Dear TIME-Reader

FOR want of a middle name, New ' Delhi Correspondent Alexander Campbell almost lost a lap in his pursuit of Russia's carpetbagging Bulganin and Khrushchev (see FOREIGN NEWS). Campbell's father had intended, 43 years ago, to name his first-born Alexander MacLean, but he forgot the MacLean at the christening. "Now," says our correspondent, "there are thousands of Alexander Campbells, and lots of them are journalists, including one who much annoyed the Burmese after World War II, allegedly by participating in a rebellion."

When Campbell applied for a visa to visit Burma with the Russians, he got an angry refusal. Happily, the British embassy came to his aid by assuring the Burmese that TIME'S Campbell had never been to Burma, had never participated in a rebellion anywhere.

Many of you remember an earlier letter (June 9, 1952) about Alex Campbell, the Edinburgh newsman who went off to South Africa and eventually (in 1951) became our Johannesburg correspondent. Since then, Alex has written his sixth book: The Heart of Africa. He also won Sigma Delta Chi's Foreign Correspondence

Award for the cover story on Gold Coast Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah (TIME, Feb. 9, 1953). Fifteen months ago. Campbell moved to New Delhi after 17 years in Africa.

In India he has ranged from Bareilly and Srinagar down to Pondicherry and Tanjore, keeping an old pro's eye, cocked and wide, on the mysterious ways of the land -- and on the politics of Prime Minister Nehru. At his New Delhi home, sacred cows browse in the flower beds ; snake charmers with their cobras, fortunetellers and holy men with begging bowls crowd the veranda, push in on him. "I feel them at my shoulder as I work," says Campbell.

Amid the staged welcomes for the Soviet visitors last week, Campbell knew at least one of India's millions of firm believers in astrology who took a dim view of the proceedings. He was a student who had gone to Russia and lost all hope for Communism. It was not Communist regimentation that disillusioned him. "No, no, far worse," said the student. "Those Russians are barbarians. A girl I met, who otherwise seemed charming and well educated, told me she thought astrology was nonsense!" Cordially yours,

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