An American Doctor, an Indian Sadhu, and the Story of the Eradication of Small Pox
Sanjeev Kumar Nath

Today the word “Babaji” is likely to suggest conmen-type individuals who rule over their lavish ashram-empires, fooling uneducated fools and educated, tech savvy idiots alike, hobnobbing with politicians and having huge social media presence.
Just as the word “politician” has unfortunately acquired many negative connotations because of the doings of some politicians, the word “Babaji” has also acquired many negative connotations because of the charlatanism, quackery and deceit many so-called babajis in fancy dress and spectacular headgear practice.
Then there are politicians who pretend to be mahatmas, and so-called mahatmas who are actually politicians. In such a scenario, it is difficult to broach the subject of a Babaji without evoking sceptical smiles.
However, Neeb Karori Baba or Neem Karoli Baba (1900-1973), fondly called Maharaj-ji by his devotees, was an extraordinary sage whose spiritual fragrance spread far and wide, so that seekers and devotees from the western world, besides India, sought him out in his ashram at Kainchi, Uttarakhand or wherever he happened to be. (Although he had built an ashram at Kainchi, and often stayed there, he also wandered around in other places, and was not confined to the Ashram).
From the 1940s onwards more and more devotees were attracted to Maharaj-ji, often because they heard tales of miracles performed by him, although Maharaj-ji never claimed to perform miracles. He just listened to the requests and pleas of people who went to him with problems, and often relieved them of their troubles in mysterious or unexpected ways.
And lots of people have confirmed that his mere presence was intensely blissful. So many went, not to tell him of their woes, but just to be near him and enjoy that unexplainable fragrance of peace and bliss wafting around him. Many Hindu sacred texts speak about this unmistakable characteristic of a true mahatma, a jivanmukta—just go near him, and you feel blessed.
From the early 1960s, lots of westerners visited Maharaj-ji, many of them hippies or members of other counter-culture movements, people expressing their anguish at their aggressively materialistic, competitive, and consumerist (and sometimes war-mongering) societies. Among these visitors was a young American doctor Larry Brilliant.
Maharaj-ji’s famous American disciple Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) urged Larry to travel to India and meet Maharaj-ji, and Larry’s wife Girija (Elaine) also wanted him to see Maharaj-ji whom she had met earlier. Larry and Girija were in their twenties when they went to see Maharaj-ji together at Kainchi, Uttarakhand.

People who have heard that Maharaj-ji has had devotees or admirers like Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), Jeffrey Kegel (Krishna Das), Kreston Ludwig (Bhagavan Das), Jai Uttal, Ray Markus (Raghu Markus), Busha Alpert (Mirabai Bush), Peter Bush (Rameshwar Das), Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Julia Roberts, but have not studied Maharaj-ji’s life in detail, might sometimes wonder if Maharaj-ji and his ashram gathered a lot of money from these westerners, but Maharaj-ji was against accepting financial help from his western devotees because he considered them his guests.

He was not selling spirituality. He was not on any fund-raising programme. Later, the ashram management agreed to accept certain donations in kind from foreigners, and if Maharaj-ji did not object to this, it was only because of the entreaties of the devotees and his desire to fulfil the wishes of his devotees. However, someone who first goes to see Maharaj-ji might not understand his whimsical ways, and might think that Maharaj-ji is interested in their money.
The moment Larry and Girija went to him, for example, Maharaj-ji said, “Doctor—Doctor America! How much money do you have?”
When Larry said that he had only five hundred dollars, Maharaj-ji asked again, “No, no, no, really—how much money do you have?” and Larry reiterated that he only had five hundred dollars, and no more.
But Maharaj-ji again asked, “Yes, yes, yes, that’s in India. But how much money do you have in America?”
Naturally, such abrupt and insistent questioning on money made Larry think that Maharaj-ji may be interested in financial donations for some temple or something like that.

Anyway, now being asked about his funds back in America, he said that he had another five hundred dollars in America, but he also had big debts to pay off. He had borrowed money to be able to pursue his medical education, and so although he had one thousand dollars in total, he required far more than that to pay off his debts.
Maharaj-ji then said, “What, you have no money! You are no doctor!” He kept laughing at the poor American hippie doctor and said, “You are no doctor. You are no doctor, you are no doctor…..UNO doctor….UNO doctor…” Maharaj-ji then told him that he was going to go into the villages in India and give vaccinations.”
The mention of vaccination made Larry think that may be, Maharaj-ji wanted him to give an injection to someone there, because he could not imagine that he was going to join the WHO’s small-pox eradication programme. Although Larry had actually made some casual inquiry concerning jobs with WHO, he had been told that there were no vacancies, and he did not think Maharaj-ji’s “prediction” of his working for the UNO made much sense.
However, over the next few weeks, Maharaj-ji kept asking him whether he had got his WHO job and he kept replying that he had not. This was a subject Larry clearly didn’t want to talk about. But Maharaj-ji was relentless. One day he told Larry to go to Delhi so that he can get his WHO job. Larry then went to the WHO office in Delhi, met the person with whom he had made inquiries earlier, and asked him if there were any vacancies.
The man said there weren’t, and in any case WHO only hired experts from medical institutions outside India. However, he also said that there was some possibility of Larry’s finding some work in WHO’s small pox eradication programme, and arranged for Larry to meet Nicole Grasset, the French doctor who was heading that programme in India.

Larry thought that his hippie looks might not be appreciated by the French doctor, so after making the appointment to meet her, he borrowed a suit from one of Maharaj-ji’s devotees in Delhi, and also bought a tie which he describes as “horrible”. Larry writes that although he wore that suit and tie and tried to hide his long hair inside a white shirt, Nicole must have noticed his rather bizarre outfit and known that he was just another hippie. She was very polite, however, and said that there was no vacancy.
When he went back to Kainchi, Maharaj-ji again asked him if he had got his job, and he again said he hadn’t. He requested Maharaj-ji not to keep pressing him on this, but two weeks later Maharaj-ji again asked him to go to WHO. Once again he was told that there was no opening. Next week Maharaj-ji asked him to call Nicole, and he was again politely told that there were no jobs with WHO. However, some time later Maharaj-ji called Larry and said, “Immediately! Go to WHO!”

Larry went and met a new man at the WHO office this time, the chief of the global small pox programme who had come from Geneva. This gentleman interviewed Larry, and wrote a “note for the record” which appreciated Larry’s desire to serve in India, his understanding of local culture and so on, but said that Larry could not be hired because he had no expertise in the area, and no experience whatsoever.
Besides, at that moment of time, WHO was not interested in hiring Americans in India because of prevailing political tensions. Also, it was difficult to make the small pox programme successful in India because of various reasons including the government’s unwillingness to cooperate fully.
Larry was also told that if he wished, he could be considered for the small pox programme in Pakistan, to which Larry of course said that he couldn’t take a decision without asking his guru. The mention of his guru must have amused the doctors at WHO, but they were polite, and allowed him to ask his guru. Maharaj-ji said he must work in India, not Pakistan.
After two months of these meetings with WHO officials, an exhausted Larry and his wife Girija decided to take a break and visit Kashmir. Before leaving, he called Nicole when she said that although he couldn’t be hired as a small pox doctor, there was a possibility of her hiring him as an administrative assistant. She made the necessary changes in his application, and communicated with D A Henderson, the programme chief in Geneva.

When Larry and Girija returned to Kainchi from Kashmir, again Maharaj-ji asked him about his job application, and told him to go to WHO, Delhi. So, he went to Delhi and found that his application had been approved, but there was one final hurdle to pass—a mandatory security clearance.
Larry then thought that he would never get to work with WHO because the American government would never give security clearance to someone like him—an erstwhile leader of the Medical Committee of Human Rights, a radical organization, and a participant in left-wing anti-war movements in America. Back in Kainchi, he told Maharaj-ji that this was the last straw; that he would never get the security clearance.

Maharaj-ji then asked him who was the boss who was supposed to give him the job. Larry said it was Henderson, and Maharaj-ji sat up, as if to perform some magic trick, held one of his palm before his face, and asked him to spell Henderson’s name. Maharaj-ji then spelt Henderson’s name like a magician spelling out an incantation, all the time looking at Larry through the gaps in the fingers of his palm, and all the time giggling.
Larry Brilliant writes that that evening Dr Henderson was attending a cocktail party at the American Embassy, and the American ambassador and the Surgeon General were there in the party. The Surgeon General asked Dr Henderson about the small pox eradication programme, and the doctor told him about its successful progress in several countries and the help the programme had received from different governments.
Then the Surgeon General asked Dr Henderson what he could do for the programme, and Dr Henderson said that there was this young American doctor living in an ashram in India who was very keen in working with WHO but could not get his security clearance. The Surgeon General wrote the “security clearance” for Larry on a cocktail napkin that very moment and gave it to Dr Henderson who telegraphed WHO, New Delhi that Larry Brilliant could now be given the job.
Why did Dr Henderson think of the young American doctor when the Surgeon General asked him if he could help him in any way? Why did he not seek any other aid but only the security clearance of Larry Brilliant? Obviously, Maharaj-ji was at work in his mind!
Of course, Larry was yet to know of all this, but the next morning Maharaj-ji called him and Girija, and served them tea and jelebees and they were allowed to rub his feet. They felt so happy to be treated like that by Maharaj-ji. It was absolutely blissful. Then suddenly Maharaj-ji said, “Okay, now it’s time for you to go.”
They thought Maharaj-ji was bidding them goodbye from the Ashram, so they did their prostrations and were just moving out when the post man arrived with a telegram from WHO, Delhi saying, “We have been notified today that you have received a US security clearance. Come immediately to WHO, Delhi to begin work.”

Larry started working in the WHO office in Delhi as an administrative assistant, coming to see Maharaj-ji on weekends. He says that in one of his visits to Maharaj-ji, they talked for hours on small pox, and he was astonished by Maharaj-ji’s range of knowledge about the disease. Maharaj-ji told him about the places in India where the disease was rampant, the places where they would have trouble working, the seasons and the transmission cycle of the disease, and so on.
Larry found that Maharaj-ji was quite thorough with the epidemiology of small pox, and knew much more about the disease than he did. When he asked Maharaj-ji if small pox would indeed be eradicated, Maharaj-ji said that the eradication of the dreaded disease would indeed be God’s gift to mankind because of the dedicated work of medical scientists. Maharaj-ji seemed to have no doubt that small pox would be eradicated.
However, Larry remained busy doing only office work in Delhi and the WHO was not even initiating the actual vaccination drive in the villages. Then it seemed that by September the vaccination team would start its work in the villages, but Larry was not one of the members selected for the programme. He was going to remain in the Delhi office.
Just then, however, an opening emerged for him. Two Russian doctors who were supposed to be in the vaccination team could not join work because of some kind of Soviet government red tapism. Larry was then requested to fill in, and thus his journey of touring the villages and vaccinating people began.
Larry believes that Maharaj-ji’s blessing were always with them to complete the vaccination programme successfully. There was a big picture of Maharaj-ji on the dashboard of the jeep that he and Girija drove.

He says that often the civil surgeons they visited would show only cursory interest in the WHO programme, and would ask them to leave, without getting into the business of the vaccination programme, but when they saw Maharaj-ji’s photo on the dashboard and inquired and came to know that they were devotees of Maharaj-ji, and that Maharaj-ji said that small pox would indeed be eradicated through the dedicated efforts of medical scientists, the civil surgeons would change their mind, and help them in all possible ways.
Occasionally, a sceptical WHO or Indian official would say that even if small pox got eradicated elsewhere it was impossible to eradicate it in India, but when they heard what Maharaj-ji had predicted, the Indian officials would almost always change their opinion. The officials remembered that when China had invaded India in 1962, Maharaj-ji had predicted that the Chinese would eventually leave on their own, and Maharaj-ji’s prediction came true.
So, they were inclined to believe that Maharaj-ji’s prediction about the eradication of small pox would also come true. Hence, they helped Larry and Girija to make the vaccination successful in the villages. Maharaj-ji was the driving force of motivation for many of those doctors and other medical practitioners who worked very hard with the Americans to make the programme successful.
WHO sent Larry to all sorts of remote and strange places, but he was particularly thrilled to be sent to Amarkantak in Shahdol District of Madhya Pradesh, one of the places in which Maharaj-ji had spent quite some time as a sadhu. Devotees of Maharaj-ji visit Amarkantak to this day, to soak in the spiritual atmosphere of this place particularly sanctified by Maharaj-ji’s stay there for a long time.

That is why Larry was very happy to be sent there, although Shahdol District of Madhya Pradesh was experiencing the worst epidemic of small pox in India at that time. Luckily for Larry, most people in the district remembered Maharaj-ji, and when they heard that he had predicted the end of small pox, everyone participated in the vaccination programme enthusiastically. Maharaj-ji had left his body on September 11, 1973, and Larry went to Amarkantak in 1974, but once again, Maharaj-ji’s inspiration and motivation continued to work wonders.
Larry says that Nicole, the head of the small pox eradication programme in India, began to appreciate Maharaj-ji’s influence, and she would often ask Larry to know Maharaj-ji’s advice in the context of specific problems that the programme faced. Maharaj-ji’s advice was always very practical, but also spiritual. Many of the people with whom Larry worked also had faith in Maharaj-ji, and Larry enjoyed working with people who were devout and spiritual.
With the concerted effort of these wonderful people, the deadly disease was conquered in just two years in India, despite initial scepticism of many experts in the beginning. 400 epidemiologists from 30 different countries and 100000 Indian workers worked tirelessly to defeat small pox. Maharaj-ji’s prediction that it would be eradicated came true.

The last case of small pox in India was reported in 1975 and the last case in the world was reported from Somalia in 1977. In 1980, the WHO announced the complete eradication of small pox. This disease, the single most deadly disease in the world, which may have killed 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone, and has ravaged human civilization for thousands of years, was no more.
Larry and Girija, meanwhile, went on to acquire specialized medical degrees, and have worked in many projects involving charity, public health, and social service worldwide. Larry is now 80, and Girija is in her late seventies.

(Much of the information in the article has been taken from the book Miracle of Love by Ram Dass/Richard Alpert)
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