Honey, he shrunk the world!

There have been very few brands worldwide that command a loyal fan base like Apple, for Apple a fruit that was considered to be forbidden, as a brand is today synonymous with innovation, and is regarded as a pioneer in its market, we all have rested under the shade of the Brand Apple tree and have been enamored by its global fan following. It’s been ages since the world had witnessed an innovator with the caliber of Steve Jobs–ours is a generation that never lived during the times of the invention of T.V or the telephone or the computer and we have only read about the brilliance of Graham Bell and Edison, and I doubt if there are were videos of them speaking in business/school/college conventions. So when we witnessed a gadget that redefined the way in which we listened to music, and communicated with people it left us wide-eyed and envious of those who possessed it. In Steve Jobs we had the digital era’s Messiah, a man who invented and reinvented as he rose the bar challenging his competitors to come up with anything that could match the gadgets that Apple manufactured chip for chip. From accessing music  in a gadget that boasts of a hard drive of more than a hundred GB to watching videos and getting in touch with your loved ones on a portable tablet, Steve Jobs’ Apple had brought the world closer. In the corporate world he was the boss everyone wanted to be, a man who was looked up to by everyone from a college student to a company CEO, he was the mentor everyone dreamt of having a tete`-a-tete´with.

I by no means am a techno geek, I have no idea how many GB RAM my system has nor do I know the name of the graphic card that supports the games I play. And when it comes to discussing the nitty gritties of a gadget, I am as clueless as a deer caught in the headlights. But I am a consumer of the modern day inventions who is thankful for the way life simplifies with the push of a button. I am thankful for the internet that had reduced everything from stalking my high school crush on Facebook to gathering information on the Renaissance period to just the click of a button. I am thankful for the electric trimmer that with the push of a button shaves off the hair from my head with a calculated precision, I am thankful for the mobile phone that has brought us closer to our loved ones and to those who owe money to us. But of all my few prized gadgets the Ipod tops the list­–having lived in a time when storing 3000 songs in a music player was unheard of, the Ipod captured our imagination, it dared us to dream, it not just changed what we listened to but also how we listened to it.

There are many a cheap doppelgangers that are available in the chor bazaars, yet the product with the half-bitten apple as its emblem is the real deal. There were other top players in the market who competed with Apple from PCs to mobile phones, to music players to tablets–yet brandishing an Apple product in public grabbed eyeballs and was the owner’s pride. Never has an innovator/industry captain’s loss evoked such pathos from the different stratum of society, from two-page eulogies read out by nation heads to a tribute of a hundred and forty characters tweeted by tech geeks and Apple owners, news channels and social networks alike paid their respects to one of the i-Cons of the Digital Age. Steve Jobs was to brand Apple, what a quarterback is to his football team, he was its face, its heart and all that he stood for. All those humane factors that Steve Jobs personified, be it his simplicity, his large-heartedness, or his creativity was replicated in his brainchild. In one of his most poignant speeches made at Stanford, Jobs shared his rags-to-riches stories as he philosophized about life, love and death. He highlighted his code for living life - to stay hungry and to stay foolish. Hungry enough to strive to achieve what we want, and foolish enough to make mistakes, for how could we improve if we made no mistakes?

Be it the iTunes installed in our system, or the iPads and iPhones which are the playmates of the techno-savvy, we all have had a bite of the Apple and owe a bit of gratitude to the gardener who planted a seed and watched it grow into a tree, he shared his garden of dreams with us inviting us to have a larger bite of what he had so fondly grown.  He amazed us with all that he offered, he teased our imagination, and he brought the world closer. For if it weren’t for this gardener the world would never have known to dream bigger.

Image Courtesy: http://fernexpress.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/