Hero or anti-hero?

The moody baron of Silicon Valley:

Aditha DISSANAYAKE

There are some events in certain novels that stick to your mind like chewing gum. Though it is many years since I read Jeffery Archer's Kane and Abel I still remember vividly the scene where Kane raises his hat to Abel not knowing he is greeting his arch rival. Could this be a prophesy of a similar event that would take place between a father and a son, neither knowing who the other was, in a restaurant in Silicon Valley, several years later? The father, Abdulfattah Jandali was a Syrian-American, and the owner of the restaurant. The son, an executive at Apple, was Steve Jobs.

An insatiable curiosity to unearth more details about the man who invented this Mac Book I am using right now to type these very words, made me surf the net in search of titbits that would help me draw a clearer, more precise portrait of the lord of Silicon Valley, than what I already knew; that he was adopted, he invented the Apple Macintosh in his foster parent's garage, he was fired from the company he co-founded, and he made a brilliant speech at Stanford University where he confessed this was the closest he had “ever gotten to a college graduation”.

What made Steve Jobs tick? Could he have inherited his brilliant brains from his father? Why did he not bother to find out more about his father even though he traced his biological mother with the help of detectives after he became rich in the mid 1980s? Who was Steve Jobs' father? We may want to know. But not Jobs. He tells his biographer, Walter Isaacson, “I learned a little bit about him and I didn’t like what I learned.”

As with all other things in Jobs' life there was a reason for this aversion.

According to an article in the Seattle Met magazine Jandali a political science professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., took a group of students to Egypt on a study-abroad trip in 1974. Less than two weeks after arriving in Egypt, he abandoned his students, stranding them with thousands of dollars in unpaid lodging bills. Amid the controversy that ensued, he resigned from the university. Today, at the age of 80, he is a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada.

In the biography, 'Steve Jobs', Isaacson has explained why Jobs refused to see his father by saying he resented the fact that Jandali had abandoned his younger sister Mona Simpson, whom, unlike Jobs, their mother had not given up for adoption. When Mona had traced Jandali and discovered him working in a restaurant in Sacramento, Jobs had asked her not to reveal his identity to his father.

But in a Kane and Abel like twist, it appears that the father and son had already met years ago. When Mona met him, Jandali had told her that he used to run a restaurant in Silicon Valley that attracted many high-profile people, including Steve Jobs, and that the Apple executive was a “great tipper.”

In a Tv programme called 'sixty minutes' where recordings of Jobs' interviews with Isaacson were aired, Jobs remembers being in that restaurant a couple of times and meeting a manager there who was from Syria. “I shook his hand and he shook my hand and that’s all”.

But to his credit Jobs had a deep affection for his sister Mona. In his quest for perfection he berated her for not wearing 'fetching enough' clothes. At one point, she had written him an irritated letter declaring, “I am a young writer, and this is my life, and I’m not trying to be a model anyway.” Soon after, a box of clothes from Issey Miyake (who also manufactured some of Jobs' trademark black turtlenecks) arrived, including three identical pantsuits. “I still remember those first suits I sent Mona,” Jobs told Isaacson. “They were linen pants and tops in a pale grayish green that looked beautiful with her reddish hair.”

He himself though, had almost always worn black turtlenecks and jeans. But according to the article Maureen Dowd wrote about this mad perfectionist who even perfected his stare, called “Limits of Magical Thinking”, in his younger days he had scorned deodorant, walked around barefooted and had a disturbing habit of soaking his feet in the office toilet.

He embraced Zen minimalism and anti-materialism. First, he lived in an unfurnished mansion, then a house so modest that Bill Gates, on a visit, was astonished that the whole Jobs family could fit in it. He scorned security, and often left his back door unlocked.

Why then, did Jobs not give his money to philanthropy? Isaacson hasn't a clue. “That’s the one thing about him I don’t know much about. He remained very private about what he did philanthropically. I asked him about it, but he chose not to discuss it.” said the biographer in an interview with the New York Times.

When asked if he thought (like most others) that Jobs was a bit of a jerk, Isaacson explains, “the intensity and passion that is reflected in his personality is part and parcel of Steve. It was what made him able to change things; to invent things; to make amazing products. He could be perceived as a jerk because he was brutally honest with people. But his petulance was connected to his perfectionism. If he were truly a jerk, he wouldn’t have built a team at Apple that was more loyal than any other top executives in America.”

Isaacson places Jobs on par with Disney and Picasso. “Steve was equal to Walt Disney or Pablo Picasso. Disney was probably the closest to Steve. The real genius of these men was that they were able to create an emotional connection with their products. Bob Dylan does the same with music; Picasso with art. It’s a real genius to tie art, emotion and technology together.”

But as always, Shakespeare has already beaten everyone else when it comes to describing the real character of Steve Jobs. He is a reincarnation of Henry V. As Isaacson quotes at the beginning of the biography, Steve Jobs, like Henry V, is a king, “callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed”.

A king who had the best piece of advice for all of us. “Trust in something your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” It will make all the difference.

Be one of the 'crazy ones' to quote from Jobs' famous campaign for Apple. “They push the human race forward.”

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