The men had left. The smoke was still lingering there. Destruction’s cruel laughter was still echoing. The wind carried the smell of the dead to far off places. The battle was epic. The strife was hard. But every time, every season, the result was the same. Countless dead bees were laying there. The smoke and heat stung the bees as their own stings. Poor, miserable bees. What do they get in return of their sweet labour, the gratitude they get from the Mother Nature for toiling from flower to flower, meadow to meadow and making honey? Who can think of facing such devastating consequences of bringing sweetness and light into this world? A Dove, who was observing this, season after season, asked a Bee, “When you know that the man will steal your honey every time, why do you make it, and let yourself killed, why?” Then the Bee replied:
Once upon a time, there was a man. At the age of 21, he founded a company with his friends in his garage. For 09 years he toiled hard, he gave his blood, sweat and tears to the company. He made the company so successful that people went crazy for it. People would stand in lines for 12 hours, 24 hours to buy the company’s products. Every product the company made was a sure success, it was sold like hot cakes. Woosh, and the product was sold, woosh, and the idea clicked. Riding on the horses of success, this man went to hire a CEO of Pepsi-Cola. When the CEO showed cold feet he threw his vision to him as, “”Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” This was his vision, to change the world. Little did he know that the same CEO would chuck him out from the same company he made with his own hands?
The year was 1985 and Jobs was without a job or was he? His next apple of the eye was NeXT. He continued making computers, gadgets and software. In 1986, Jobs bought The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar).
The first film produced by the partnership, Toy Story (1995), with Jobs credited as executive producer, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released. Over the next 15 years, under Pixar’s creative chief John Lasseter, the company produced box-office hits A Bug’s Life (1998); Toy Story 2 (1999); Monsters, Inc. (2001); Finding Nemo (2003); The Incredibles (2004); Cars (2006); Ratatouille (2007); WALL-E (2008); Up (2009); and Toy Story 3 (2010). Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up and Toy Story 3 each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
So he was making movies, selling workstations and having fun. How Apple was doing in these 10 years? Apple’s worldwide market share fell from 12 percent to 3 percent, and Apple struggled to stay relevant in any respect. All the products it rolled out were not inspiring, not clicking with the consumers. So it bent on a knee and proposed Steve Jobs. Apple literally begged Steve Jobs to become the captain of the ship in its troubled times. The year was 1997 and within 03 years Apple was on the right track. For technical marvels like iPod, iPhone, MacBook etc. people flocked to Apple Stores. And he responded to his exile years as “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
But his was an exile of only a decade or so, the bee continued. There is an exiled community, religion. They were blamed of crucifying Jesus Christ. For more than 2000 years they lived in exile. Their children were killed, their women were raped. According to James Carroll, “Jews accounted for 10% of the total population of the Roman Empire. By that ratio, if other factors had not intervened, there would be 200 million Jews in the world today, instead of something like 13 million.” So where are the rest of the Jews? Later in medieval Western Europe, further persecutions of Jews in the name of Christianity occurred, notably during the Crusades—when Jews all over Germany were massacred—and a series of expulsions from England, Germany, France, and, in the largest expulsion of all, Spain and Portugal after the Reconquista (the Catholic Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula), where both unbaptized Sephardic Jews and the ruling Muslim Moors were expelled. In the recent times, in Nazi Germany, more than one third of the total Jews (15 million) 06 million were slaughtered in the Holocaust.
After being banished from every place the Jews could call their home, they, on 14 May 1948, declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” But their struggle does not end there, should we say, the Fury intensified its wrath manifold. The very next day, 15 May 1948, neighboring Arab armies invaded Palestine. Israel’s lands were half desert and half snow-capped mountains. Nothing could be grown there. Israel is the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world’s population. The mighty Arab League boycotted Israel and any organization that would do business with it. Even till 1966, Pepsi and Coca Cola were not available in Israel.
From these conditions, today, Israel is a developed country and an OECD member. Now Israel has the highest standard of living in the Middle East and the third highest in Asia, and among the highest life expectancies in the world. Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world. Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation by a large margin -109 per 10,000 people – as well as one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed. In proportion to its population, Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world. Outside the United States and Canada, Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies. Israel’s $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined. In 1984 and 1991, Israel airlifted a total of 22,000 Ethiopian Jews at risk in Ethiopia to safety in Israel. Israel has the world’s second highest per capita of new books. Israel is the only country in the world that entered the 21st century with a net gain in its number of trees. Israel developed an innovative way to increase crop yields by up to 50 percent while using 40 percent less water. Israel leads the world in the number of scientists and technicians in the workforce, with 145 per 10,000, as opposed to 85 in the U.S., over 70 in Japan, and less than 60 in Germany. With over 25% of its work force employed in technical professions. Israel places first in this category as well. The cell phone was developed in Israel by Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel. Most of the Windows NT operating system was developed by Microsoft-Israel. The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel. Voice mail technology was developed in Israel. Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R&D facilities outside the US in Israel. The technology for AOL Instant Messenger was developed in 1996 by four young Israelis. While being astonished over all this, remember that the land on which the country was found was complete desert, and before Jews settled there no Arab country was interested in that piece of land. Even when it is crowded and bullied by such hostile neighbors, it prospered.
Similarly, the way Jobs prospered even when he was thrown out of his own Company. The Bee said, “ dear Dove, the men can take our honey, they can burn our shelter, they can choke us with smoke, they can kill us, but they can never snatch, steal or bereft us of the knowledge of making honey. They can never take that from us. Till the day, we have that knowledge, we are not defeated. Every time we will make a new hive and we will make honey. And the experience we have while making the honey is the reason of our existence. It is not the honey that we live for but for the pleasure we get while making that. Jobs didn’t live for the company but for the joy he got while working on projects. The Jews succeeded because of that even after being robbed of everything countless times. Because, my dear Dove, that’s the power of knowledge. Once you have it you have it. Nobody can steal or rob it.”
