To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Saving Language

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange -Champs. Today, saving language. You know about endangered species. Maybe donated money to save whales or polar bears, but there's an even bigger extension crisis facing us. The world's languages are dying. In fact, according to some estimates, we lose a language every two weeks or so. Luckily, there are people like David Harrison, a language who's traveled to some of the most remote places on the planet looking for lost languages, kind of like Indiana Jones. Steve Paulson tracked him down. David, why are so many languages going extinct? In a word, you could say globalization, the forces of industrialization, urbanization. But there's a more important pressure and that is small languages are disadvantaged. They're disfavored. It's partly because those of us who speak major languages don't really appreciate the knowledge base that is found in small languages. And so the speakers of those languages eventually they internalize those negative attitudes and they start to devalue their own languages. And you're

losing a whole set of knowledge, tradition, history, mythology, wisdom that simply cannot be directly translated or transferred over into English. So this is more than just saving words. I mean, you're talking about saving a way of life, a whole body of knowledge. It's an immense body of knowledge. It's scientific knowledge. It's cultural knowledge. You know, we maybe think that we know everything we need to know and that we can Google everything or look everything up. But we've had the privilege of walking through the Australian Outback with elders, walked through the Siberian forests with elders. And the knowledge they have is just astounding of those ecosystems. We would die there in a day or two. They thrive in those harsh environments because they know every plant and animal and the interactions. And that knowledge doesn't exist in English. It's not known to Western science. It's local knowledge. It's indigenous knowledge. In fact, I've heard one story that is in that the Arctic people, the UPIC,

they have something like 99 distinct types of sea ice formations. Yes. Because the UPIC, we live in Alaska, devote a great deal of their time to simply observing the ice. It's a major pastime or avocation and it's crucial to their livelihood. They have well -documented. There are 99 different words for different types of sea ice formations. And so that's a nice example of local knowledge. It's very complex. It's much more detailed than what, say, a meteorologist would know about sea ice. Well, Anna, I would think as we enter the age of global warming and ice starting to disappear. Actually, that kind of local knowledge could be incredibly useful to study what's happening. It literally could save us. And so this is another reason not to dismiss or discount indigenous languages as quaint or obsolete. They have ancient knowledge. They have very deep knowledge. It's their intellectual property, their cultural wealth, and we could all benefit from having this knowledge

be preserved. And then there are these small ways that, I mean, as I was reading about your research, I mean, sort of individual words that say so much. I mean, for instance, I guess there's a single toven word that means the short side of the hill. Yeah, the word E, which I really loved. Toven has all kinds of wonderful complexities, but they really care about the landscape. And so every minute feature on the landscape is named and described in the language. And so E is a very useful concept because when you're out in this landscape, which has almost no trees, but lots of hills, and you might be hurting goats or carrying firewood or riding a horse or something, you want to avoid the E, the short side of the hill because that's the steepest side. Once you know that that exists, you see the landscape differently. So I never thought about the shape of hills, but once I learned that concept, I began to look at hills differently. So just knowing that word, that little package of information, affects the way you're

interacting with the landscape. Are linguists still finding new languages around the world? They are. I mentioned before that there are approximately 7 ,000 languages that have been identified by science. I had the privilege of doing this in 2008 with my research team in India. We identified a language called Koro, that's K -O -R -O, spoken in a few remote villages up in the Himalayas. And this language had never been recognized by the political or social structures or by scientists. So it's a language that's completely new to science. So I have a sound clip of a woman named Abamudegyo, and she's singing a traditional song in the Koro language. So you spent a lot of your time traveling around the world meeting people who speak these rare

languages, right? Yeah, it's a real privilege, and I've been doing this for 15 or more years. I get to meet people who, in many cases, have never traveled more than a few miles from the village where they were born on some remote island, or perhaps up in the Himalayas or the Andes. They have an incredibly local existence, and yet they have an incredibly expansive worldview. I write about this in my book, The Last Speakers, The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages. These amazing individuals that I refer to as language warriors. Often they're elderly, but often I'm also meeting a younger generation who are doing very innovative things like performing hip hop in their languages. Who performs hip hop? Well, hip hop is global, of course, and so I've been in communities in Chile, in India, in Micronesia, where people have borrowed the genre of hip hop, but they're creating lyrics in the local languages, and so I have a recording of some young men speaking the Akha language,

which has spoken in the Himalayas in India, and they're performing a hip hop song in this language. It's a song about love and romance, and it uses the metaphor of hot chili peppers. That's about as much of a translation as I can give. That's great. You've also developed something that you've called talking dictionaries. Tell me about this. Well, we live in the internet age, and we take it very much for granted, but most of the world's languages have no presence whatsoever in the internet. You can't find even a single word, much less a recording, and so I help communities build

something that I call talking dictionaries. You can visit talkingdictionary .org and see some of the more than 60 talking dictionaries we've created. For example, the Celettes language, which is a Native American language spoken in Oregon, it has one fluent speaker and a handful of people who are trying to learn it within the tribe, and the fluent speaker, his name is Bud Lane, he sat down and he recorded, I think 12 ,000 words in the Celettes language. It's fascinating. So you're talking about using new technology to try to preserve these sometimes very ancient languages. Not only preserve them, but to revitalize and expand them. They do things like sending text messages in the language, and they have to invent new words for technologies, so they have to decide, are we going to call, are we going to borrow the word computer for English, or are we going to make up a new word in the Celettes language that means brain in a box. They tend to go for the latter solution, and so

even with a minuscule number of speakers, you can have new intellectual things happening like the invention of new words and concepts. One of the things is so wonderful to hear you talk about is the optimism that you seem to have. One way to read this whole story is it's oh my god, all these languages are going extinct, but there is a concerted effort, obviously, in some places to not only preserve them, but to revitalize them in some cases. Indeed, we are in the middle of an extinction crisis, one that parallels and even exceeds the extinction crisis of plant and animal species, but there is a vibrant global movement for language revitalization, and it's exciting to see these communities around the world leveraging new technologies and making a renewed commitment to keep their languages. Speak my language. David Harrison is a linguist at Swarthmore College. He co

-directs the Enduring Voices project at the National Geographic, and he's the co -star of the documentary film The Linguists. His most recent book is called The Last Speakers, the quest to save the world's most endangered languages. Coming up, young Israeli hipsters rediscover Yiddish. I'm Anne Strange Shamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International. We're talking about saving the world's languages in this hour, and we're partnering with the radio show in another language. Israel's story is one of the most popular radio shows in Israel now going into its second season. Some people call it the Israeli This American Life. Here, Israel's Story Journalist Dana Harmon takes us to the epicenter of the rebirth of a dying language, a Yiddish library in Tel Aviv in a rather unlikely location. Past the vendors hawking cheap napsacks, phone cards, bed sheets, plastic plants, and greasy filophils. Up the ramp, beyond the STD clinic,

and a kindergarten for African migrants' kids is a dark corridor with an open door. Welcome to Tel Aviv's massive and much -maligned central bus station, the Takhanah Mokazita Khadashaf. It's where hapless commuters shuffle along the foreign workers, refugee seekers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and homeless. And into this mix add one Belgian born orthodox Yashiva boy, turned Bohemian Israeli, a Yiddish performer, and book collector. That's him, Mendi Khad, who's speaking here in Yiddish. He's a 48 -year -old bachelor with bushy eyebrows, sparkly blue eyes, and a receding mane of gray hair. Who today is sitting at a desk amongst a clutter of papers and unpaid bills, chain -smoking, world cigarettes? He looks for his lighter, and then he looks for his mobile phone, and then thinking of an even better plan, he starts looking for his glasses, so he can actually look for his mobile on his lighter. He then gets up and puts on an old tin kettle for mint tea,

swaying ever so slightly back and forth as he chats, a leftover perhaps from his early Antwerp Yashiva days. Though you wouldn't know it from looking at him, Mendi's kind of a rock star in the Yiddish world. I was born in Belgium, I grew up in Antwerp, which is like really like a cosmopolitan Jewish city, I grew up with Yiddish, with French, Dutch, and of course also Hebrew, you know, well like in its school we learned the Mishnah, the Talmud in Hebrew. Like was a traditional religious society, but the open -minded at the same time, like we also went to the synagogue, and we also saw movies. At home, I had books of Sartre and Camus of my mother, and we also had a Jewish library with the Talmud, the Mishnah, the Mershaw, the all kinds of exegesis. In 1980, right after high school, he came to study at Yashiva in Israel, but soon began string from his Orthodox path, enrolling in

secular courses at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. From quite early on, I felt that I wanted to get out of the religious world, which felt to me like the small stator, everyone knew each other. I wanted to be in the universal world. Israel was for me an encounter with freedom, with sunshine, with open skies. I went to Hebrew University. On a whim, he decided to take on a Yiddish literature class to his course load, just really for old time's sake. And that's when he realized something in Israel was a miss. It was really like we were in the department, we were three or four students, like really a small department, and the feeling was that it's dying, and here we are studying at the university to keep the memory going, but actually it's a dying thing. And this feeling that it's dying, and that it has gone from the world, and that it has not really much to say anymore. This was really disturbing. I lifted my eyes from the book, and

I said to myself, hmm, here we are in Israel, in our home country, finally. And where is all this? Where, where, how come there's no even a memory of it? And I understood that these are my roots, and I have to do something with it. And so I said to myself, I'm young, I have ambition, I want to do something creative, and so let's take this Yiddish thing, and let's take it a step further, let's take it into life. Then I started to collect Yiddish books. Mendy started collecting in 1996, putting out word that he would take care of any Yiddish book, dropped off at his place in Jerusalem. He soon was overwhelmed by calls and then visits, typically from younger Israelis who couldn't speak Yiddish. They, following the death of an older relative, didn't know what to do with the books left behind. Many of these youngsters Mendy told me, felt it would be pretty

disrespectful to toss out their grandparents or their parents' libraries, but they also didn't really want them there on their new Akiah shelves. Now they had a much better option, guilt -free. They could schlep them all over the Mendy's and leave them on the doorstep. The piles in his living room grew and grew and grew. I didn't know what it was going into, like I thought I would collect a few hundreds, thousands of books, I would have a nice library, and I would have good reading material. Before World War II, there were some 15 million people in Eastern Europe who spoke in Red Yiddish, a mix of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic written in Hebrew characters. That world was lost and destroyed in the Holocaust. But there's been something of a many revival of interest in Yiddish language and literature. Here in Israel there are about 500 high school students

sitting for the Yiddish matriculation exams. There are more universities and colleges offering Yiddish literature as part of their courses. But still, outside of ultra -orthodox circles, in Israel, Yiddish basically is a dead language. It never stood a chance, really. In pre -State Palestine, and then later in Newborn Israel, Yiddish was seen by many as a competition to Hebrew, the ancient Biblical language which had been revived by Eliezer Ben Yahuda. And so Yiddish was not only neglected, it was actually derided. When we spoke to Absalom Kor, Israel's go -to authority on the Hebrew language, he explained that the attitude was... When you talk Yiddish, you are attached to the diaspora. Eliezer Ben Yahuda, for instance, he was ready to talk to everybody in every language in the world, he knew many languages, but never Yiddish, because Yiddish is a concept that you do not belong to the land of Israel. You do not belong to the language of the Bible.

That's the anthem of the Hebrew language brigade, a group completely devoted to safeguarding Hebrew from foreign intruders, like Yiddish. Speak Hebrew, Jew, go the lyrics, because that's the language of your land and people. There is a story about the riots of the years 36 until 39, riots against Jews in the promised land. These riots are known today as the Arab Revolt. The Arab Revolt was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs against the British mandate and the mass Jewish immigration. A Jewish bus on its way, Arabs started shooting, one of the Jewish passengers shouted, Yorim Alainu, Kulam Nishkov. They're shooting at us, everybody line down. One of his friends stood up and said, do shistmen, une rete brache, it was Yiddish. He they are shooting and he talks Hebrew. At the middle of the riots, in the Jewish bus, there was the battle between Hebrew and Yiddish. And indeed, in the

1930s and 40s, in an era that celebrated the figure of that subar, the strong, virile, tanned Israeli, toiling away on the fields of the kibbutz, Yiddish was losing that battle big time. Yiddish movies were boycotted, kiosks selling Yiddish papers were attacked, and local Yiddish musicians were banned from performing. All those Yiddish books saved from Eastern Europe and lovingly brought to the new land of the Jews lay yellowing on dusty shelves. In a country that was trying to forget the Holocaust, they represented something weak, even shameful. I remember this woman when I met her, she was like beyond the 80s and she told me she came here to Israel and with this whole feeling of wanting to give, she came from Vilna after the destruction and wanting to educate the children. And she says, and here I arrived, and the first thing that she saw is the grace she started to talk to the children in Yiddish and they immediately there were three, four years old and they were putting their hands on their ears so they shouldn't hear like the head is already inborn reaction to Yiddish. And this hurt her so much.

And she says, how did I know to close the ears? Like little children, innocent little children, how did I know this? And this pain when she told me was as if it was fresh in the life and she told me like my husband, when he died, he told me it cannot be that they will continue seeing Yiddish like this. They at some point it will change and here you have arrived to take the books and so so I felt like a calling. Soon Mendy's little Jerusalem apartment was overflowing with donated books and so he decided to make it all official and call it a library, Jung Yiddish. Jung Yiddish Jung means young and Yiddish so it's to relate to the young energy, to the rejuvenating energy of Yiddish, like if you have young and young so you also should have Jung. At the beginning this was it was really like Hush Hush people told each other from word of mouth. People came from neighbouring canters, Yeshua

students or people who like literature who know to sing. The center was thriving but Mendy was a bit of spielkiss as they say. And with the sunny beaches of the Mediterranean calling he decided to get on route number one and head 45 minutes west to the big city of Tel Aviv. He set up shop temporarily in the basement of an office building but when that space was taken over by a kindergarten a few years later he found himself together with oh 20 ,000 books and counting, evicted and out on the street. Yeah when you're refugee you know with books or with peckler you don't have much time to think every day is like survival like a Jewish, Jewish survivors not like the survival of television you know. Desperate he followed a tip

from friends of friends which led him to the behemoth bus station. There as luck would have it and something had been attempt to revive the reviled space the city had begun offering cheap rents to encourage artists to move in. As I saw this place it was like a deserted parking lot with birds flying around and no windows and nothing no electricity. I had like seven tons of Jewish books that I needed to find a house for. And so I said that's it that's the place. He fixed the windows he swept the floor brought in some secondhand Persian rugs and moved in with his hoard of Yiddish treasure. If you go to Mendes Kingdom today there are like 40 ,000 books there it's amazing. Periodicals and magazines fill the cavernous space behind the office they're lined up on shelves they're propped up on the walls they're piled high all over the ground. Health magazines for more saucers circa 1924 joke books

are the 1930s villainous and beautifully illustrated children's books from New York in the 1940s. There are novels by Shlomela Ettinger and Chaim Grada poems by Manny Laid they're plays by Yudlamed Parrots and translations of everything from Pushkin to Hemingway to Seravantes all in Yiddish. Stop by you won't be alone on any given day besides Mendy and the occasional volunteer cataloging books or organizing a temporary exhibition you're as likely as not to find. Oh maybe a few bearded chassids in the corner who've popped in for a schmooze or a handful of Russian immigrants reading their tomb color or looking up something in an avarum raisin poem. They're occasional curious tourists to wander in or shy students who don't know a shlamille from a shlamazzle but who will show up with a letter from a grandparent they've found and need translated and then they're the young hipsters lounging around having a smoke with Mendy. Yiddish has become like a really a fringe culture it does not have a home it does not have a nation does not have establishment

so many groups who also feel that they're not part of the establishment they must they're the fringes of society they connect with Yiddish so be it lesbians or homosexuals or people who don't feel at home with this Hebrew militarism they find Yiddish a more peaceful and more lenient culture to connect to. Several times a month Yiddish fans of all sorts gather here for themed evenings everything from sing -alongs to cabarets to holocaust memorials to herring and kugel tastings. Mendy will typically get up on stage at some point often with a visiting artist in tow and with the always appreciative crowds swaying and humming along he will begin to crew. This evening he's invited his keyboard player a small lady in her 70s to

center stage she takes the microphone flashes a sort of flirtatious smile pushes back her gray hair strikes a pose and channels eat a thp off in Yiddish of course the crowd to use a Yiddish word my mom taught me kvels at the end of the evening we sit around near the oversized cushions depicting the greats of Yiddish literature mandal and mocharts foyerim shalom alaykum and youdlamid parrots and we talk mandy pours out the masjke the vodka for a bissella haim he says

and rolls himself another cigarette the bus is rumble overhead shaking the entire room and a muffled announcement in Hebrew informs us that the 394 will soon be leaving for the city of alat and then it's quiet for a moment allowing my thoughts to wander those great Yiddish writers and thinkers who so yearned and dreamed the land of israel what would they make of this central bus station library i asked mandy how would they feel about this place provided to them in their promised homeland well don't know if they will dance from joy because on the one hand like they come from there were millions of readers around them and here these books are a little bit left aside a little bit hurt but there's so many intelligent bright things and so much work in these books so much thoughts if i would have some money i would make panels that you can see the writers their

biographies and then you could see the richness of all this but for the moment this is the best we could do so that's it but i believe it will crawl maybe that's what journalist Dana Harman of Israel story brought us that piece and now a trip to the not so distant future where print is dying and words can vanish alaina gradin has written an intellectual thriller called the word exchange begins like this on a very cold and

lonely friday last november my father disappeared from the dictionary and not only from the big glass building on broadway where its offices were housed on that night my father Douglas Samuel Johnson chief editor of the North American dictionary of the english language slipped from the actual artifact he'd helped compose that was before the dictionary died letters expiring on the page before the virus before our language dissolved like so much melting snow alaina your book starts with such an ingenious premise printed books have disappeared language itself is endangered and words have been monetized everyone now communicates with devices called memes which are sort of like smartphones on steroids but networked into your brain exactly so the book is set a few years in the future people have become even more dependent on their devices than say i am on my iphone and that's how they

access language and the meme really is sort of the next generation of the kind of devices that we all use now and also some users have gotten an optional microchip and planted in their brains and that's what makes it possible yeah for language to be disrupted oh so this is a futuristic noir thriller so of course there is an evil corporation and in this case some tech moguls have figured out as you said how to monetize words explain how does this work so because people have become even more dependent on these devices they've actually sort of yielded more and more of the functionalities that we may be once thought of as fundamental to our humanity decision making and even using language and they've started to forget some kind of obscure words initially they forget things that maybe they just don't use that regularly or don't come across like

paradox or cynical but their device gives them the option to download the definition from this vast online database which is called the word exchange the same title of my book and so for a small fee i think two cents at the beginning of the book they can get just the flash of a little definition and they can continue on with their conversation or reading their email and the developers of this device are in fact the same developers who own this vast database of language and so they decided that maybe they would you know exploit that memory and language loss a little bit in this way this is such a brilliant evil idea it was a little scary to read i mean when you thought about corporations buying and and then selling the rights to words did you think no way that's too far fetched or did you think oh yeah that could happen well you know i obviously in many ways this book is meant to be a little bit fantastical and by setting it in the future i was interested in maybe shining a

bit of a light on the present so now there are huge conglomerates that have consolidated holdings of lots of things music film things that we sort of didn't ever imagine being consolidated in those ways and yet you know that's become a reality and i was sort of interested in thinking about applying that process to language and looking at what might happen if you know an outside force were to determine for us what words we had access to what information we had access to i'm curious are you the kind of person who reads dictionaries for fun i do yeah so i mean there are a lot of unusual words in my book and partly the reason for that is that the characters are lexicographers so they come across words that other people don't encounter and then part of the reason for that is that over the course of the book some of the characters catch this virus which they refer to as word flu and so their language actually devolves over the course of the book that is one of the scariest parts of the of

the book this this language plague can you explain more about it sure so because the devices are hooked into people's physiology it makes it possible for there to be a virus that in many ways mimics a computer virus and it's referred to as word flu because it garbles people's speech and language garbles at how they'll think of a word that is really not exactly the word that they intended to use or they'll just sort of flip flap letters within a word in a way that makes it really difficult for them to communicate and like a virus it's exactly it's communicable it's communicable and also it's kind of seeding ordinary accepted language with these nonsense words that will appear it gets harder and harder to tell what's a real word and what isn't you know I wanted to use language as its own tool for demonstrating what the significance of its loss would be for us and I wanted to sort of at least

suggest the alienation that we might feel if we no longer had access to this incredible resource that that only works because we all share in the work of learning it and maintaining it and you know letting it evolve together well Elena before I let you go I was going to ask if you would give us one more reading there's a little meditation just a little short meditation about language that I love and I wanted if you'd read it I would be honored okay so this is taken from the journals of one of the characters whose name is Bart and he unfortunately later succumbs in the book to word flu and he's writing in his book about some of the reasons that language is so important to him and why he wanted to devote his life to studying it recording it and making it possible for other people to access it and this is one of the things that he writes in his journal about why he loves language language is infinite it can be as creative and as chillingly

precise as the human mind bomb and brand shrimp flation egie a word coined per conditions distinct to the 20th century means incendiary bombs shrunken bodies less distressing in a sense is shita farcey left over dinner that's eaten for breakfast or the indonesian jayus to bungle a joke so badly that your interlocutor feels forced to laugh in japanese koi no yoken means the ineluctible feeling you have upon meeting someone for the first time that eventually the two of you will fall in love words compress impressions into facts cold as frozen quarters one single word like emergency or love can revise a whole night a whole life alana gradin her new novel is called the word exchange

coming up a true story from the 1960s a hippie kid becomes a doctor and winds up helping save the world from smallpox i'm answering champs it's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin public radio and pr i public radio international i don't know about you but i'm having a bit of a hard time these days cutting through all the post -election bitterness and negativity so for a change here's a story about hope and idealism that didn't crash and burn it's a story about a guy who went looking for enlightenment and wound up helping to eliminate one of the worst diseases in history his name is larry brilliant he's a doctor and he's one of the key players in the fight to defeat smallpox in fact he presided over the last known cases he also founded a non -profit that cured more than two million cases of blindness but none of this is how he started out in his new memoir sometimes brilliant larry tells the story of how as a young man he got swept up in that whole summer of love

psychedelic hippie thing and eventually he landed in the Himalayas at an Indian ashram where his guru told him that his destiny was to cure smallpox as larry told Steve Paulson his whole life has been a series of unlikely events starting with becoming a hippie well i was from Detroit michigan which i think explains that i hadn't seen very much of the coasts and i certainly was unprepared for what i would see in the summer of love in san francisco and it really wasn't fair to do to a young boy like me to try michigan and i didn't resist i have to confess it was like opening up a candy box to a kid and that candy box was freedom and self -expression playfulness a sense of humor a little bit too much hedonism sex drugs and rock and roll is what you're talking about sex drugs and rock and roll without any question and it was it was amazing uh and it wasn't

just hedonism hedonism hedonism it was this is the beginning of the age of aquarius this is a time of freedom and justice and partying to top it all off i was there during the summer as a government employee and i had a job which was to check hospitals for discrimination but indeed that was my day job at night my job was to understand the counterculture you're quite right about that so you basically became a hippie doctor i hadn't yet become a hippie doctor that happened when i met wavy gravy wavy gravy that the the the famous sort of clown prince of the counterculture yes then my uh my transformation from activist to hippie was complete so for people who who've never heard of wavy gravy can you describe this man because he really sounds like one of a kind he was um on the bus uh and part of the uh merry pranksters he then started his own commune kind of a uh parallel to ken keese's

commune called uh the hog farm and the hog farm was invited uh to go to uh woodstock and to provide food and the clown persona is just his way of getting around in costume of of disarming people too right i mean he's always been an activist but he wanted to get people to drop their defenses yeah wavy doesn't have any enemies you're you're not going to find people who say uh let's go out and beat up wavy gravy that's just not the way it works so you see you met a lot of the the icons of the sixties ken keese tim leery you're possible of LSD Richard Alpert uh leery's one -time Harvard colleague later became rom does it must have been pretty heavy stuff yeah they you're talking about my friends now you know certainly rom does and my wife and i lived in the same ashram that he lived in in him leas uh we were taken by his book be here now uh ken keese uh stayed in my apartment in san francisco

many times and and of course tim leery who was uh Richard Alpert's colleague no how did psychedelics figure into that whole scene LSD psilocybin and the other stuff that was going around well i think it was part of the the water we drank just about uh and it was uh certainly on the medicine ball caravan on this movie which was the only time i took LSD and psilocybin in large quantities over a very intense period of time it was part of the caravan and it was an amazing time for me did that change it i mean oh yeah it definitely changed me it made me unable to go down the road that i was going down as an activist uh you know the peace march the non -violence was leading into a violent kind of anti -war um the sds becoming the weatherman that transition i couldn't go there um i couldn't see how people would pick up guns now you and your

wife Elaine you later changed your name but uh you you joined wavy gravy on the hog farm bus and it was quite an odyssey at least as you write about our tub what was this all about this bus trip well first of all we had an expression in those days you're either on the bus or you're off the bus we were really on the bus there's no question and wavy and the hog farm that we were not formally part of at that point uh decided they wanted to continue on the road and and buy another bus turned out to be two buses and drive from London through Europe and Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan and Iraq and into Pakistan and India and up uh either to Nepal or to go to Bangladesh which wavy thought we should do to bring food and medical supplies to people who had been uh devastated by a cyclone in 1972 and gyrgion i my wife Elaine and i traveled with the bus from Istanbul to Kathmandu and that was an amazing experience now to jump ahead in the story a little bit so

you've already had your taste of India and you end up going back to India uh your wife has spent a lot of time at an ashram with the famous uh Hindu spiritual guru named Karuli Baba and you end up going there as well how did that happen my wife decided that she wanted to find the guru of Baba Ramdas named Karuli Baba and so she had gone to his ashram and uh war had broken out between India and Pakistan and we could not communicate with each other very well phone calls were difficult to come by uh telegrams were often misinterpreted she would say and her telegrams to me come here immediately and i would get back telegrams that seemed to say i am living with another man and the part about him being a guru and named Karuli Baba wasn't all that clear so our communication was a little complicated and in the end we negotiated a settlement that uh she would come back to San Francisco for Christmas and

i would pledge to go back to India with her to meet this man named Karuli Baba and we went to live for what turned out to be a couple of years but when when you first got there i mean your wife was totally committed i mean this is what she wanted to do with her life and you say that it was a hard landing for you i mean you you thought you were going to have this amazing transformative experience as soon as you got there you didn't now that's right i i knew i wanted to find something that would change me into a better person spiritually i'd been reading the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita and but i hadn't found the right thing for me and i was so hoping that by going back and staying in the sashraam that had where randas had been changed and so many others that that i too would become changed but my the first couple of weeks there the scene seemed pagan to me there were all these idols these young Americans that were touching this old man's feet i mean it just seemed like i was not

destined to be part i thought it was a cult i thought my my wife had been captured by a cult and and the way you read about this is i mean when when things weren't working out with you there they weren't working out in your marriage as well and they looked like that's right the things were going to fall apart oh because if my wife had to choose between her guru and me there was no contest and i loved her very much and i didn't want to lose her and i had my own dark night of the soul except it was during the day and i went out on a lake near the sashraam in nani tall i started thinking about god i think i recited every prayer that i'd ever learned whether it was Hebrew or whether it was Tibetan Sanskrit or i was trying to find a way to get a sign that it was the right place for me to stay but i got nothing back i i was bargaining with god i mean just give me an oil slick with a little rainbow

in the oil slick nobody else needs to see it i'll take that but nothing i thought she's been captured by a cult and it isn't my cult so you were gonna leave at that point i packed my bags we cried we hogged the next morning she said uh you're leaving but would you at least go and say goodbye to him and i said yeah i don't go say goodbye to him and we packed everything in a taxi and we went down to the sashraam and i told the taxi driver to wait and we went into uh to say goodbye to him and he he was in his room and there was a um we call it a tucket it was just a wooden cot that he would sit on and had a little blanket on it and the villagers who adored him who worshipped him who venerated him had made a what's called a mandala out of flowers and fruits they had brought them in it's like a drawing but they had instead of a drawing they had written the name of ram which is the name

of god ram and they had made the name of ram out of apples and oranges and flower petals and one of the apples had fallen down it rolled off the cot and so i reached down to pick up the apple to put it back on the tucket to complete the name of god and named croweybaba who we called maraji he burst out of his room he saw me he saw my hand on the ground picking up the apple and he stepped on my hand and all of a sudden my worst nightmare i was touching his feet and i couldn't get my hand out from under his foot and he pinned me down there and he started to laugh and he said and it's the first time he had ever said anything to me i'd been there for more than a week he never even noticed me and i and now he looked at me he said you weren't here yesterday and you know it's an awkward position to be down on your knees you just want to get the hell out of there right i couldn't you know i couldn't get my the apple out of my hand he's standing on my hand you were not here yesterday i said that's

true yeah he's speaking hindi which i understand a little bit of and then he said you weren't here yesterday we were sick no you weren't sick i and he's talking to himself he said were you flying a kite no you weren't flying a kite were you swimming in the lake and i'm thinking that's the most polluted lake on the planet he's not really seriously he said no no you were at the lake but you weren't swimming what were you doing at the lake and up until now he'd only spoke and in hindi but lake he said in english and i felt the kind of shutter in my back and and then he looked down at me says what were you doing at the lake yesterday oh yes you were talking to god did you ask for a sign and he said that in english and when he said it it was like everything in my life had pointed towards that moment and i started crying and i mean i'm a scientist there was nothing in my rational mind or in my science training that could explain that he

knew that i was i mean i hadn't told him you hadn't told your wife that you what you would know i wouldn't tell anybody and certainly nobody knew i'd been trying to recite every prayer i had memorized in every different language so a sign would appear and then he released my hand and he started rubbing my beard my i was crying and he was wiping away my tears and he said uh doctor america that was the name he gave me doctor america i mean they say in all the ancient texts that the teacher will initiate you i had some idea you'd walk into a room put a robot and you'd you'd do some incantation there'd be candles and you know this was my initiation how do you explain that i mean how do you explain that he knew this dark night of the soul or dark day of the soul for you and that you know you'd lost hope and this was the moment that he was going to reach out to you i can't explain it nor can i explain how years later he told me out of the blue that i would be transformed yet again from dr america into

UNO doctor and work for the united nations and work to help to eradicate smallpox i i mean maybe somebody could have seen me on the lake that's possible but you don't believe that i mean you you something else no i don't believe it but i try to i try to honestly answer the question what do i think happened i don't know but i don't i don't think it's the magic part or the you know ascribing superpowers to him part or that is the least bit interesting to me how he captured my heart was that when i sat in front of him and he was talking about the lake and maybe reading my mind i don't know i knew that he loved everybody in the world i could feel the love coming from him but it was not a surprise to me that he loved everybody in the world he was supposed to that was his job but what had happened in that moment was that i felt that i loved everybody in the world and i had never

felt like i loved everybody in the world to me there were there were cops and there were marchers there were soldiers and there were Vietnamese or the everything had been binary but in that moment and in many moments since then i don't feel like there's anyone i hate and that was not something that i was prepared for and that is the reason that i stayed Larry Brilliant went on to join the World Health Organization team in India that eradicated the world's remaining cases of smallpox you can hear that story and more in an extended version of Steve's interview on our website at ttbook .org brilliant later became the first executive director of google .org and his memoir is called sometimes brilliant that's it for the show today but there's always more in our podcast feed to sign up visit iTunes or Stitcher to the best of our knowledge comes to you from Madison and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio this hour was put together by Steve Paulson with help from Raymond

Tonga Carr Doug Gordon Charles Monroe Kane and Mark Rickers our theme music comes from Steve Mullin at walk west music our technical director is Carrille Owen i'm Ann Strangeamps until next time