Steve Jobs

Jobs spent a few days in Munich, where he solved the interference problem, but in the process he flummoxed the dark-suited German managers. They complained to Alcorn that he dressed and smelled like a bum and behaved rudely. “I said, ‘Did he solve the problem?’ And they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘If you got any more problems, you just call me, I got more guys just like him!’ They said, ‘No, no we’ll take care of it next time.’” For his part, Jobs was upset that the Germans kept trying to feed him meat and potatoes. “They don’t even have a word for vegetarian,” he complained (incorrectly) in a phone call to Alcorn.

He had a better time when he took the train to see the distributor in Turin, where the Italian pastas and his host’s camaraderie were more simpatico. “I had a wonderful couple of weeks in Turin, which is this charged-up industrial town,” he recalled. “The distributor took me every night to dinner at this place where there were only eight tables and no menu. You’d just tell them what you wanted, and they made it. One of the tables was on reserve for the chairman of Fiat. It was really super.” He next went to Lugano, Switzerland, where he stayed with Friedland’s uncle, and from there took a flight to India.

When he got off the plane in New Delhi, he felt waves of heat rising from the tarmac, even though it was only April. He had been given the name of a hotel, but it was full, so he went to one his taxi driver insisted was good. “I’m sure he was getting some baksheesh, because he took me to this complete dive.” Jobs asked the owner whether the water was filtered and foolishly believed the answer. “I got dysentery pretty fast. I was sick, really sick, a really high fever. I dropped from 160 pounds to 120 in about a week.”

Once he got healthy enough to move, he decided that he needed to get out of Delhi. So he headed to the town of Haridwar, in western India near the source of the Ganges, which was having a festival known as the Kumbh Mela. More than ten million people poured into a town that usually contained fewer than 100,000 residents. “There were holy men all around. Tents with this teacher and that teacher. There were people riding elephants, you name it. I was there for a few days, but I decided that I needed to get out of there too.”

He went by train and bus to a village near Nainital in the foothills of the Himalayas. That was where Neem Karoli Baba lived, or had lived. By the time Jobs got there, he was no longer alive, at least in the same incarnation. Jobs rented a room with a mattress on the floor from a family who helped him recuperate by feeding him vegetarian meals. “There was a copy there of Autobiography of a Yogi in English that a previous traveler had left, and I read it several times because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from village to village and recovered from my dysentery.” Among those who were part of the community there was Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was working to eradicate smallpox and who later ran Google’s philanthropic arm and the Skoll Foundation. He became Jobs’s lifelong friend.

At one point Jobs was told of a young Hindu holy man who was holding a gathering of his followers at the Himalayan estate of a wealthy businessman. “It was a chance to meet a spiritual being and hang out with his followers, but it was also a chance to have a good meal. I could smell the food as we got near, and I was very hungry.” As Jobs was eating, the holy man—who was not much older than Jobs—picked him out of the crowd, pointed at him, and began laughing maniacally. “He came running over and grabbed me and made a tooting sound and said, ‘You are just like a baby,’” recalled Jobs. “I was not relishing this attention.” Taking Jobs by the hand, he led him out of the worshipful crowd and walked him up to a hill, where there was a well and a small pond. “We sit down and he pulls out this straight razor. I’m thinking he’s a nutcase and begin to worry. Then he pulls out a bar of soap—I had long hair at the time—and he lathered up my hair and shaved my head. He told me that he was saving my health.”

Daniel Kottke arrived in India at the beginning of the summer, and Jobs went back to New Delhi to meet him. They wandered, mainly by bus, rather aimlessly. By this point Jobs was no longer trying to find a guru who could impart wisdom, but instead was seeking enlightenment through ascetic experience, deprivation, and simplicity. He was not able to achieve inner calm. Kottke remembers him getting into a furious shouting match with a Hindu woman in a village marketplace who, Jobs alleged, had been watering down the milk she was selling them.

Yet Jobs could also be generous. When they got to the town of Manali, Kottke’s sleeping bag was stolen with his traveler’s checks in it. “Steve covered my food expenses and bus ticket back to Delhi,” Kottke recalled. He also gave Kottke the rest of his own money, $100, to tide him over.

During his seven months in India, he had written to his parents only sporadically, getting mail at the American Express office in New Delhi when he passed through, and so they were somewhat surprised when they got a call from the Oakland airport asking them to pick him up. They immediately drove up from Los Altos. “My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times and finally my mother came up and said ‘Steve?’ and I said ‘Hi!’”

They took him back home, where he continued trying to find himself. It was a pursuit with many paths toward enlightenment. In the mornings and evenings he would meditate and study Zen, and in between he would drop in to audit physics or engineering courses at Stanford.

The Search

Jobs’s interest in Eastern spirituality, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the search for enlightenment was not merely the passing phase of a nineteen-year-old. Throughout his life he would seek to follow many of the basic precepts of Eastern religions, such as the emphasis on experiential prajña, wisdom or cognitive understanding that is intuitively experienced through concentration of the mind. Years later, sitting in his Palo Alto garden, he reflected on the lasting influence of his trip to India:

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.