ANN ARBOR PACKAGE DEPOT INC. 1 26991 Lahser at 11 Mile WE WRAP, PACK & SHIP ANYTHING RETAIL OR COMMERCIAL • UPS • PARCEL POST • NEXT DAY AIR • BUS • COMMON CARRIER From Haight To The Himalayas: Larry Brilliant Mends The World HSER N I I I 11 MILE 1111 CALL 353-4514 Inside the Greyhound Bus Station SUSAN LUDMER-GLIEBE Special to The Jewish News o say that Larry Brilli- LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENING AT GREYHOUND • Bus Tickets • Tour Packages • Bus Charters • Package Express • College Transportation 26991 Lahser at 11 Mile Rd. Greyhound And leave thEdriving to us. Call 353-2870 .1 101 Is If THE SMARTEST INVESTMENT YOU CAN MAKE THIS YEAR IS ONE HOUR OF YOUR TIME. Audrey Pearl, Certified Financial Planner, Registry Planner President, Pearl Advisory Corporation Spend that hour with Audrey Pearl! 41111 ■ Nationally-known, regularly-quoted and recog- nized as one of America's foremost Financial Consultants, Audrey Pearl answers the questions today's investors are asking: • "How can I insulate my money from the economy's effects?" • "Are there any investments that make sense now?" • "What's the point in planning, if events are so unpredictable?" • "What's an overall strategy for saving for retirement, education, financial security and meeting monthly expenses?" • "What do I do now?" Let Audrey Pearl and Pearl Advisory Corporation show you how to protect yourself in a volatile market by investing defensively. Call today for a no-charge introductory consultation. At Pearl Advisory Corporation 26011 Evergreen Road, Suite 314 Southfield, Michigan 48076 Phone (313) 353-7670 Audrey Pearl is a registered representative of Planners Securities Group, Inc. 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.