 The Columbia Broadcasting System presents One World Flight. You are listening to Muslim prayers coming from the loudspeaker system of the Muhammad Ali mosque in Cairo. As heard above the cheering of thousands of Egyptians on the day last summer, that Britain returned the famous citadel to Egypt. This historic recording is among several authentic sounds and voices transcribed inside Egypt and India to be heard tonight on this eighth of a series of 13 broadcasts based on Norman Corwin's 37,000 mile global tour as first winner of the Wendell Wilkie One World Flight Award. On the 9th of last August, in the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, the Union Jack that had flown over Cairo's ancient citadel for 65 years came down and a green flag of Egypt was raised by its king Farouk. The act was a symbol of Egypt's independence from the British and it was cheered by a throng gathered in a square below the citadel. That night, both the citadel and the Muhammad Ali mosque behind it were floodlit. A great searchlight, the kind used during the war to spot aircraft, was trained on the flag. The evening was clear and warm with exhalations from the African desert stretching away on all sides. The celebrants seemed to cheer every stirring of the flag in the breeze that came off the swollen Nile and as though to contribute to the vivid mixture of ancient and modern which is Cairo, an airplane came up from nowhere and flew low over the scene. For a moment, its motors obliterated the voice of the Moazine chanting praises for Allah on the public address system. On a rooftop in the neighborhood of the citadel where we had set up our CBS recording microphone, a group of Arab women sang with an abandon that seemed to go along naturally with a bizarre setting of minarets, airplanes, floodlights, domes, cupulas, cheering and amplified prayer. It was all colorful and wonderful under the amber moon of Ramadan. Everybody seemed gay and animated. Certainly the celebration of independence is a joyous occasion to any nation. But in the hot bright lights of the next morning, it was perhaps reasonable to ask what this independence represented. Independence of home, for home. Whether the people who had cheered it last night would profit by it tomorrow. Exactly what these people were, how they lived, what they thought. Whether they had fears, hopes, ambitions. We set out a few of us to look for answers. Our party consisted of Lee Bland who handled the recorder, George Polk, CBS Cairo correspondent, Marcel Hitchman, a writer who served as our interpreter, and myself. Our first stop was in Abdeen Square in the vicinity of the King's Palace, and I intercepted the first person to come along. He was a boy, better dressed than most to be seen on Cairo's streets. I asked how many were in his family. What sounds at first like Godfather is the boy saying, I Godfather and so forth. Good father and good mother and good sister and good father and good everything. All living in the same place. How many rooms? He said he was a mechanic, that he earned 15 piastres a day, which is the equivalent of about 60 cents. In the following recording, you will hear questions by Polk and myself. The interruption of a small child standing nearby, and toward the end, the striking of bells in a tower of the Abdeen Palace. What sort of food do you eat? Something like that. I take 15 piastres every day. How much? I take 15 piastres every day. I smoke the cigarette by 5 piastres and keep 10 in my home to get some uniform for myself. Yes, sir. He said he wasn't worried about anything. He said he had heard a rumor that the war was over, but he wasn't sure. He was somewhat better informed about American jargon, for he suddenly used the phrase, hubba hubba. You've seen some American movies, huh? Yes. Is that why you've got hubba hubba? Hubba hubba and turkey easy. Booking studio to make hubba hubba, turkey easy. Through Mrs. Hitchman, we next questioned a man named Abdul, who said he was a servant, earning 7 Egyptian pounds a month or about $21. I say that you're happy now, your life. He says, well, who is happy? Why are you not happy? Because everything is expensive. I asked what he thought of Egypt's independence, of the situation in Palestine, whether he knew the war was over. He said, I don't care about politics and about war, who cares about these things. I asked whether he was at all interested in the world outside of Egypt, whether he would perhaps like to visit some other country. Well, should I go? If there is work somewhere else, alright, but I mean to go just like that, where? I see. Does he ever get to see a movie? He never went to see him in his life. Would you like to go to one? Why should I go? He said he had never read a book, that he never read newspapers, that he was not interested in these things at all. While this was going on, a crowd had gathered and there were rumbles of suspicion and hostility. I started to ask questions of an Arab in a long blue Galabia, and he told Polk, he thinks his men sold to his dignity. Other people in the crowd said they were afraid of being recorded. I asked what accounted for this attitude. Well, it's quite difficult to explain. First of all, it never happened to them before. And then they don't know what is this, and they think it's mixed up with some movie business, and they just now, especially, they are not very friendly, they are foreigners, and they are afraid of stating things definitely. They don't like people who ask them questions. They are always like that. You see, when people ask them questions, it generally brings trouble. It means there is a policeman who comes to ask them questions or things like that. Nobody ever asks them what they think. Egypt was the 11th country visited in our one-world flight, and though we'd seen bad conditions in other countries, this, for a traveler heading east, was the beginning of really morbid ignorance, squalor, disease. To the high, Cairo is attractive, both in its medieval and modern aspects. It's checkered with mosques and palaces, ancient walls, towers, domes. The old city has bazaars and narrow winding streets. The newer quarters along the river achieve a certain European colonial dignity. To the east, behind the citadel stand barren hills, and beyond that sandy desert. Just out of town at the edge of the western desert are the great pyramids, and in between, the Nile, tree-shaded, romantic, polluted, supporting life and agriculture along its banks just as it has done since earliest history. In this austere land where so much of civilization was cradled, there is small tradition for one world, or for anything resembling democracy as we know it. The world of Egypt has been, by turns, Memphite, Theban, Syrian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Arabian, Turkish, French, British. Dozens of wars have swept up and down the Nile and have zig-zagged across the deserts, and the only constant factor since the days of the pharaohs has been the depression of millions, the poverty, the relentless ignorance. There are schools in Egypt, yes, for the better off. There are also health services of a sort, we were told about them. But as we went around the city, stopping ordinary kairines on the street, there was little to show the effect of either education or sanitation. In a big square known as Medanismilia, one of the newer and better sections of the city, we interviewed people of random one night. I asked a cook named Ahmed what he thought of conditions in the country. Too many people know work, too many people know eat, too many people know money. Too many people know work, too many people know eat, too many people know money. When I asked him what he thought should be done about it, he answered that the government should open shops and factories in order to create more work. He said he was a monarchist because he read in the papers that the king wanted to improve Egypt. I then asked about his knowledge of politics. Have you ever heard the word fascism? You have not. Have you ever heard the word Nazi? He has not. Have you ever heard of the word communist? What do you know about democracy? Democracy means everybody is the same. Among those we interviewed on Cairo's streets, Ahmed was exceptionally well informed. More typical of the attitude we met with everywhere was that of Mohammed, a waiter. The regime of Ismail Siddi Pasha, since succeeded as prime minister by Fahmi Al-Nakrachi, was under considerable attack and criticism at the time and I asked Mohammed what he thought about it. How do you feel about the government in Egypt today, the government of Siddi Pasha? He says we don't care at all in all these troubles. We don't participate in these troubles and we don't hear anything about it and we don't want to hear anything about it. I asked Mrs. Hitchman, long an observer of Egyptian affairs, why so many of the people shied away from any kind of political thought or expression. They are afraid. They are afraid of every kind of authority. They know that every time they come in contact with authority, they aren't happy. So they are afraid of doctors, they are afraid of policemen, they are afraid of the government, they are afraid of everything. The ignorance which lay like a pall over the people was not confined to any particular district. It should be borne in mind that these recordings were made not in a backwoods area in tobacco road country but on the streets of the biggest city in Africa, a modernized busy city which for centuries has had access to the best of eastern and western culture. In the hope that samplings made thus far were not entirely representative of the Egyptian man on the street, I tried again in still another district. The first man here was a worker, father of two children, sole support of his mother and father. He earned a dollar a day. In the following recording you will hear the man say an answer to a question. Throughout the Middle East this means no. Has this man ever been outside of Carol? He doesn't read, he doesn't write. Has he ever seen a moving picture? No, no, he said. Has he ever heard a radio? He says he listens to music from the Egyptian state broadcasting but not to the news. On his own radio? High up the ceiling of the cafe and it's kept open night and day so everybody hears the radio. Home sets here? They just can't dream of it. They haven't got enough money to buy clothes. How could they buy radios? We next talked to a man who said his home was four miles from the Nile and I asked when he had last seen the river. He hasn't seen the Nile for the last eight years. He went only for two months to school and then he left. He passed over here a moment later and I asked the boy whether he'd like to fly in one. At first he said no and then he said tomorrow if I work for Hitler maybe I'll ride a plane. Nobody ever told him that Hitler is dead. I mean Casablanca. Some people say he's a British, some people say Hitler. And has he ever thought he would like to find out? Who on the wall is he curious to know? It took some time to make the boy understand this last question and in the process a man of about 35 who was standing nearby a cemetery caretaker took part in the discussion. Finally they both answered it. The boy says he doesn't care and the other man, the other caretaker says well in the end Hitler will win. George Polk noticed that the caretaker had an eye infection and he informed me that 90% of Egyptians suffer from eye diseases and that the incidence of blindness is very high. I asked Mrs. Hitchman to ask the Arab what he was doing about his eye. I said well but why don't you go to some clinic or something he says I have no money. You're afraid of going blind, so many persons are blind. Here you see them wandering in the streets, so many persons blind. The statement God is there was accompanied by a gesture of pointing to heaven. The government of Siddhi Pasha last summer had one absorbing internal preoccupation and it was not that of alleviating the poverty or sickness of its people. It was the hounding of liberals. The editor of the principal newspaper of the Wafda an opposition but not leftist political party was arrested so was the Greek millionaire Zabini known to be sympathetic to the anti-royalist movement in his home country. 11 cultural, scientific, educational and labor associations were suspended hundreds of people were jailed for weeks without charges. Months later on November 8th the New York Times reported from Cairo and I'm quoting the red scare in Egypt has passed off without proof of the existence of a communist organization. Nearly all persons arrested have been released. The roundup resulted in the detention of an assorted lot of intellectual, social reformers, labor leaders and foreigners. Some would be described outside Egypt as liberals or socialists but those arrested included some who were plainly capitalists including millionaires. Others appeared to be simply opponents of the government. At the time we were in Egypt three months before that dispatch appeared the assorted lot of intellectuals was in jail and it seemed to me that the Egyptian people themselves were behind bars, behind the bars of their own ignorance. If there was any awareness of the concept of one world in ordinary Egyptian life it must have been as rare as a well-fed child, as rare as a well-paid worker, as rare as a literate farmer. We left Cairo for India at dawn one morning on a converted York bomber and flew across the glaring deserts of Transjordan, Syria and Iraq. Geographically this was the middle of the Middle East. Socially in point of progress it was the Middle Ages. The great and terrible bond among these many countries stretching all the way from the mouth of the Nile to the mouth of the Ganges is rank poverty, disease, abysmal ignorance. We crossed the vast swamp lands lying between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and landed at the sizzling river port of Basra to refuel. Then we took off again and flew out over the Persian Gulf. The waters of the Gulf were a sickly bleached out blue. For nearly a thousand miles we followed the dry rugged west coast of Iran and as night fell we were droning over the Arabian Sea. In the middle of the evening we landed at Karachi, India a port well known to American soldiers who served in the Far East. On the day that we were to take our recorder on the street so that you might hear the voices of Indians religious rioting broke out between Hindus and Muslims and our movements were blocked. In Calcutta we found martial law when we arrived. We had to watch our step to avoid treading literally on the corpses of slain rioters. We could get no transportation to carry our recording equipment no batteries to run it. And without recordings whereby you could hear directly from more than a few Indian people it would be arrogant to comment upon a situation so complex that men who have given years to the study of India's problems shrug their shoulders when you ask them about prospects of unity within any reasonable time. India as you know is a land divided by hundreds of languages, religions, casts and customs. Its political problems at the moment are as difficult as those of almost any trouble spot in the world. Instead of attempting to present any rounded picture of the turbulent Indian scene as it existed last summer we will limit our report to an interview with the one Indian leader of world renown available to our microphone during the period of our visit. He has panted Jawaharlal Nehru Minister of External Affairs and Commonwealth Relations. We recorded Mr. Nehru in the modest home of his nephew. He was wearing the round white cap of the Indian National Congress Party. His sensitive face was drawn and sober. For almost an hour we talked on a wide variety of subjects. First about Wendell Wilkie whose book One World he said he had read in prison while under detention by the British for political reasons in 1942. We then discussed the international situation which at that time was badly inflamed. I asked what he considered the greatest threat to the peace. Well I should say the greatest single threat at the present moment is the growing conflict between America and England on the one side. She liked to put them together and the Soviet Union on the other. I believe how to blame for the blame in the past. Mr. Nehru spoke at length of India's problems which he said were not formed suddenly but were the accumulation of more than a hundred years. He had bitter words for the treatment of Indians in the Union of South Africa whose racial policy he called, quote, exactly on a par with Nazi doctrine, unquote. I asked him whether there was goodwill in India for the United States and he replied, America which attracts for many reasons among the negros of denying freedom to large numbers of our old people and we are suffering for that one of the causes that have unfolded in India in the past. Get rid of that completely. For one race or one nation or fundamental issue of career to another, it has to be given up. From the vantage point of this pleasant home in New Delhi, a city whose appearance suggests an American university campus more than an Asiatic government center, it was hard for me to imagine the vast Indian subcontinent of 700,000 villages stretching away to all compass points to sense the stupendous poverty and struggle of its nearly 400 million people. These masses, like the relatively small population of Egypt, come within the bleak area of humanity that we call backward. Backward because of no inherent lacks but because of economic stagnation and total absence of opportunity. I asked Pandit Nehru what recommendations he would make toward achieving the cooperative and united world of which Wendell Wilkie spoke and he replied, You cannot cooperate while suffering from all manner of conflict. He was looking right at America and our principal allies when he spoke of countries who have power and influence in the world today taking the lead and working out the four freedoms. Perhaps he had even defined a fifth freedom. Freedom from subjugation, prejudice, discrimination. A simple formula of that but one that would make life more livable for three out of every four people alive on this earth today. You have been listening to Norman Corwin, first winner of the Wendell Wilkie One World Flight Award in the eighth of a series of broadcasts based on his recent 37,000 mile global tour. All recorded voices heard on this broadcast were transcribed in Egypt and India. Next week at the same time, One World Flight visits China and Japan. Tonight's musical score was composed and directed by Alexander Semler. Guy Dela Choppe was associate director. This is Lee Vines and this is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.