THERE ARE LINKS TO VIRTUALLY EVERY EXPERIENCE. DO WE LIKE THAT? MORE IMPORTANT, ARE WE STILL STRIVING OR THRIVING? SANGEETA WADDHWANI WELCOMES YOU TO A BRAVE NEW WORLD!
Almost everybody you know has adapted to the unique ‘mediated’ reality of the Pandemic, where everything – from hanging with friends, family, keeping a business afloat, to payments to your baniya and takeaway meals – has a zoom version or a digital wallet solution. Do we dig this? Have we adapted? Where are you on the spectrum?
THE END OF ‘BUSINESS-CUM-PLEASURE’ LUNCHES
Here’s a story that is screaming to be written.
The Digital Connect vs The Human Connect.
Is it one and the same thing? If you are spending a lot of time on your own, trying to fool yourself into thinking, ‘well I spent much of the day meeting people online,” just pinch your arm and be a kinesiologist for a bit and ask your body… do you miss hugs, handshakes, eye-to-eye smiles? Do you miss the unique auras and perfumes of the people around you? Do you miss the business lunches and dinners that showed you how your colleagues wind down while talking shop? How you got to learn about the best wines and potions to enjoy your Italian fare with at random events?
DIGITALISING BUSINESS, LIT FESTS AND CULTURAL EVENTS: ACROSS CITIES.
To me, travelling to a new country for business would encompass not only your actual business meetings, but moving through the streets of a new city, trying new flavours, shopping for loved ones, picking up the vibe and vitality of a different culture. These days, all one does is send out a zoom link and speak. Head to head. Megapixels and bytes.
To be fair, I did find it easier to focus on the Jaipur Lit Fest sessions purely on the content level, but how I missed the 20 degrees Celsius temperatures, deep fried kachoris and savoury chutneys, the kullad chais, the roar and applause of a LIVE audience, the sheer variety of faces and warm humanism in the global throng, the vivacious riot of colours that make the Diggi Palace such a travesty of dull academia, the eclectic stalls, and the floodlit dance and cultural presentations at Amber Fort, the Jaipur City Palace, the publishing parties and the Writer’s Ball at Rambagh! Also Jaipur is like a Paris at the time of the lit fest… rich in architecture and artistic expression. So though the Teamworks team had done a fantastic job with their curation and online simulation of the Diggi Palace… I missed the holistic treat to the senses, the social, fashion and culinary dimensions around JLF, immensely.
DOES ZOOM MAKE THE HEART GROW FONDER?
Romantic relationships operate the same way – there has to be great love for an offline, tangible connect without vaccine certificates and paranoia. Nobody wants to die for love – nobody wants the kiss of death…they may take a chance on lust, but love…who has the time yaar? Now is this good or bad news?
To me, it’s a mix. Pre-Pandemic, casual, physical entanglements brought a consumer nature to relating. It is not at all in synergy with India’s sophisticated notions of togetherness, where a truly dharmic relationship may have put two strangers together in holy matrimony, but over many decades, that relationship evolved to embrace ALL the seven chakras – mind, communication, heart, power equations and sexuality. Shiva and Shakti enjoyed this kind of bond… there’s was a passionate and complementary bond but primarily egalitarian, friendship-based. Shakti or Parvati asked Shiva so many questions about the Kaliyuga that he shared with her the Nadi Shastra – the tale of every soul that would live in this age, inscribed on leaves. That tale encompassed data of around two lifetimes or more per soul. As equals, Shiv and Shakti sparred mentally, they often played chess games, discussed the depths of spiritual truths, and of course, explored the depths of passion as well. The physical distance brought about by the Pandemic perhaps taught Gen Z that love can be a mental construct and not always a hook up!
But going beyond the personal realm, I have seen amazing ‘pivots’ among entrepreneurs, fashion designers, (so many couturiers went online with diffusion and prêt lines, I have lost count!), PR people, (who suddenly saw old print models of media vanish into thin air), and even film-makers, perfumers, who were either used to working with large ensemble teams in real time and space when shooting their films, or in the case of perfume, having clients sniffing an assortment of fragrances in real time and space before picking their choice.
DLC: A SUPER-AMBITIOUS IDEA IS BORN OUT OF THE PANDEMIC
Here are some fascinating stories, starting with the Della Leaders Club, founded by serial entrepreneur Jimmy Mistry, known for his six resorts and lifestyle store in Lonavala. They say a good entrepreneur sees an opportunity where others see a challenge. Jimmy came up with the idea of setting up the world’s first business portal during the first year of the Pandemic, hiring people when others were on a firing spree. He could have mourned the frequent shutting down of his resorts or walked away from this new dream seeing the gamble it entailed. But come June 12, his 50th birthday, and we got a taste of what the Post-Pandemic global community looked like as the Della Leaders Club launched; voices spoke from across 26 knowledge domains and 15 thought and creative capitals around the world! The ‘live’ audience was limited, but the event was staged elegantly, in a ballroom at the Della Luxury Resort…and it literally felt like we had travelled around the world while seated on our chairs; in one beautifully curated ‘zoomed’ evening. We heard from five spiritual figures of five faiths, on why knowledge-sharing is part of human evolution. We heard from Fern Mallis (New York Fashion Week), from Steve Rodgers (former CEO Warren Buffet) and many, many more on why a space of free and rich knowledge exchange, lifestyle guidance and social responsibility, serves up unlimited potential for building a support ecosystem for leaders globally.
PIVOTS AND IPS: THE NEW NORMAL
Let’s look at how some others ‘pivoted.’ I for one, (while being a Lifestyle Consultant for DLC) started teaching the fine art of Creative Writing on zoom, finding my students coming in from Montreal, London, New York and of course, India. It became a rich experience for them to gain insights into Indian stories, our notions of myth and archetype, and I in return, had students sharing movie scripts from Hollywood, discussing ideas and global politics – the quality of the class narratives were super exciting! This gave me immense joy and creative satisfaction, to help others discover their inner Kalidasa, so to speak! We also visited the voices of fiction and non-fiction writers and experimented with Ekphrastic poetry. It felt like I had discovered a new talent, that of firing up imaginations and making people passionate about self-expression. Each individual has a museum of stories to share, but sadly in our information-overload times, people rarely tap into their inner storyteller. Creativity is therapeutic as my friend Mimi Rao (Associate Director Ernst & Young, UK) observed, while in my Masterclass. Sharing insights in a like-minded group is also a rich experience.
BACK TO BUSINESS: HOW DO YOU CHOOSE YOUR PERFUME ONLINE?
My friend Sheetal Desai, Founder & Curator of Fragrances – wiSDom, and Founder & Director SD Scents, had to deal with the Pandemic disruption just about the time she was raring to go all out with her perfumery brand. She had a history as an entrepreneur for 25 odd years, having worked closely in all aspects of the fragrance business – ‘right from marketing and evaluating a portfolio of renowned brands to building entire manufacturing units and setting up international business units within my family business to setting up and leading entire cross-functional teams as CEO,’ as her Linkedin profile tells us.
As an independent entrepreneur, she was launching her own fragrance brand in December 2019, expecting to popularize her merchandise through live exhibitions the first year and be present in stores by the second year. However, by March 2020, “everything came to a standstill,” she points out. “I had to very quickly adapt to going online. I didn’t have a website yet, barely understood Instagram. The first thing we did is get listed on an e-commerce site so people could shop. We then got on Instagram and other e-commerce platforms.”
The big challenge was, since perfumes are such a sensory product, how do you sell them digitally? “Fragrances are usually bought while smelling them personally,” she admits, but found her way around this conundrum – a miniature series where the customer gets to try three fragrances at a much lesser price than a typical 50ml bottle. Another innovation was to design the miniature series in such a way, that “the consumer can layer their scents and in the process, curate their own unique fragrance!”
A classic case of finding new opportunities when challenges present themselves!
FROM PR ON INTERIORS, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN TO ART CURATON FOR PUBLIC SPACES
Sakina Rangwala, a Communication Consultant and partner at Eztablish Design Communication, suddenly gave me a heads up to view a spectacular display of contemporary art at the Palladium mall, before the Second Wave of the virus hit us. A professional acquaintance and a friend of mine, she explained how her company decided to pivot into supporting art exhibitions in public spaces, owing to the overall sluggish event and brand calendars… not to mention how most solid print entities were out of circulation! “We saw almost all content going up on their social media or websites,” shares Aziz Amin, Founder, Eztablish Design Communication. “We started sharing video content for these platforms. There were lots of changes in the way the industry was functioning, in general. The events aspect of our business had come to a standstill. On the commercial front, clients were not always able to meet their commitments on time. But where Work From Home as a modality goes, we were doing it before the Pandemic hit! Overall, as a business, we had to deal with the fact that things were in flux, there was no certainty, anything could hit us at any time!”
NEW AVENUES FOR OLD
“We started as purely a PR outfit, did our first solo event in eight months. About a year-and -a-half into business, we introduced our Social Media management department. A little before the Pandemic, we were thinking of getting involved with art… it was an area we were passionate about as a team. Initially we got some artists on board for our PR division, promoting them. Then, we started Eztablish Art where we made it a platform for designers and architects to source and discover artists for their projects. It was exclusively for the design and architecture community. Then when the Pandemic struck, we could not do any physical event or activity. When we did find the opportunity, it was with the Palladium mall, Mumbai. We did it as part of the Luxe Fest event, putting up sculptures, installations and art works in the atrium and other open spaces. We had about 25-30 featured artists, some very established and some getting there. That gave Eztablish Art a great boost,” he shares.
ART AS AN ONLINE COMMODITY
“We are now revamping our website, creating an entire hub of artists, be they digital, fine artists, sculptors, to enable people to buy art directly off the site. By the end of 2021, we will have an entirely new website in place, and are looking to do smaller events in the next couple of months. Hopefully once things relax more in the event-space, we will boost our event logs and see new revenue streams generated by selling art in public arenas,” shares Aziz Amin, on an optimistic note.
HIERARCHIES MELTDOWN: DATA IS GOD
Devita Saraf, the energetic and passionate young CEO of VU television shares this golden insight into The New Order: “I think whether one is a CEO, an Editor-in-Chief, there is no scope for power play anymore. Whereas earlier it was all about one individual’s brilliance trickling down, now in the age of Artificial Intelligence, it has become more about data and looking at trends, what a consumer wants. Decisions are more about collective intelligence. A leader has to be humble and tuned in all the time to adapting to data and insights from consumers in real time.”
She also sees another over-riding Shift which has major implications for marketing professionals: “Earlier brands invested in pop ups, events, on ground retail and exhibitions to become ‘visible.’ But today you don’t really need to have those points of interaction as your consumers are revealing far more about their lifestyles, friends and chosen products and services on social media. If you can communicate digitally, it will save you time AND give you targeted reach.”
‘WORK FROM HOME’ AND NOT DESTABILISING YOUR EMPLOYEES INCOME OR JOB STATUS
Many CEOs have trust issues when employees choose to WFH or adopt hybrid formats of working and it has been heartwarming seeing the former CEO of Worldwide Media, Tarun Rai, (the company flourished creatively and had a fantastic, happy vibe under his progressive, people-centric leadership)…it has been fantastic seeing him share a post on LinkedIn that CEOs need to trust in their teams with remote work options. Says Devita, “At the end of the day, people work because they need financial stability, and no matter how trendy a CEO may seem telling people to WFH and not come back to office, it’s important to pay people in full and on time. Good leadership is about caring for your employees’ well-being and careers.”
SURVIVAL: NOT OF THE FITTEST BUT THE MOST FLEXIBLE
So there you have it… just a tip of the iceberg on the Age of Pivots, survival not of the fittest, but most flexible. As eras go, this one will be remembered as one of immense paradoxes… love but don’t touch, consume but recycle, spend but save more. Where babies at airports were unvaccinated and unmasked while their parents were subject to both protocols. The ink of my metaphorical pen dried up as stimulation moved to screens rather than real life scenes… and as I move away from this blogpost, I do hope that when we resume living… real living… we live with far more sensitivity to the message this brought us. That true wealth is having company, the ring of laughter at a party, the clink of glasses at a toast, the thrill of watching live gigs, be it Coldplay at the MMRDA grounds of Mumbai or classical music performances at the Ajanta and Ellora caves. There’s so much more to life than branded goods, sensory satiation, and empty social comparisons.
LIFE OF A MAGAZINE EDITOR 