Will Steve Rest In Peace?

      I
am quite aware of the extent to which millions of people across the world are
attached to Apple’s “i-gadget” family (almost like adaptors, connectors, or chargers), and can
therefore sense the depths of their shock and sense of disconnect at the
tragic passing of the “i-guru” Steven Paul Jobs. In fact, many
of them received the news of Steve’s death on one of his own inventions,
which made their grief all the more poignant. Although I am an unrepentant and
incorrigible “i-illiterate,” I found myself inescapably drawn to
Steve, back in the late 1980s, when I saw the first Mac of my life at an
air-conditioned DTP bureau in a city in southern India. Mac’s GUI, icons (in
place of nasty chains of command), colour graphics, mouse, feather-touch
keyboard (“Life is smoother since we can
touch instead of push”], sleek design and several other cool features
struck me like some strange magic, and I can recall times when Mac was the
apple of the computer world’s “i,” and its SA (Sex Appeal) and price-tag
were so high that snobs would carry Mac just to make a fashion statement. But,
in my case, more than the machine itself, its prodigious maker mesmerized me, and Steve breaking
conventions impressed me more than Steve making inventions (or reinventions). 
Steve’s traumatic early childhood experiences, particularly his unwed parents
giving him up for adoption; his dropping out of college; his passion for
calligraphy and typographic fonts; his garage start-up; his conversion to Zen
Buddhism (and consequent head-shaving); his counterculture
experiments; his dismissal from his own Apple Computers; his
counter-challenge to cancer (the rebel’s
own cells rebelled against him, and in the beginning, he shunned mainstream
medicine) — there was nothing about him, in style as well as substance, that
was not sensational and maverick.  In my view, Steve was more an iConoclast than an iCon, and I loved seeing him
defying tradition more than defining tastes & trends. To me, Steve was
a person of transterrestrial brilliance, and an archetypal
representative of an uber-smart technological civilization to come.
     

      What
“NeXT”? Maybe some insanely
ingenious nerds will keep Steve-the-Geek’s celebrated inventive legacy alive,
and present the world with i-peds, i-pids, i-puds, and other game-changing gizmos to carry
users’ sensory experiences still deeper. But, I personally look forward to the
advent of a “pan-creative” Steve-like genius who will present a cure for
pancreatic and other pernicious cancers. Also, I anxiously anticipate the
emergence of a Pixar that can physically reanimate the likes of Steve Jobs!!

      It
is now time to wish “RIP” to Steve, but I would prefer to refrain from doing
so, because I know Steve is not the type to ever “rest in peace.” Indeed, he
will already be trying to i-connect to his successors from his pad in “outer
cyberspace”! Steve will always stay logged in to the memory systems of his
countless fans, and his life & mind will continue to inspire them as long
as history lasts.

Stay hungry, foolish – and dangerous,

c.ta.rom, India.

* It may be worth noting here that “Job” is the protagonist of an Old
Testament parable of the righteous sufferer. Steven means “crown, garland and honour” in
Greek, and St. Stephen is revered as the first
martyr of the Christian Church.

* Just like Randy Pausch delivering his famous “Last Lecture” at Carnegie
Mellon, Steve Jobs presented an immortal Graduation Commencement Address at Stanford University in 2005. Some of the lines of
this Address bear reproduction here: “… don’t waste it (your time)
living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with
the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions
drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow
your heart and intuition.”

c.ta.rom, India.

Great, thank you for compiling this.

Steve stood for what he believed in, and when its time to go he passed
the rein on, yeah we innovators might be called crazy, our happiness is
always the impossible, our life paths are a road few travel on, we see
way beyond what normal eyes can see, we contribute more good than bad,
but  at the end of our time we wither and expire and that my friends is
the only time that we are like normal people.

google has it as well http://t.co/fout991l