An American story

- Against odds, Jobs wrote his destiny

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JOBS WELL DONE

Steve Jobs made the computer a thing of beauty, and therefore, to stay with the poet's words, a joy forever. He not only made computers a necessity of modern life but he also made them aesthetically appealing. Taste was an important element in all that Jobs did. He believed that great products were always statements of good taste. The beauty of all that Jobs put out on the market emanated from his unique ability to make complex and intricate products incredibly simple. Here lay his genius. In this sense, he was like a philosopher. In his mind he grappled, as philosophers invariably do, with devastatingly complicated ideas or entities and then communicated them in easy, elegant and comprehensible terms. In thought and in deed, elegance, for Jobs, was an important and indispensable category. He did not believe that his products were worth anything unless they looked and felt beautiful. He refused to accept the divorce between form and content. Jobs was an artist and a philosopher who was coincidentally an innovator and an entrepreneur.

Jobs refused to swim with the tide. This, for him, was the easy way out. He loved being different. When the entire world of business took the path of decision-making through committees — men and women in black suits or dresses, one Steve Jobs, college drop-out and sometime hippy, chose to be the maverick in faded blue jeans and black turtleneck jersey. He celebrated individuality over the power of the committee men. When business decisions were taken on the basis of elaborate market research, Jobs decided to trust his instincts, his gut feelings. He had no faith in market research. One of his memorable quips was: "It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." He picked up the gauntlet thrown down by market research and went on to create his own market. He refashioned the world of business. Jobs was always confident that what he was offering his consumers was nothing short of the best. This confidence and the relentless pursuit of the best and the beautiful made him an entrepreneur that others could only envy, never emulate. Steve Jobs excelled in being excellent.

Jobs had the rare gift that the gods give only to a few humans — of transforming dreams into reality. His early critics commented that he created a "reality distortion field". As if with one movement on the tracking pad, those three mocking words soon became words of unalloyed admiration. Yesterday's distorted reality, in Jobs's skilled hands, became today's everyday reality and tomorrow's beacon. Jobs had a vision and opted to live by that. He knew no other way to conduct his life. Jobs's life work is rightly associated with the name of a simple but healthy fruit. The reasons of naming his company are not exactly known, but apples have played significant parts in human history. Adam offered one to Eve and this resulted in the emergence of human beings from the world of illusory innocence. A falling apple ushered in modern science. And then there was Steve Jobs.

An American story

- Against odds, Jobs wrote his destiny

OUR BUREAU

Oct. 7: He was neither a king nor a movie star.

Yet from Barack Obama to Manmohan Singh, from Google to Microsoft, from the Vatican to a satirical newspaper that used the F-word, the world paused yesterday to pay tribute to Steven Paul Jobs, who changed lives in his short life that did not cross 56 years and ended on Wednesday.

Even some who shrugged their shoulders were compelled to do so with a digital wisecrack: "iDon't care."

How Jobs transformed daily lives has been chronicled in a waterfall of emotion on Twitter, which clocked 6,049 tweets a second and pulled past the 5,008 that Osama bin Laden's death had ignited. However, perhaps in an unwitting tribute to Jobs's obsessive stress on curiosity, the tweets on his death remained second to those (8,868 per second) about Beyonce Knowles's baby bump at the MTV video music awards last month.

In the avalanche, what appears to have been overshadowed is the all-American, or perhaps only-American, narrative of the Jobs story.

His was truly an American story, an astonishing tale of a mortal who emphatically wrote his own destiny right from the time he was given up for adoption by a Syrian immigrant into the US.

Consider the twists and turns of his life — some would have been enough to derail the lives of many other individuals, some others would have given them reason enough to rest on their laurels.

Jonathan Mak, a 19-year-old design student, poses with his laptop showing a self-designed sombre logo in tribute of Apple founder Steve Jobs in Hong Kong on Friday. The logo, with Jobs's silhouette incorporated into the bite of a white Apple logo, has gone viral on
the Internet. (AFP)

Biological parents giving him up for adoption, parents without college education adopting him, then he himself dropping out of college, backpacking in India, co-founding Apple when he was 20, getting kicked out at 30, letting his creative prowess flower during such a low, pioneering computer-generated imagery through Pixar Animation Studios (remember Toy Story), muscling his way back to the top at Apple, launching the three game-changer devices one after the other (iPod, iPhone and iPad), getting diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in between, undergoing a liver transplant yet not allowing it to stand in the way of innovation and eventually calling it a day in one of the most graceful exits ever.

David Pogue, the personal technology columnist of The New York Times, put it in words that the Apple generation will understand. "Here's a guy who never finished college, never went to business school, never worked for anyone else a day in his adult life. So how did he become the visionary who changed every business he touched?"

Could it have happened in any country other than the US? Not many modern-day fairytales tell the tale of such accomplishment in any other country in the face of adversities or in the absence of privilege.

"In the Mahabharata, Karna boasted that birth may be ordained by the gods but fate is ordained by man. Yet in the end, Karna was not allowed to come up trumps," said an Indian Apple admirer, who underscored the individual brilliance of Jobs.

In a way, the land of Karna did play a role in shaping Jobs's vision. He came to India in the summer of 1974 in an elusive quest for a little-known messiah named Neem Karoli Baba — not unlike the lama in Rudyard Kipling's Kim and his gruelling search for the arrow that the Buddha supposedly fired from his deathbed.

Failing to find the Baba — and doubled up in pain after a severe bout of dysentery — Jobs had his satori moment, a sudden burst of enlightenment. "It was one of the first times that I started to realise that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together."

It's apt that at the precise moment of enlightenment, he should have thought of Edison. It gave direction to his life. Like Edison, Jobs committed himself to a life of re-fashioning existing inventions to produce a range of fascinating products that no one had conceived before.

He would borrow ideas aggressively — even from competing teams within Apple. "If he saw something that could be made better, smarter and more beautiful, nothing else mattered," Pogue wrote in The New York Times.

Although the counterculture of the 1960s influenced Jobs and he was a fan of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Joan Baez, his creative approach to business was coupled with a sometimes ruthless, autocratic nature. The unconventional single-mindedness and self-belief made Jobs a most conventionally successful businessman.

His personal life too had its share of controversies. His journalist daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, was born in 1978, just as Apple was experiencing significant growth. Her mother, Chris-Ann Brennan, was for a time forced to bring Lisa up on welfare after Jobs initially refused to accept paternity. Jobs later expressed regret for the way he had handled the situation when he had found out he was about to become a father.

It is perhaps this mixture of personal frailties and indomitable will to beat back odds that made Jobs such an acceptable figure in death in spite of his supposed irascibility, petulance, combativeness, ruthlessness and desire to control all aspects of his personal and working life.

The best compliments came from his rivals. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and for so long Jobs's nemesis, said that it had been "an insanely great honour" to know him. Google, the business arch-rival of Apple, added a tribute to its most valuable asset, its home page — "Steve Jobs, 1955-2011".

Jairam Ramesh, India's rural development minister, did not think twice before saying: "I use the entire gamut of Apple products… actually, it is not a product, but god's gift."

CPM politburo member and Rajya Sabha MP Sitaram Yechury is also an iPad loyalist. "I am using iPad and it is quite useful and user-friendly. I have not tried other products," Yechury said.

Pogue answered the question that he raised — "how did he become a visionary" — by recalling Jobs's commencement address to the graduating students at Stanford in 2005, "the secret that defined him in every action, every decision, every creation of his tragically unfinished life".

Jobs had said: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

That in a nutshell is the American story — the likes of which were told and retold in classrooms there and prompted America to stake claim to the title of the greatest nation on earth.

It is also a testimony to how much Jobs understood modern America better than those who govern it. "Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era's large institutions and centralised decision-making, that technology would free them from traditional workplaces and the limits of a physical marketplace. This was the underlying point of 'think different' — that our choices were no longer dictated by the whims of huge companies or the offerings at the local mall. This was the point of a computer that enabled you to customise virtually every setting, no matter how inconsequential, so that no two users had the exact same experience," The New York Times wrote.

Aware how badly America now needs the qualities of Jobs, President Barack Obama said yesterday: "Steve was among the greatest of American innovators, brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."

Jobs's self-confidence could sometimes be indistinguishable from arrogance and self-aggrandisement. At an Apple Halloween party during the wild early years, he reportedly came dressed as Jesus. (In a rare tribute for a lay person, Jobs's career was celebrated on Thursday on the front page of the Vatican's newspaper.) But it was an arrogance tempered by faith in the power of technology to improve lives.

The satirical newspaper The Onion underscored this point nicely in its news story on Jobs's death. The headline said: "Last American Who Knew What the F*** He Was Doing Dies."

But it is deep in the nature of Silicon Valley to challenge such sentiments. "I don't want to take anything away from the guy, he was brilliant and uncompromising and wonderful, but there's a level of adulation that goes beyond what is merited," said Tim 'Reilly, chief executive of the tech publisher 'Reilly Media. "There will be revolutions and revolutionaries to come."

With reports from the Times, London, and New York Times News Service

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