The Foreign Service Journal, September 2011

as a matter of policy not to present the hippie problem — to the extent it was a problem — as a predominantly American phenomenon.) When the article came out a week or so later, that’s exactly what it said. Only it wasn’t expressed as an estimate but as fact. “Only 40 percent of the hippies are Americans. The rest come from all over Western Europe — es- pecially Germany and Scandinavia — with others from Britain, Australia, Japan and elsewhere.” Still, the report didn’t cite any source for this intelligence. Nor did it mention me or the embassy. So I was off the hook — or so I thought. A Timely Report Hand it to the AP for timeliness. In the following months more hippies got in trouble in New Delhi, enough for Indian newspapers to cover the stories: drug busts, vandalism, sleeping on the streets, public indecency, running out on bills at cheap hotels and hostels. The police normally informed the em- bassy when an American citizen was being held in jail, and we would send our hippest consular assistant, Frank Fernandes (an Indian Christian from Goa), or his senior colleague, Ven- kataraman Ramamurty, to visit the prisoners and explain what the em- bassy could and could not do for them. Specifically, we could contact their families in the States if they requested it — but most of them asked us not to do that. We could give them a list of local attorneys who might be willing to represent them in court — but very few hippies could afford to hire a lawyer. And we followed their cases to see whether they were treated worse than an Indian arrested for the same offense — but that was never a prob- lem, because arrested Westerners were invariably treated better than In- dian common criminals. The End of the Matter One day the consular section got a call from the New Delhi police. The officer in charge of dealing with of- fenses by foreigners wanted to talk with us about the rising hippie prob- lem. When I informed the front office of the request for an appointment, the deputy chief of mission told me with a S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 Despite my nickname, I rarely saw a hippie, for they preferred to have nothing to do with the embassy — unless they were in distress.