Dr. Brilliant Vs. the Devil of Ambition

"The idea was to drive around Western Europe spreading good vibes," says Wavy. But in 1970, a cyclone hit Bangladesh. One of the century's worst disasters, the storm claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. "Relief efforts were so slow to respond that we decided to go there to help the people and to embarrass the relief agencies. We wanted them to say, 'My God, a busload of hippies is doing our job.' We put together medical and food supplies, and we pooled our money. In Germany, we got another bus -- 42 people from 17 countries. We thought it would take a couple of weeks. It turned into one and a half years."

The film -- which had started the whole journey -- turned out to be the worst ever made until Ishtar came along. But Brilliant was hooked on learning the secrets of life that went beyond mere comfort and success. "We had never met so many people who were so poor, yet so alive," Brilliant says. "Life didn't just happen to them. They experienced life at a deeper level than I had ever experienced it. I had been a radical, a left-wing politico, and meeting the Indian people made me realize that the politics of the left and the right were so much less important than the politics of the heart and the spirit." A year later, he wound up at the ashram of Neem Karoli Baba.

To Brilliant, this destination didn't look like ambition -- it smelled like Nirvana. It turned into a trip to the big time.

Apply Apples to Your Testicles and Call Me in the Morning

Brilliant was sitting under a bodhi tree at his guru's ashram in northern India, content with doing nothing more than his daily meditations. There was just one problem: "Every time I sat and meditated, my guru would throw apples at my testicles," Brilliant says. "I had to get up and get moving. I had no choice."

The point of the apple throwing was to get Brilliant out of the lotus position and into work where he could do the greatest good. His guru, Neem Karoli Baba, was telling him, "There are people who get exactly what they want. You think they're the lucky ones, but they're not. The lucky ones are those who do what they are meant to do." For Baba, that meant vaccinating people against smallpox. In the early 1970s, the disease was devastating India. Trying to eradicate it seemed like a fool's errand.

That errand became Brilliant's. At his guru's insistence, he found himself on his longest journey yet: a bus ride from the monastery in northern India to the offices of the United Nations.

It is a measure of Brilliant's unusual outlook on ambition that he never questioned his guru's advice. "I had never seen a case of smallpox," says Brilliant. "I don't know how my guru knew that I could do this work. I had hair down the middle of my back, and I was wearing a white robe. Everybody in the United Nations was over 50 and wearing a business suit. I showed up at the United Nations office dressed as you would expect someone to be dressed in a monastery. I walked in and said, 'My mystic sent me to cure smallpox.' I was told to go home. I took the 17-hour bus ride back to the ashram and told Baba that I had failed. He said, 'Go back.' I did this two dozen times, making this trip back and forth. Slowly, the robe gave way to pants, then to a shirt, then to a tie, then to a haircut, and then to a resume. I learned to look like a diplomat."

What was the lesson that his guru was teaching him? "The great thing about gurus is not that they make you feel everybody's love," says Brilliant. "It's that they make you feel that you can love everybody."

The nightmare wasn't confined to the disease. "Mrs. Gandhi wasn't allowing the UN to work in India on smallpox. Later, she changed her mind, and I became one of the first four people hired for the program -- largely because I could speak Hindi and because I could type. It wasn't until several years later that anyone remembered that I was a doctor. I ended up staying with the program for six years, and I was in India for ten years."

Day and night, smallpox, like a war, ravaged the villages of India. Rivers stopped flowing, dammed by the dead bodies that filled them. Crows were seen flying overhead carrying tiny arms and legs that were spotted with the disease. Entire cities were decimated. Smallpox is a virus that forms lesions carried through the bloodstream. The lesions can attach themselves anywhere: to the stomach, to the eyes, to the lungs. Then they consume the whole body. Quickly, they consume whole villages. A win had to be total: If one person were left untreated, smallpox could reemerge even more virulently. Even if the UN could inoculate each of India's 600 million people, an impossible task, how could it cope with each year's new wave of 25 million unvaccinated babies? The solution was to quarantine whole villages in order to contain the outbreaks.