Grandkids!

Suddenly I find myself with grandkids springing up everywhere. I don't know whether I am prepared for this phenomenon or not. I am not yet done with my own kids. Despite their obvious high stations in this world, they are still small to me. I love them too much to put them away for even a moment out of my mind. I still am constantly thinking of how to make them even more of superkids than they already are, and of course how to help them become better human beings. Now to see them having kids of their own makes me a little confused. How do I go about this knotty situation? Do I tend to the grandkids even as I continue to care for my own kids by combining the two, or do I abandon one group for the other, or do I tend to the elder group in a way that vicariously takes care of the younger group, or what? Sheer confusion. At times, I have been told by people, though discreetly, that I am making a mess of the lives of my own kids by continuing to treat them as kids and refusing to believe they have grown up and indeed have a mind of their own. Hmm, I am sure they have one (that's what the doc said when they were born), and I am happy for them, but I must admit I always worry for them, and I always think they should still take a little more care in crossing the roads, and filling up application forms, and tying the shoelaces. The truth is, and let it be out before I sign off, I constantly thought what would happen when these kids, who appear to me to be perfectly capable of dozing off at the airport gates and missing the flights, would have kids of their own? And how would they cope with that?

But the time of hypothesizing is over. The grandkids have arrived, and in a grand style too. And may be it is time for me to grow up too. Not to worry too much about either my kids or their kids. I know, I know, it's my parental ego that is central to all this. You really don't have to tell me that. I figured it out myself. I promise I will try and change myself and really be friends to all of them rather than oversee them. I love all of them too much to do otherwise. After all, they are my kids and my grandkids.
(Oops! Can't really get rid of my pestering ego!)

Adieu!

Steve Jobs died. Eight years of fighting cancer and finally getting defeated. A great guy he was. A complete loner. Never believed in competing, never believed in excellence. Because to compete or to excel at something, you need someone else to compete with, or some existing standard to surpass, to be able to say I excelled at this or that. He created his own standards. He would later not like them. Then he created some other standards. He believed in innovation, in ideating, in sheer imagination. Never wasted his time on others' ideas. Used to quote Stewart Brand, "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

There is a difference between selling and getting bought. He never sold his products. People bought from him.He created the PC. In due course of time, posthumously, he will be credited with the honor of being the destroyer of the PC. He has already ensured that. Some day, not far off, we will not go to a computer owned by us to use it. The computer device (not the PC form) will move around with us. The laptop did that. Then the notebook. Now the iPad. But the villain is still the Windows. It still chains us to so many things at a time. Jobs was moving towards breaking that bind.

When you need to write with a pencil, you just pick up a pencil, not the whole penholder which may have a dozen pencils and a dozen pens and a dozen markers. When you need to correct your eyesight, you just wear your glasses, not wear a device which has attached to it glasses, and binoculars and magnifying glasses all together. When you need to eat with a spoon, you just hold a spoon, not the whole cutlery store. So when you simply want to email, you would have a small device which just helps you send email and nothing more. For now, you have it in a smartphone that is a mobilephone. When you want to look up a website, you would simply want to have a website that quickly allows you to surf through to that website, and nothing more. Remember that Casio calculator which still survives? Only with inflation, the eight digit device has become 12 digit. Like the proverbial cockroach, it has still survived over years. Because it has a specific function and it fulfills well and you can afford to have one in your office, one in your home, one in your briefcase and one in your car. It's always there where you are. It's there because you don't want to remember what 12 into 27 is. There is a calculator in your computer and a smartphone, but you will still reach for that Casio calc on your desk. Someday when the Windows hegemony is broken, we will have about a fifty or hundred of small software which will help us write, categorize, analyze, listen to music, look up websites, purchase and sell things, communicate, and of course, compute, but all separately, all independently. The software will be unitised, the device will be adaptively unitised. And then there will be enough number of such devices lying all around, so wherever we go there will  be a device to use, not go to a device to use it. Jobs was relentlessly working towards this.

He broke the software umbrella but he had yet to break the single device dependence or freedom from the hardware. Jobs was a great downsizer. From the ancient IBM room-filling machines, he made a PC, and from there he came down to iPhone. He was still looking for that freedom of doing one thing at a time, even though apparently it looked he was cramming many things into a single device. If cancer had not blown him away, Jobs may have finally made a hundred devices with specific functions. He created new ideas, he destroyed old ones. He could see with his eyes closed. He could hear with his ears plugged. Walking on the Times Square, he could touch the Eiffel Tower. He was one of a kind.

55 is no age to die. Cancer is so cruel. It does not distinguish between being a Jobs or someone else. It does not even tell you why Jobs died.

Adieu!