JP Rangaswami

From the time I can remember being able to remember anything, I’ve been fascinated by everyone and everything around me, and tending to think about what’s common and what’s different, what’s abundant and what’s rare. My innate curiosity has become tempered with both patience as well as passion over the years. I was born into a close-knit Hindu Brahmin family and then educated by the Jesuits for 15 years; these experiences created a sense of tolerance and non-judgmentalism that has helped me remain curious and fascinated by the world around me, keen to observe and to learn.

I was five when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring; my youth and teens were spent observing youth-led protest movements about war, about poverty, about nuclear weapons, and about control and bureaucracy, both in India as well as abroad. Helped by the teachings of family and faculty, it became clear to me that the problems I was seeing the world beset by were not going to be contained and solved by individuals in well-defined and bounded nation-states; instead, they needed communities and the communities needed to be cross-border, cross-culture and cross-timezone; they needed to be inclusive and tolerant as well, disenfranchising no one.

That led to a fascination about how communities formed and grew, communicated and evolved, and I became less and less interested in the cult of the individual: I love the golf expression “A solitary golfer has no standing on the course”. I became more interested in what John Seely Brown called “The Social Life of Information”, seeing education and information as the foundation stones of being able to work across culture and timezone. I’ve spent the last forty years learning about this, and continue to do so. That learning has made me think of language, food, music, mathematics and programming as disciplines with a common foundation, something that continues to guide me today.

Having spent four decades mainly working in that strange space where computing meets finance, I am now retired, and spend as much time as I can as a human being, a son, a husband, a father, a sibling, a grandfather, an uncle, a friend, a learner and sometimes a teacher. I try and spend a similar amount of time giving back to community, working pro bono as a professor, a school governor, a trustee of charitable organisations and as an angel and mentor at a bunch of startups. The final third of my time I spend as an independent non-executive director, board member and advisor to commercial organisations. In all these things I try and keep my focus on the power of community in using education and information ti facilitate the changes we need to see in the world around us, fascinated by the very small, the very large, and points of inflection in their development.