role of media--print, television, movies, and the like--in relationship to the circulation of discourse and the development of civil societies and public spheres not only in Europe, but as well in other parts of the world, especially India and China.

As part of its efforts, the group invited Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal to attend one of its meetings, which took place on November 11 and 12 of 1989. Benegal had recently completed a 53 part series for Indian television, dramatizing Nehru's The Discovery of India. The group was interested not only in the process of inter-media conversion (book into television series), but also in the effects of internationalization on the conversion to the television medium, in the role of television in relationship to the formation of India as an imagined community, and in how the processes occurring in India relate to those in China, the West, and elsewhere.

The following is a partial, edited transcription of that meeting, designed to give readers a sense not only of the issues, but also of the dialogical processes of discovery that are at work within the Center Forum. It is part of a broader effort to develop ways of representing what goes on at the Center, and to get away from the usual form of monological narration of dialogical processes. (--Greg Urban)

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