Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs is one of America’s most visible Arab-Americans:

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco to an American woman and a Syrian man–Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah John Jandali, a graduate student who later became a political science professor… He was adopted by Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View… [Link]

He spent several months on the Indian hippie trail, chasing the remnants of the ’60s:

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life… 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 interesting…

… I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.” [Link]

The precursor to the India pilgrimage dates back to 1972 when Jobs entered Reed College, a private humanities school in Portland, Oregon. Jobs, being from a middle-class background, had trouble fitting in to the affluent school and though he was a voracious philosophy student with a keen interest in religion, he dropped out after just one semester. The 1960’s had come and gone and Jobs had essentially missed it…

That same year, when Jobs was 19 years old, he set off to India with Reed College friend, Dan Kottke… to visit the Kainchi ashram and Neem Karoli Baba… when they arrived they learned that Baba had died and that they had missed yet another opportunity forever… the two “drifted around India, reading and talking about philosophy”…

Not long after their arrival, Kottke decided to attend a meditation retreat for a month. Jobs didn’t go with him, but rather wandered the subcontinent for a few months before returning to California, and Atari, in the autumn of 1974. [Link]

Here’s an excerpt (PDF) from the unauthorized biography iCon about Jobs’ disastrous trip to India. You can thank the hassles of being a mendicant in India for steering Jobs away from philosophy and into computing. Today Jobs uses the same haggling skills in keeping iPod component costs down as he used to buy buffalo milk in the Himalayas.

Steve’s devotion to the philosophies of the East seemed to be… tied as well to his own identity. He was “totally determined to go,” said Kottke of the planned trip to India. “He felt some kind of unresolved pain over being adopted. That was the same period that he hired a private investigator to try and track down his mother. He was obsessed with it for a while…”

… Jobs arrived in India barefoot and threadbare. This was how he chose to dress, as an expression of a specific ideal or aesthetic. In India he was confronted for the first time with people who were poor–not the way California hippies were poor, by choice, but poor by fate. It was an eye-opener for him…

He immediately traded his T-shirt and jeans for a lungi, a loincloth that is the traditional Indian garb for mendicants, and gave away everything else he had. Joined by Kottke, he headed north from Delhi toward the Himalayas… They slept in abandoned buildings and bought what food they could in the villages they passed through. True to form, Jobs bargained hard. “He looked at prices everywhere, found out the real price, and haggled. He didn’t want to be ripped off,” recalled Kottke. His aggressiveness with a woman who sold them watered buffalo milk nearly caused them to be run out of one town.

[Jobs:] “I was walking around in the Himalayas… There was this baba, a holy man, who was the holy man of this particular festival with his large group of followers. I could smell good food. I hadn’t been fortunate enough to smell good food for a long time, so I wandered up to pay my respects and eat some lunch. Jobs and Kottke remembered India as a country of constant hassles

“For some reason this baba, upon seeing me sitting there eating, immediately walked over to me and sat down and burst out laughing. He didn’t speak much English and I spoke only a little Hindi, but he tried to carry on a conversation and he was rolling on the ground with laughter. Then he grabbed my arm and took me up this mountain trail… We get to the top of this mountain half an hour later and there’s this little well and pond at the top of this mountain, and he dunks my head in the water and pulls out a razor from his pocket and starts to shave my head…

“We weren’t going to find a place where we could go for a month to be enlightened. It was one of the first times that I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karolie Baba put together.”

The pair of traveling mendicants took off again after only a month in Kainchi. It was the summer high season when India is hottest. The dust was in their teeth and their hair, and they had grown weary of the poverty they saw everywhere. It would always be remembered by both travelers as a country of constant hassles…

[Kottke:] “There’s a very famous story in India about a guru called Baba Ji… He’s a well-known mystical yogi who keeps reincarnating and [he’s] hundreds of years old… It was a ten-mile hike up a dry desert riverbed… all we had on were the lungis, so the sun was merciless. And finally we found this cliff, with a stairway up, and it was the ashram.

“… we both thought the guy was a bit of a bozo… he was very much into wearing colorful saris… he was very flowery with his language too. All ‘the essence of existence is so and so…’

“… as we were sleeping in the dry creek bed, along came a thunderstorm… There we are in our flip flops and thin cotton shawls and the rain is beating on us, and the thunder is roaring, and the lightning is breaking all over us. And it got so intense, and the two of us were both so kind of out of it, that we decided to cover ourselves in the sand.

“There we were, wearing next to nothing, and I remember us hunkering down in the sand trying to defend ourselves from the rain pelting down, trying to dig a hole that we could crawl into so that the rain wouldn’t destroy us. I’m sure that was the high point of the trip, because I remember us praying. Out there in the dry creek bed, in the middle of India, completely disoriented, all our rhythms and beliefs shattered, where we were sure a flash flood would come through any moment, the two of us praying to any god that could hear us: ‘Dear God, if I ever get through this, I’ll be a good person. I promise.’”Wearing saffron robes and sporting a shaved head, he drifted into Atari and asked for his job back

They survived to continue their journey. They ate food in bazaars. Kottke finally cut all his hair, not out of some inappropriate fashion statement but because the lice and the fleas and the filth drove him to it. They wanted to see Tibet, so they headed up the mountains. Each contracted scabies in the town of Menali, the site of a famous spa, to go along with the dysentery they’d had for a while. But Kottke also had his traveler’s checks stolen. This was the end of the journey. When he went to the bank in New Delhi, it refused to refund the checks to him. Jobs, who was leaving in a few days, gave Kottke all the money he had left–$300.

The whole experience in India had been intense and disturbing… Jobs came back determined to work toward the root of things in a different way. When Steve returned, he was rather distant and very spaced out. Wearing saffron robes and sporting a shaved head, he drifted into Atari and asked for his job back. This blissed-out kid in an orange toga might have prompted most companies to call for security as soon as he approached the door, but this was Atari, in California, in the 1970s. Atari said, “Sure.”

… He remained true to the hippie aesthetic, which was easy enough because Silicon Valley was so close to the hippie meccas of San Francisco and Berkeley… [Link - PDF]

Like the spreadsheet company Lotus and the modem maker Racal-Vadic, the naming of Apple was Eastern-influenced:

The name “Apple Computer” was chosen because they hadn’t found anything better and because it was Steve’s favorite food at the time (he was a fruitarian). [Link]

Jobs took delight in gaming the system. The brilliant product designer once supposedly cheated Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak out of money earned from Woz’s own work:

Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700 (instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak’s share was thus $350. [Link]

It was only one of many Jobsian schemes:

… one day he was building something and needed some parts… “The next day he came in as pleased as could be and told me that Burroughs was sending him the parts, and they should arrive very shortly. When I asked how he had managed that, he said he had called the main office, collect, and told them he was working on a new electronic design. He was trying various components and was considering using theirs.

“I was furious. That was not the way I wanted my students to behave. And sure enough, in a day or so the parts arrived by air freight…”

“It was a very foggy day. All us boys in our freshman class were running a couple of laps around the track. And all of a sudden Steve, who was ahead of me, glanced back across the field at the PE coach, who was hidden by the fog, and saw that he couldn’t possibly see the far side of the field. So [Steve] sat down.

“Well, I thought that was a pretty good idea. I joined him. The two of us just sat and watched everyone else run by us.When they came back around for the second lap, we stood up and joined them… he had figured out how he could get away with half the work and still get credit for the whole thing.” [Link - PDF]

Apropos of nothing, here’s a fun Woz commercial for an old Datsun sports car (via Digg):