Steve Jobs: The man who gave next generation to life

For as long as I can think back, I’ve had no connection whatsoever with this man Steve Jobs whose demise, at age 56 due to pancreatic cancer, has convulsed the world. I could never afford to own a Macbook or even pretend to understand its complex working conditions; its non-Windows programming showed me up as more of a technology retard than I really consider myself to be; I am yet to own any of his i-line gizmos, their price tags often mocking me and many others like me in this side of the world.

In fact, Jobs himself showed a blatant contempt for the much revered, population propelled market called India, giving it a studied go by in so many of his legendary product launches. His first generation iPhone, which cost $200 in the West, cost nothing less than Rs 39,000 in India becoming an elitist status symbol more than a device meant to answer calls. The only time Jobs ever came to India was on a crazy spiritual journey in his formative years — one of the very few that proved to be so singularly futile that this success bomb ticking and exploding all over the hi-tech ramp never thought of returning the favour to our land.

Come to think of it, Jobs was not even my kind of man from what I’ve read about him. Arrogant, brusque, a control freak and a billionaire totally derisive of even a modicum of charity, he was someone who wouldn’t blink even once about cutting into the privileges of handicapped people. He disowned his daughter from his girlfriend for a long, long time and even cheated his friend with whom he started his hi-tech journey from a garage.

Yet, very strangely, I was first shocked and then felt bereaved when I heard at 6 am the other day that Steve Jobs had passed away on the other side of the world. Why? I reasoned with myself, thinking it must have had something to do with perhaps the amount I had read on this man ever since he stepped down as CEO of Apple Inc this August on health grounds.

It must also have had something to do with the fact that Job’s eccentric and yet scintillating journey was stunningly cocky. He prospered on audacity of all measures. He beat down cancer till he physically could, mocked death with a tightly packed life timetable, and is credited to have propelled the single most important thing that will consume the world’s nine billion lives in the coming days, months and years — technology — smart, good-looking and unprecedented technology.

Indeed, there must be something in a man who could so consistently ride his failures that success got a new meaning in his deft ways. He dropped out of college, yet his lectures were the most eagerly awaited annual events to which people from all walks of life would die to get a ticket for, much like sold out rock concerts; there must have been really something unprecedented in a man to be thrown out of a company he founded, only to be sought after voraciously by the same men looking for business salvation 12 years later in the hands of this marketing genius, master innovator and the ultimate messiah of handcrafted technology.

Apparently, Jobs had as much fascination for his black turtle necks and faded jeans and sneakers as he had for nano designs. As personal technology specialist Steve Lohr of the Times who spent a lot of time with the man in point wrote, Steve Jobs once rejected a mother board merely because it looked ugly. This, despite the fact that only technicians would have ever seen its innards!

He had the same problem with Microsoft, the products of which he openly called third rate copycats, insisting that his assessment was not powered by competition but by the sheer lack of taste in the Bill Gates camp. “The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste. They don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their products. I have no problem with their success – they’ve earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products,” he said on tape of a TV documentary titled Triumph of the Nerds last year.

Indeed, Gates and Jobs were a culture apart, be it persona or business. Gates is the man everyone would love and respect; Jobs an unabashed megalomaniac anyone would hate to love but will be forced to respect; Gates believed in giving, in corporate responsibility in upping living conditions worldwide; Jobs had no such mission or even a pretension of it; his one and only mantra was fiercely pocket-driven and individualistic; it was always and always only business, competitive, innovative, money-propelled business. Gates is the ultimate ‘we’ man; Jobs an intrinsically ‘i’ man.

Yet, when history will judge the two greats of the superhighway, Gates may be for the heart but Jobs will definitely be for the head — the man who gave culture to technology, beauty to design, innovation to gadgets, elitism to devices, variety to wires, and the next generation to life. That’s a contribution few can rival in the universe, that’s Steve Jobs’ law of Edisonian gravity, his Adamistic seduction of the new-age apple and his ultimate uniqueness of giving iconic stature to being hungry and foolish.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, October 9, 2011