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From sidewalk loudspeakers outside the big Western-style hotels came the scratchy strains of an old Tommy Dorsey recording of Marie. The swarm of delegates arriving in town came in British-and U.S.-made planes, were taken to their hotels in new, pastel-colored Plymouths, escorted by just as new Harley-Davidsons. The Indonesian soldiers who stood on guard at almost every corner, corridor and doorway wore U.S. steel helmets. Only in such trappings, however, was the Western world represented in the great assemblage that gathered this week in the Indonesian resort city of Bandung, where nearly 1,000 leaders of 29 Asian and African countries sat down together in a vague but portentous political communion. There were smiling black men from the Gold Coast and Liberia, keen-eyed Arabs, Ceylonese and Indians speaking in the clipped accents of Cambridge and Oxford, Burmese in silken longyis, a prince from Siam and a self-deposed king from Cambodia, supple Marxist mandarins from Peking and smiling, slightly nervous gentlemen from Japan. In all, they spoke or affected to speak, for more than half of humanity, chiefly the yellow and brown and black half. Loose Bindings. The Bandung Conference nations came together with a loose binding of things in common. Most were newly sovereign countries. All but one or two had been dominated for years by Western colonialism or imperialism. All yearned for a greater place in the sun. They differed in a myriad of ways—religion, ideology, ambitions and inhibitions, animosities, economies, resources and enemies. They could not hope to find much common footing for their mixture of neutralism, Communism, pro-Westernism, antiCommunism, anti-Westernism, and simple, provincial unconcern. Even the conference's five sponsors—India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon—were not agreed on what the conference should try to achieve. The headliners got together on the way to Bandung. Egypt's young (37) revolution-maker, Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser, flew to New Delhi to consult in advance with his newfound friend, Jawaharlal Nehru, the dominant man among Bandung's five sponsors. Before 100,000 Indians who squatted to greet the Egyptian, Nehru got in a plug for the Five Principles of Coexistence he had worked out with Chou Enlai. When a newspaperman asked Nasser, in front of Nehru, whether he subscribed to the Five Principles, Nasser replied: "What are they?" Nehru and Nasser hopped on to Rangoon together for a rendezvous with Burma's U Nu, the quietly stubborn ascetic who aspires to negotiate a Peking-Washington settlement of the Formosa crisis. With U Nu at the airport, and closely guarded by a small army of armed police, was Bandung's most powerful and most eagerly awaited guest, Red China's Premier Chou Enlai. The Premiers and their entourage struggled good-naturedly past thousands of Burmans, happily engaged in dousing each other with water, the traditional way of celebrating Burma's New Year. "I thought they squirted the water!" said Nehru's well-dampened daughter. "They just throw the water," explained Chou En-lai in English. Coconut Milk. Chou turned his charms on Premier Nasser, whose current irritation with the West coincides neatly with Peking's desire for Egyptian recognition. "The government and people of China have great respect for Egypt," said