Steve Jobs, the Baba

In a Rajnikant film, the protagonist turns ‘Rajnikant’ after a visit to the Himalayas. In fact, his conscious goes there to meet a Baba and the hero becomes ‘Baba’. He acquires a magical power taking the potboiler to the dizzy heights of entertainment.

Steve Jobs was the ‘Rajnikant’ of tech world. His words were prophecy to come true. His touch was magical turning dead hardware a lively world of fairy tale. He was a magician.

How could he do that?

We Indians have fascination in believing in miracles. The magician Jobs was born after Steve Paul Jobs came to the Himalayas. He became ‘Baba’ after he met a Baba there. There after Jobs was a great entertainer; business became entertainment and the entertainment reached its dizzy heights under him.

A 19-year old Jobs arrived in India, in 1974, accompanied by his friend Dan Kottke, who later became Apple’s first employee. Soon he had swapped his jeans and T-shirt for dotis as he set out from Delhi for the Himalayas.

While he was searching for Neem Karoli Baba, Jobs chanced upon a mendicant from whom he begged for food. The mendicant was the real Baba. Seeing upon him sitting there devouring, the Baba walked over to JObs and sat down and burst out laughing. The language was not a barrier as the Baba knew how to address a soul. As the conversation continued, he rolled on the ground with laughter.

Then he grabbed the young man by his arm and took him up the mountain trail. Jobs found it little funny, because there were hundreds of Indians who had traveled for thousands of miles to hang out with this guy for some fleeting moments and he had just tumbled in only for some thing to eat and was being dragged up the mountain path by the Baba.

When they got to the top of the mountain, they found a little well and pond, and the next thing Jobs knew was the Baba dunking his head in the water and pulling out a razor from his pocket to start shaving his head. Jobs never quite understood why the bizarre Indian Baba dragged him away from the rest of the crowd and shaved his head atop a mountain peak.

Ours is the land where an atheist Narendra becoming a champion of divinity and religion just by a touch of his master, to conquer the world. For us it is not a wonder the Baba gracing the Jobs to become Jobs.

Then how else an unwanted child, who was given away by his unmarried parents to someone for adoption on account of their inability to raise him as they were just students, could have scaled up such heights? He was the guy 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?

But, attributing the feat to mere miracle is not only doing injustice to the genius but also reflecting on our pettiness unable to reconise the task done. The achievement was not for no reason. David Pogue, in his obit, writes ‘the story of Jobs boils down to this: Don’t go with the flow.’

‘Steve Jobs refused to go with the flow. If he saw something that could be made better, smarter or beautiful, nothing else mattered. Not internal politics, not economic convention, not social grace,’ Pogue says.

We saw a man swimming upstream, against the currents, to show even a lesser breed can reach the heights and it is the miracle of the perfect focus on the target regardless of any distraction. Did he get the focus after his head was shaven in the Himalayas? Let us believe so, because it can make us believe Jobs is ‘our Baba.’