I. Me. Myself.

I am an extinguished journalist. I am the slowest runner on earth. I am also the Founder & CEO of IRIS Business Services Limited (www.irisbusiness.com) a firm I founded with Deepta Rangarajan and K Balachandran. I became the CEO not because I am the most deserving. Just because.

I am also horribly overweight, ok, may be not so horribly. But enough for every doctor to make fun of me when I tell them about my running. You cannot be too good, they tell me and they are right.

I took up running to deal with my attention deficiency disorder as Americans are wont to call it. You know how they have converted every situation to a disease or illness so that one does not have to take responsibility for it.

When you are on the road for as long as I am, you cannot afford to be very attention deficient. As I like to tell people about my long runs, I am so slow that I leave home yesterday only to return tomorrow. Not because I run long distances but because I am so slow that it takes me a long time to cover even short distances.

I took to writing for the same reason, to deal with my ADD. I started by getting onto Facebook where I put up notes for people to read. Some did. And now I have decided to take all of my Facebook notes and put them together to launch a blog.

I will write about anything that attracts my attention, running, politics, economy, whatever.

When I was a journalist and even now, I meet a great many number of fascinating people. Each of them has a story to tell which I will share with you.

At IRIS, we have built a reasonably successful business around XBRL, an information standard which is becoming ubiquitous across the world. Today, as we approach 2014, I am thrilled that we have a presence in as many as 14 countries where we have implemented our software.

I will write about politics as the subject fascinates me. i returned to India after my education in the US in 1987 because I entertained aspirations of being a politician, I have long given that up, instead I am now trying to do something to reform our politicians.

I studied economics at Yale, a subject in which I have more than a passing interest. My greater interest is in public policy where I am convinced that the quality of discourse can be improved significantly. It is for this reason that we launched www.esocialsciences.com, perhaps the biggest social sciences research portal in this part of the world.

I call my blog Abol Tabol, inspired by the work of the same name by the great Bengali writer Sukumar Ray whose son, the legendary director Satyajit Ray, everybody would have heard of for sure. Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol, a collection of poetry, belongs to the genre known as literary nonsense.

Welcome to my Abol Tabol, my world of nonsense. Because I recognize that what makes sense to me may seem nonsensical to you.


S Swaminathan