Himalaya Harbinger, Rudrapur Bureau
Apple has finally fully arrived in India. After beginning production of iPhones in the country, the company has now opened its first retail store at the Jio World Drive mall at BKC in Mumbai today. A second one, at the Select Citywalk mall in Saket, in Delhi, will open on April 20.
In a manner of speaking, many people who are aware of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ life journey would agree that Apple had its beginnings in India. His intuition was what drove Jobs to create some of the most unique electronic products — and his intuitive life started with a jolt that was the India trip he made in 1974.
Jobs grew up in the 60’s on America’s West Coast which was swept by counter-culture, a heady mixture of Eastern spirituality, drugs, music and idealism. A few years before Jobs visited India, San Francisco had seen the Summer of Love, the gathering of thousands that popularised the hippie lifestyle. Rock stars rubbed shoulders with Hindu and Buddhist gurus. Srila Prabhupada of ISKCON could be seen singing with the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin. The hippies were convinced a new Age of Aquarius, the age of love and peace, had dawned.
In those days, living in a psycheldelic haze of LSD and spirituality, Jobs, a college dropout who ate free food at Hare Krishna temple in Portland, was saving money for his trip to India. What inspired him was an iconic book ‘Be Here Now’ by Richard Alpert, who got famous as Ram Dass in America, a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, who was a mystic saint considered by his devotees an incarnation of Hanuman ji.
As an 18-year-old backpacker in search of enlightenment, Jobs set out for India in 1974 along with his friend and fellow dropout Dan Kottke who would become the first employee of Apple a few years later. When Jobs reached Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram at Kainchi near Nainital, Baba had already passed away a year ago. And India wasn’t what Jobs had imagined through his LSD visions.
The hot, uncomfortable summer made Jobs question many of the illusions he had nursed about India. He found India far poorer than he had imagined and was struck by the incongruity between the country’s condition and its airs of holiness,” writes Michael Moritz, author of Jobs’ biography, and a partner at Sequoia Capital. “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 Neeb Karori Baba put together,” Jobs said as quoted by Moritz.
But something more than disillusionment happened with Jobs during his trip to India. Otherwise, he would not have told, more than three decades later, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to visit Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram in India if he wanted to get back his mojo.
In 2015, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was visting the Facebook headquarters in the US, Zuckerberg told him that Jobs had suggested him to visit the ashram to find himself again: “…he (Jobs) told me that in order to reconnect with what I believed as the mission of the company, I should visit this temple that he had gone to in India early on in his evolution of thinking about what he wanted Apple and his vision of the future to be.”
Zuckerberg did visit the Kainchi ashram in 2008. “So I went and I travelled for almost a month, and seeing people, seeing how people connected, and having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone has a strong ability to connect reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing and that is something I’ve always remembered over the last 10 years as we’ve built Facebook,” he told Modi.
Neem Karoli Baba, who attracted a large number of Western celebrities, including Julia Roberts, Larry Page of Google and Jeff Skoll of eBay, was a mystic who propounded no philosophy. His only message was to serve others. He was popularised in the West by one of his most famous devotees, Richard Alpert, known as Ram Dass, who once conducted research with Timothy Leary at Harvard University on the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs.
Though Jobs was initially disappointed with his trip to India, he later realised it did play an important part in his life.
Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of Jobs: “Years later, sitting in his Palo Alto garden, he reflected on the lasting influence of his trip to India: “Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work. Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom”.”
Steve Jobs and Paramhansa Yogananda
Jobs got in touch with his intuition during his trip to India, but another thing happened during the trip that was to stay with him till his death — he got to read ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ by Paramhansa Yogananda, a book that has remained a spiritual bestseller since it was first published in 1946.
Isaacson describes how that happened: “He went by train and bus to a village near Nainital in the foothills of the Himalayas. That was where Neem Karoli Baba lived, or had lived. By the time Jobs got there, he was no longer alive, at least in the same incarnation. Jobs rented a room with a mattress on the floor from a family who helped him recuperate by feeding him vegetarian meals. “There was a copy there of ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ in English that a previous traveler had left, and I read it several times because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from village to village and recovered from my dysentery”.”
Jobs got so much influenced by the book that its message stayed with him till he died. A few months before his death in 2011, ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ was the only book he had on his iPad. Isaacson describes what he saw a day after the launch of iPad 2 on March 2, 2011, a few months before Jobs died: “At his house the following day he was still on a high. He was planning to fly to Kona Village the next day, alone, and I asked to see what he had put on his iPad 2 for the trip. There were three movies: Chinatown, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Toy Story 3. More revealingly, there was just one book that he had downloaded: Autobiography of a Yogi, the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since.”
Most who are familiar with Jobs’ life and career would be surprised to know that this was the book that Jobs held more important than any other philosophy in his life, at least in the months leading to his death. Marc Benioff, the co-founder and CEO of the software company Salesforce, who was Jobs’ friend, once spoke of a secret gift Jobs had left for people who would attend his memorial service.
Jobs knew he was about to die, and he had planned his memorial service himself. Benioff said Jobs picked the speakers, which included Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, as well as the artists that would play there, Bono and Yo-Yo Ma — and a secret gift for each of the hundreds of people he had selected to invite.
When Benioff opened his gift box after the memorial service, he found a copy of ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’. All those who attended Jobs’ service were given this gift as Jobs had desired.
On a website dedicated to the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda, a follower, Nabha Cosley, recounts a related experience: “A short time after Steve Jobs passed away, a friend of mine at Crystal Clarity Publishers received a phone call. “We’d like to place an order for 500 copies of ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’. Do you have that many?” It turned out that those books — eventually purchased from Self-Realization Fellowship, which had enough in stock — were needed for the memorial service for Steve Jobs, the famous founder of Apple who was inspired throughout his life by Eastern spirituality.”
“He went to India,” said Benioff, “And he had this incredible realization that his intuition was his greatest gift, and that he needed to look at the world from the inside out.” A few years after Jobs’ India trip, this realisation he got led to the birth of Apple where he went on to design some of the most intuitive gadgets. Today, when Apple has opened its first store in India, the company has looped back to its spiritual source.
