Thursday, December 3, 2009

Message from Steve Jobs

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just
three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless
later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it 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, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

A Day for Tribute


Dear Readers,
God Bless You!

In 1987, WHO recognized the need to do something special for a disease that must be among the Top 3 deadliest ever. They declared that 1st December each year will be celebrated as World Aids Day. The objective was to wake us out of our slumber and let us recognize that AIDS is here to stay and annihilate. Alas, we have relegated WAD to the league of all other World and National days when events are organized just to play to the gallery.

The change in humans is often paranoid. Many traditional myths have been proved to be baseless in the last century, the century of Science. Still, the taboos associated to these beliefs continue. Whenever tradition is contradicted by Religion and Science, we defeat the latter. Often defeat of science leads to a mockery of common sense. Progress in the fight against AIDS and similar killers is suffering from such blind faith in Religious Traditions.

People in majority do not want to believe that promiscuous behaviour is not the only source of acquiring this virus. Research clearly tells that the exchange of the contaminated fluid between a victim and a supplier is the real cause. Unsafe sex is just one of the many items on this list. You mention AIDS and people gallop away akin to the Derby Winner. You become a social outcast, moral criminal and destined to die in isolation. Nobody wants to admit such people in their sphere of life, more often than not to uphold their dogmas.

True it is that AIDS is still incurable and leads to a premature death of its victims. But, the patient can live a normal life by following a very strict semi-treatment plan. His/her endeavour to do so is burdened by the neglect he/she invites from people whom he/she would like to love and care for him/her. Mental disintegration is what a HIV-positive suffers more strongly than the biological decay and vulnerabilities. This is where we as a society have to grow up.

Every year millions are spent on the treatment and rehabilitation of AIDS patients. Several programs are conducted to raise the awareness on the World AIDS Day. The effect is there for all to see. Things are improving on the medicine front; social acceptance is on the rise; more and more healthcare systems are gearing up to address this endemic; overall outlook is impressive.

Yet, the scheme of things cannot be as effective as they want if we ,as a stakeholder of all things done for human welfare, choose to take easier way outs. Our skills and knowledge must match the levels required to prevent AIDS virus from spreading from a patient to others, from being acquired through negligent medical practices and from weakening the immune system of a patient's body beyond repair.

Let us act.

Always yours,
Pankaj Dwivedi.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

If I will die tomorrow...

It is very easy to welcome you again to yet another reading of yet another article, but to start writing on a topic that is eternal is never going to be easy. To die is one thing and to think about is another. The first part is played by all and sundry, but only some give a serious thought to the process of death, the input and the output. Let us have a look at the question at hand through my eyes.

If I’ll die tomorrow, my parents, who are my GOD in flesh and blood, will be bereft of the crop that they had sown and nurtured with unparalleled love and devotion. They will not see that the individual, they supported and allowed to grow into a matured human being, has stood the test of time and is their best ambassador. They won’t be able to know how much he loves them and he is prepared to give back a little of what he got from them. I beg my all readers to keep loving and caring your parents.

If I’ll die tomorrow, my country will be weakened by the loss of a devoted soldier. She’ll not know how much does he love his brothers and sisters, how has he earnestly tried to do whatever he can to support their cause. She will miss the vigor and ideas he has for his motherland; for him the society that makes the country is priceless. She will have to wait a little longer to see its sons and daughters living a life free of fear, full of joy and respect for one another. The effort that is required to make the humanity the biggest religion will increase a touch.

If I’ll die tomorrow, my city will lose a servant of merit. Like all other modern cities, it has been plagued by the lack of basic amenities. Whatever exists cannot be sustained for long. I’ve always sincerely tried to keep my surroundings clean as much as I can, to educate people about their civic responsibilities. It will be difficult to remove the difference between slums and posh areas without me. It will not be easy, after me, to ensure decent living for all city dwellers because an enthusiastic activist of this cause will not be there any more.

If I’ll die tomorrow, the society will lose many great ideas that I have with me. The society will rue that I couldn’t implement most of them. These ideas are as vivid as the sunlight, as diverse as geography and as feasible as respiration. They could have helped the mankind to live, love and sustain in a better manner. They could have brought more smiles to more faces around the globe.

What others will be missing is a list of treasures, but what I will stand to lose on my death tomorrow is a most beautiful bouquet of roses and thorns. There is no doubt that I am no more than a commoner at this point of my life. Yet I can claim to have built upon my success and my achievements a road that can make me someone to remember.

If I’ll die tomorrow, I will not be able to see the day when there will be no death because of hunger, the day when every human being will get the respect and share of food that he deserves. When society will not ignore its poor, when they will be treated better than animals, when no women will compromise with her modesty to appease herself and her dependents, I will not be there. Let this evil die with me tomorrow.

If I’ll die tomorrow, I will not be able to travel to all the nooks and corners of the world, which they say is a very beautiful place to behold. I sincerely believe that to make most of good ideas work, one needs to have the firsthand experience of how they have been or can be implemented anywhere or everywhere in Planet Earth. As the technology has shrunk the world into a global village, any way I should be meeting my brethrens next door. Alas! My fellow world citizens would miss me.

And there are some funny desires too. If I’ll die tomorrow, I will miss all Sachin innings, the king-like adoration at home, my cricket, the evergreen Pooree, and much more. Those who knew me, and loved or hated me, would rue the lost opportunity to better themselves.

As I need to conclude sometime, I do so now by expressing my gratitude to all of you for sparing time to read on what an ordinary man can grieve on his untimely demise. And I wish you good luck that you won’t repent on any of the topics mentioned in this piece, and will also achieve all your most beloved goals before you get a chance to see me in heaven, if I’ll die tomorrow.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Young girls & Salwaar Kameez

Young girls & Salwaar Kameez

Priya Mitron,
Namaskaara!

Salwaar Kameez is one dress which gives women a lot of freedom of movement of limbs. It can be made of all types of common fabrics and thus is suitable for all weathers. Almost all girls in India wear Salwaar Kameez for day-to-day business. It presents no worries to those who wear it and those who do not. But, what one wears is governed by many factors viz. ethnicity, climate, culture, stages of puberty etc. Young girls fall in the realm of pre-puberty stage. I suggest that they should not be asked to wear Salwaar Kameez.

Children are free-flowing creatures by nature and their spirit cannot be bound by anything other than absolute scarcity of love and sensitivity on part of those who endeavour to do so. Girl child is no exception. Males and females dress keeping in mind their physical structure which predominantly concerns with the organs of reproduction. These organs also take care of excretion of waste body fluids. That is why it makes sense to design different kinds of clothing for boys and girls keeping in mind the ease of answering the nature’s call.

Skirts and frocks are the best garments that young girls should wear and it is the case in most parts of the world. In many Asian countries, we tend to see young girls wearing Salwaar Kameez. They cover the entire body and as we agreed earlier are good enough for physical movement. This satisfies the trait of keeping girls largely safe from a potential sexual attack or molestation. But at the same time it inculcates a feeling into the girls that they are “very different” from the boys, they are not supposed to break free and go wild as boys may choose to do, they are supposed to cover their body as far as possible as it would be considered indecent and somebody may make sexual advances if this is not the case, and that they are socially inferior to boys in the social strata.

Unfortunately, most of these feelings become reality as they enter into adulthood. We treat women as secondary human beings and more crudely, as objects of utilities. The minimum we can do to obstruct this false growth is to delay its offset as much as possible. Young minds should be free of this bias as much as possible. We do not want a girl of 5 or 8 years of age staying away from a group of boys making merry in a park simply because there is no other girl around to talk to and she has been preached to mind that difference.

This may appear a very trivial argument, based on a weak premise, but it is necessary not to let young girls worry about their sexual appearance, avoid physical contacts with boys, which is such an indispensable part of playing for kids, imitate adults about dressing and looking good. Give them some breathing space and opportunity to transform while they are supposed to undertake so much learning in that unspoiled, pure phase of life, called “Childhood”, which can help them become a good human being, not a subdued female who cannot express anything beyond a limit.

Readers are requested to think about this and see if they agree and can do something about it. On my part, I try to resist Slawaar Kameez as clothing for all young girls I know and can reach to.

Aapakaa,
Pankaj Dwivedi.