India visit gave a vision to Steve Jobs

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 nave 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.