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SUSAN LUDMER-GLIEBE
Special to The Jewish News
o say that Larry Brilli-
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111 ►
86
FRIDAY, MAY 13, 1988
4M■
.41 ■ I
1•11•111
ant is not your usual
CEO doesn't tell you
much. But it tells you a little.
"The Grateful Dead were at
my house on Sunday,"
Brilliant says from his office
at Network Technologies In-
ternational, Inc., an Ann
Arbor-based computer soft-
ware company.
For those who know
Brilliant, or have heard of
him, having a rock group like
the Dead in for the weekend
is not unusual. After all, this
is a guy who was friends with
Ken Kesey and the Merry
Pranksters. This is the guy
who, along with members
from the Hog Farm commune,
travelled through Asia in a
psychedelically painted bus
doing good works and having
a fun time in the process.
This is the guy who acted in
a Warner Brothers movie,
`The Medicine Ball Caravan,"
which documented a hippie
trip from Haight-Ashbury to
Katmandu. "I've never seen
it, but everyone who has said
it was terrible," Brilliant
explains.
In exchange for his role,
Warner Brothers donated
$20,000 to free health clinics
in the Bay area that Brilliant
was involved with — a modus
operandi that Brilliant would
use in subsequent years to ex-
cellent effect.
This is the guy who, in
1971, was flown to Alcatraz
Island to deliver a baby to a
member of the American In-
dian Movement, which at
that very moment was occu-
pying the island.
No, Brilliant's not your
everyday CEO. and he's not
your everday University of
Michigan associate professor
of epidemiology either, even
though he has authored his
share of scholarly articles in-
cluding a small book about a
huge subject, "The Manage-
ment of Smallpox Eradication
in India," about which he
knows more than little since
he spent 10 years with the
World' Health Organization
team which labored to
eradicate smallpox. Brilliant,
in fact, saw the last case of
Asian smallpox, that of a
3-year-old girl named Rahima
Banu who lived in a small
fishing village in
Bangladesh.
Of his experience Brilliant
has written, "A thousand
thoughts and images poured
Larry Brilliant has been a physician, university professor, businessman,
student of Eastern philosophies and Merry Prankster.
in from all sides as I stood
there and watched Rahima
Banu crying. We will never
know how many millions died
before her; certainly more
than in all past wars combin-
ed. Now it was over; a scourge
as ancient as history had
been conquered."
No, Brilliant's not your
usual Detroit-born-and-raised
Jewish kid who goes to col-
lege and becomes a doctor.
Not when he goes to an ash-
ram in the foothills of the
Himalayas to study Hindu
scriptures and bhakti yoga
with a guru named Nim
,Kerali Baba who owns only a
blanket and a smile.
This wise old man whom
Brilliant called a beloved and
great king tells Brilliant and
his wife, Girija, to approach
God through serving man,
which, come to think of it,
does sound like something
Brilliant might have also
picked up by reading the
Talmud in Detroit. None of
this is especially surprising,
since Brilliant's concern for
peace and justice has always
been as much a part of him as
the heart that beats inside his
body.
Brilliant says that he's been
called a Jewish Christian
Hindu Buddhist. "I don't
mind being called that. I've
developed a real love for all
the great religions." But that
doesn't mean he's forgotten
his origins. "I'm certainly
Jewish and proud to be
Jewish," he says.
Brilliant tells a joke about
his friend, Baba Ram Dass,
a.k.a. Richard Alpert, once a
Harvard professor who was
very much a part of the spiri-
tual awakening in the '60s.
"Ram Dass would say that
he's only Jewish on his
parents' side," Brilliant says
with a chuckle.
No, Brilliant is not an
average guy and for that
some people are more than
thankful. For them,
Brilliant's iconoclastic ways
and good works have given
them something precious.
Like sight. Like life. Through
his work, as founder and en-
thusiast for the Seva Founda-
tion — the word is Sanskrit
for "service" — thousands of
people in Nepal, Tibet and In-
dia who were once doomed to
blindess now see, the result of
Seva's decade-long funding of
a variety of eye treatment
programs.
Of course, as Brilliant
would be the first to point out,
none of this was done alone,
none of it can be done alone,
none of it should be done
alone. "It's a pleasure," he
says of a recent joint enter-
prise between the Seva Foun-
dation, the American Jewish
World Service and a Nepali
organization, whose combin-
ed aim is to prevent or cure
blindless in that Himalayan
country.