LONDON, UK, January 17, 2008: “What does a moral person do, given all the problems and suffering in the world? How do you focus?” Larry Brilliant illustrates how difficult this is by recalling a friend’s struggle to decide how best to allocate a few rupees among the beggars waiting to die in the Hindu sacred city of Benares, in India. Such a place could hardly be more different from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. In February 2006, after a lengthy search, Dr Brilliant was appointed to run Google.org. The story of this executive deeply commited to improving the world goes back to India, his spiritual homeland.
In 1970, Brilliant and some friends rented a bus to drive around Europe, which then turned into a relief convoy to help victims of the 1970 Bhola cyclone in Bangladesh. The civil unrest stopped the relief caravan so he spent several years in India studying at a Himalayan ashram with sage Neem Karoli Baba, from whom he received the name Subramanyam. 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 me,” 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, said, “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. 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. He would spend the next ten years successfully erradicating the disease. He was one of the leaders of the World Health Organization (WHO) smallpox eradication program that in 1980 was able to declare the certified global eradication of smallpox virus.
When he returned to the United States, he became a professor of international health at the University of Michigan as well as starting numerous charitable and business ventures. His next initiative was to create the Seva Foundation and its mission to eradicate blindness — a disease that he had seen firsthand while working in the smallpox program. Since Seva’s beginning, doctors have performed 1 million free sight-restoring operations in Asia. “Seva started primarily as a spiritual organization,” Brilliant says. “The work we did to alleviate blindness was a consequence of our spirituality. It was motivated by a desire to serve God by doing good.” He spent the first half of 2005 as a volunteer helping out in the tsunami in Sri Lanka and working in India with WHO in the campaign to eradicate polio.
Now, Larry Brilliant will coordinate all of Google’s philantropic initiatives. In broad terms, Google.org will pursue five “core initiatives” in three areas: fighting climate change; economic development; and building an early-warning system for pandemics and other disasters. It will be funded with 1% of the firm’s equity, annual profits and employees’ time.