My first Job and Steve Jobs

The first 21 point some years of my life has pretty much been the same, have been a student throughout. A major happening in my life was that after almost 22 years of non-stop paying(fees) and working(I mean, studying), now it is getting paid and working…a great welcome change. Now I get to buy as many Frootys, Pizzas, Ice creams as I want. Strangely I seem to drink a less number of Frootys, eat less number of Pizzas and Ice Creams than before, teaching me a very important lesson, a lesson we had read but not ‘understood’(like most other engineering subjects!) in Principles of Management(if my memory has it right, it was something called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), that man’s desires changes soon after he achieves what he had dreamt. Achievement, big or small, creates an ethereal sense of joy that dies out soon after we see bigger and better things to achieve. In short, man doesn’t know how to enjoy; he only knows how to long. And Akshay being a human, doesn’t enjoy Frooty, Pizza and Ice Cream anymore, he longs for a Kawasaki Ninja (pleech green, 250cc). Some cite the reason behind all human achievements is this dynamic nature of desires. It is this that sets us radically apart from animals. Were we creatures who could be permanently satisfied when our dreams realized, we would continue to be animals…I mean the first desire that comes to any creature is to get good food, good water, a good girl-friend and once these desires are achieved, animals stop working. My cat (Pakru), sleeps, plays and enjoys life to the fullest almost all the time. I think he just works for an hour or two, his hunting time, every day and the rest 22 to 23 hours is pure enjoyment. I work for something like 14 hours a day and the rest of the time sit longing when my salary would increase so that I can buy a pleech green Ninja-250. Well, I guess this(the urge to achieve more) is the reason why my fellow humans have invented Aeroplanes, Rockets, I-Phones, Ninjas and what not while Kukru, Kari and Chakki(Pakru’s fellow beings) have nothing much to say about their inventions. Why do we keep on inventing and achieving? So that we can enjoy more, we can relax more and we can lead a worry less life. Well, I thought Pakru was doing the same now… sometimes I seriously get a doubt as to whether animals have been through all that we are doing and decided that more we complicate things, the more complicated things become…not more simple as most of us think… and then decided that the best way of life is to just get the satisfy your basic needs and then enjoy the rest of the time. Keep it Simple.

Just like any other day, I walked into my office on October 7^th, 2011, double clicked Internet Explorer entered gmail ctrl-enter, ctrl –t, yahoo ctrl-enter, ctrl t, news.google.com enter(I guess this sequence of steps is common for at least 80% of IT guyz like me) and waited for the pages to load. And when I read the headline ‘World bids goodbye to i-Con Steve Jobs’, I felt my heart stopped beating for a few seconds all together. It is not often that you have tears in your eyes when someone whom you have not even met or known in person dies, but this was one such rare occasion when I had tears in my eyes while reading the news about the death of Steve Jobs. I have always been a hard core Steve Jobs fan…not an apple fan, a Steve Jobs fan. I have always felt his passion, zeal and commitment towards his company and products that he spearheaded were marvellous. I have read contradicting views about his management styles and the way he would treat his employees…the negative reviews often out numbering the positive ones. But then, there can’t be a 100% ideal man…then he would be God. Everyone has his or her own positives and negatives.

I have noted that after his death there are a huge number of articles giving him a larger than life image and this has caused a lot of people to riot that he wasn’t such a great person after all and that he had just managed to pack up a few existing technologies (say for example mp3, phone, touch-screen) into an aesthetically pleasing package and market it well. But my take on this is that if things are so simple…if putting mp3, touch, phone and apps are that simple then why didn’t any other company do it after all? These technologies have been around for quite long, but no other company has managed to create a product that created the ‘wave’ or ‘revolution’ that Apple products created. Not that they didn’t want to, just that they couldn’t. Apple without Steve in the 90s was similar to other companies. And the sales and profit just dropped to the extent of making Apple almost bankrupt. But once Steve was back, things changed phenomenally. Mac, I-pod, i-phone, i-pad…and we know the rest of the story, from a bankrupt company to a contender for the title of most valuable company in the world-worth 400 billion dollars in just over a decade!! He did have his negatives, as all of us humans have, but the fact that he was a Great person remains undisputed.

The reason why I decided to write on both my first job and Steve Jobs together is an important one…I have always wanted to write about both and also the title rhymed well.