IDEAS: Pandit's Mind

* Born Annie Wood, in London (1847), Mrs. Besant was a Suffragette, a Fabian Socialist, a fighter for birth control and companionate mar riage. When George Bernard Shaw took a brief romantic interest in her, she drew up a "contract of cohabitation" which caused Shaw to beat a hasty retreat. "Good God," he exclaimed, "this is worse than all the vows of all the churches on earth! I had rather be legally married to you ten times over!" She was converted to Theosophy (a watered-down Western copy of Hinduism) while reviewing a book by its founder, Mme. Blavatsky, went to India where she dressed in the native sari, became the leader of the world wide Theosophist movement (present member ship: 150,000). In 1909 she adopted a twelveyear- old Indian orphan boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she declared to be a reincarnation of Christ. Today, having renounced his divinity, he is an itinerant lecturer on mystic subjects, some times known as "the messiah in plus fours." In 1929 Mrs. Besant tried to start a Theosophist colony at her Happy Valley ranch in California, to breed super-Americans. She said the Califor nia climate favored such an experiment, but she eventually gave it up. Like all Theosophists, she believed that she had several bodies which helped her in her work. Before she died (she was burned on a funeral pyre), Annie Besant said: "I shall return immediately in a Hindu body, to continue the task of building a greater India."

* U.S. production today is almost twice what it was in 1929.