Fwd: Bharat visit gave a vision to Steve Jobs

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On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 11:22:28 AM UTC-7, Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote:

India visit gave a vision to Steve Jobs

By Shashank Chouhan
India Today
http://indiatoday.intoday.in
October 13, 2011

New Delhi - Before he began his journey to becoming
perhaps one of the greatest innovators of our time, Steve
Jobs embarked on a journey to find his inner self in
India. In the 1970s, Steve had just joined his first
company Atari and was hooked to the Eastern philosophy of
Nirvana. He read up some bestseller philosophical guides
of the day and decided he had to visit India where the
Kumbh Mela was on. He came with college friend Daniel
Kottke, who later became the first employee of Apple.
Kottke put together the first Apple computer in Steve
Jobs' garage along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in
1976.

The memories of the heady 70s that Steve spent in India
are hazy - the duo didn't maintain any diary and did not
have cameras. They were here to get away from materialism
after all. The experience changed the thinking of Steve
Jobs who returned as a Buddhist with a shaved head and
whose faith in human intelligence and technology was
strengthened while they visited Neem Karoli Baba, the
well-known mystic of that era.

In an exclusive interview to Indiatoday.in, Daniel Kottke
throws light on that visit and what went on and into one
of the most brilliant minds ever.

[Q] What are your thoughts on Steve's passing away?

Daniel Kottke: I was hoping he'd have some kind of
miraculous recovery though it was hard to be optimistic
after seeing the photos of how he looked right after his
resignation in late August.

Steve was a huge influence on my life, both for good and
for bad. For all his brilliance, he definitely had a dark
side and treated many people harshly at times but we are
all sad he has left us so soon and personally I am
inclined to be much more forgiving of his shortcomings at
this point.

[Q] How did the two of you become friends?

We met during the first few weeks of our freshman year at
Reed College but our friendship blossomed over our mutual
interest in the book 'Be Here Now' which had just been
published... which led to seeking out other books in the
vein of Eastern spirituality - in particular
Autobiography of a Yogi, Ramakrishna and his Disciples,
Way of the White Clouds, Cutting Through Spiritual
Materialism, Zen Mind/Beginner's Mind.

[Q] Did he show any signs of being the genius that he was
in his college days?

I would say he was not remarkable in any particular way
but a very thoughtful young man with a wide-open,
inquiring mind and a good sense for adventure, and a good
sense of humour. He had a passion for ideas that
paralleled my own and led to many long discussions about
the nature of reality and consciousness. The quality that
had the most appeal for him was 'clarity'... which I
think he got from Suzuki Roshi (Zen Mind/Beginner's
Mind).

[Q] What do you think was in his mind when he quit
college? What did he say before doing it?

He had already withdrawn as an enrolled student before I
got to know him; he did that within the first few weeks.
What he said later was that he felt he was spending "his
parents' savings" and had doubts about how much he needed
to be on the college degree track. I thought it was odd
at the time... now I think he must've had a sense of
ambition and future success that I didn't see in him at
the time (in order to take that step of getting the
tuition money back). But he did stay at Reed auditing
classes most of that entire first year.

[Q] Did he always want to do what he ended up doing or
was it a change in plan?

I don't see how he could've had a 'plan' as the
technology that enabled Apple's success was so new. I do
think that by the time Apple II came out, he grasped its
immense potential as a transformative factor in our
lives, and he pursued that vision relentlessly.

[Q] How and why did you two decide to visit India?

As I said it was first 'Be Here Now' about Neem Karoli
Baba, and then a whole series of further books about
Eastern spirituality that set the stage for our trip.
Then he found work at Atari in Los Gatos which gave him
the financial resources for the trip. Then it was our
mutual friend Robert Friedland who told us about the
Kumbh Mela in Hardwar/Rishikesh in the summer of 1974
which was the springboard for deciding to go.

[Q] What was your impression of India?

We were very young and had no preconceptions... we wore
khadi kurtas and lungis, trying to blend in, but of
course it was obvious enough we were foreigners and the
swarms of beggars at first was a shock (for example, when
getting off the bus in remote villages). But we did learn
to appreciate the deep spiritual culture of India and how
that enables so many to live richly fulfilling lives in
the midst of material poverty.

We both were big fans of Indian food, thanks to the Hare
Krishna Temple in Portland, so that was a daily pleasure.
We stayed in the Hotel Vikas in Paharganj and
particularly enjoyed the chapatti wallah next door and
the dahi wallah on the corner and the burfi at the sweet
shop down the block. Our main diet was mangos with dahi
and chapatti. We were not much interested in cannabis
much less any other drugs. I was naïve about hard drugs
and when some sketchy character asked to borrow my enamel
mug for 'fixing' I loaned it to him... then when Steve
found out, he immediately went and retrieved it for me.

When we were in Kainchi near Neem Karoli's ashram there
was hemp growing everywhere, so I dried some and would
take a puff from time to time. But really it was the
books that had the most interest for us. I remember
carrying around the Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa,
The Book and The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, the Diamond
Sutra, and the Dharma Bums by (Jack) Kerouac.

[Q] What was Steve like when he was in India?

I think we were both pretty low key about expectations...
it was a bit of a disappointment that when we got to the
Neem Karoli ashram it was basically deserted - after Neem
Karoli had passed earlier in the year, the crowds of
western hippies and seekers were encouraged to disperse
and they did! Then we made a long trek up a huge dry
riverbed to an ashram of Hariakhan Baba, a reincarnating
avatar as the story went. It was a long difficult trek
then we had to climb a hundred-plus steps up a cliff to
get to the ashram. The Hariakhan Baba we encountered was
surprisingly young, and accessible enough, but he didn't
strike either of us as being particularly profound. He
did give us both 'secret' spiritual names... I regret now
that I wasn't keeping a travel journal and can't remember
mine!

[Q] What did you and Steve take back from India that
stayed with you?

It seems in retrospect that we spent a lot of time on
endless long hot crowded bus rides from Delhi to Uttar
Pradesh and back, then up to Himachal Pradesh and back.
We enjoyed our trip to the hill town of Manali, which was
burdened with many Tibetan refugees at the time due to
the Chinese occupation of Tibet. We visited many temples,
especially in Delhi where during the later part of the
summer it was too hot to go out during the day but we'd
go for long walks at night. I think what stayed with both
of us was an appreciation for the rich culture of India
and the huge contrast between opulence and poverty to be
found there. The most memorable incident was probably
when we were making the day-long hike back from the
Hariakhan Baba ashram and a violent thunderstorm caught
us out in the open with no place to take shelter. We were
huddling under our loincloths from the pelting rain,
afraid we'd get hit by lightning... happy when we got
back to the nearest village that evening.

[Q] How was Steve influenced, if at all, by the
experience?

I think the trip influenced us both in a general sense of
broadening our experience of life on earth and putting
our lives in the US in a wider perspective. Neither of us
found a 'guru' or had a 'miracle story' or an encounter
with someone with advanced yogic powers but I would say
that wasn't particularly a disappointment. Steve's return
date was several weeks before mine so I went up to
Dalhousie and took back-to-back 10-day Vipassana retreats
with Goenka, which was a great experience and has served
me well throughout my life. Steve was mostly drawn to Zen
meditation and he went to the zendo in Los Altos
regularly after his return from India.

[Q] Tell us about the birth of Apple and the role Steve
played... and how you became its first employee?

Steve hadn't said much to me about his activities with
Steve Wozniak in California building the blue boxes (for
phone hacking) in 1973-4, and I was quite surprised when
he said in the spring of 1976 that he was starting a
company with Woz to sell a hobby computer they named the
Apple-I. I don't know that Woz needed or received much
encouragement from Steve Jobs in building the Apple-I
prototype, but it was Steve Jobs who seized upon the
opportunity to make a product out of it and sell kits...
when it wasn't so clear what it could really be used for!
However the Altair and Imsai kits had generated a lot of
interest so they reasonably thought they could tap into
that hobbyist market. I became the first employee because
I offered to come out to the Bay area from NY (where I
was then a music student at Columbia College) for the
summer to help with the Apple-I production effort. It was
part-time work at $3.25 an hour, not so lucrative but
interesting and I was eager to learn how the chips and
the computer worked.

[Q] What kind of a co-worker and boss was Steve?

In the Apple-I phase during 1976, Steve was a good friend
and a delight to work with. We rented a house together in
Cupertino 1977-79 but during that time when Apple was
rocketing to huge success his personality was changing
and we drifted apart; by 1979 I rarely saw him as he
stayed at his girlfriend's house up on Summit Road. I
never worked directly for him after 1976... I graduated
from Columbia in June 1977 and came back to Cupertino
right away to work full-time in the Apple production
department, assembling Apple-II's and learning to fix the
logic boards. I was hired into Engineering a year later
and plunged into learning to be an electrical engineer on
the job. I do, however, recommend going to school to
learn electronics! Steve was both a product design
innovator and a master at marketing... really it requires
both to some extent to have great success I think, as
well as having the brilliant detailed design work of
someone like Woz. And, the contributions of the third
founder of Apple, Mike Markkula, can't be overlooked...
he provided the seed capital and business plan and
assembled the board of directors and secured the line of
credit.

[Q] Will Apple be the same again?

Well, sadly, no, of course not but Apple has a very solid
business and momentum which will no doubt keep it in the
forefront of digital lifestyle products for years to
come. And one hopes that Steve Wozniak will transition to
a bigger role at Apple in the future and help fill the
void that Steve Jobs has left.

Steve Jobs had a spiritual side too
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/steve-jobs-had-a-spiritual-side-too/1/153981.html

10 products that defined Steve Jobs' career
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/10-products-that-defined-steve-jobs-career/1/153918.html

Steve Jobs knew end was near: Biography
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/steve-jobs-knew-end-was-near-biography/1/153913.html

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dies
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/video/steve-jobs-death/1/153878.html

The best Steve Jobs quotes
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/gallery/steve-jobs-quotes/1/5623.html

Source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/india-visit-gave-a-vision-to-steve-jobs/1/154785.html

More at:

India Today
http://indiatoday.intoday.in

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

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