The monk who left India to make iProducts

“Three apples have changed the world. One seduced Eve, second awakened Newton, the third one was in the hands of Jobs.”

This was one of the most widely circulated messages doing the rounds on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere on internet after the untimely demise of Mr Steve Jobs, the visionary entrepreneur and the force behind the US-based global technology giant Apple.

Much before embarking on the path of giving the world iconic products such as Mac computers, iPod music players, iPhone mobile phones and iPad tablet PCs, this cult figure of the world of technology came to India in the early 70s in search of enlightenment or “nirvana” and went back unsatisfied.

He found India far poorer than he had imagined at that time and, ironically, years later in mid-2000s, when he thought of setting up a facility for Apple's Mac computers, India appeared to be much less cost-effective to do business.

But, it was his unsatisfactory India visit of early 70s that could have been one of the major reasons for Mr Jobs' focus on the world of technology and eventually the setting up of the company called Apple.

His biography, titled “The Little Kingdom – The Private Story of Apple Computer” quotes Mr Jobs as saying that “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 Neem Kairolie Baba put together.”

Neem Karori Baba was the guru that Mr Jobs, then 18, visited in India along with his college friend Dan Kottke. The American duo had come to India after they dropped out of college and Kottke eventually joined Jobs as the first employee of Apple.

“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,” author Mr Michael Moritz wrote in Mr Jobs' biography. The book quoted Mr Jobs as saying: “We weren't going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened” and said that by the time he returned to California “he was thinner, thanks to a bout of dysentery, had closely cropped hair, and was dressed in an Indian attire...”

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