Magic of Connect

Having just drenched myself in the collective outpouring of electrifying office beanfeast called "SLT Offsite", I cannot but ponder on the nature of the institution itself and the need it satisfies in our life. In the last few years, I have had reason to attend several of these as one grows older and the number of commemorative occasions multiplies and in each case, the josh is astoundingly intense and often more crystallized and definite than it was the first time around. Such off sites almost manufacture a feeling that did not quite exist and give it a shape and form of a more durable kind. We discover a sense of oneness with others who shared our past with us and make friends without the trenchant discrimination we showed in our youth. At a reunion, everyone is a treasured friend, even if we do not really have too much in common. But somehow what we do share in common, however insubstantial and far off in the past it might have been, seems to take on an altogether more significant form, and we embrace this warm sense of communion.

At such off-sites, everyone becomes a version of our former selves, as we excavate our own past and take a stroll down memory lanes as tourists of our own experiences. We go back to interesting RFP stories, wins, good wins and not so good wins, office nooks and crannies where we did insignificant things looking back, nostalgia accords everything with a sepia sheen of palatability, and with the benefit of distance, even dislike becomes benign affection.

Is it a desire to turn back the clock, to push back at the straining seams of age that swell our waists and thin our hair and thus return to the simplicity of an earlier time? It would certainly appear to so, given the ease with which we slip back into our earlier versions. The nicknames with bewildering histories, the jokes that were never funny, the crushes that bordered on psychotic fantasy, the hoots and catcalls redolent with frustration, the legends about people who were super heros; it is as all of these stayed in a part of our memory that was ageless and needed only an occasion like this to tumble out of their tightly stuffed compartments and reveal themselves all over again. To be at an offsite meant behaving with few extra tings of liberties with bosses, listening to the same leadership lectures and re-telling the same problem, for which the whole world was creating a solution until then.

Or perhaps, the nostalgia is really for who were and the times we lived in. Age gives perspective, and time softens the heart.?For few the journey now is neatly divided into two halves, and the retrospective gaze reveals as much if not more than the anticipation of what is yet to come in the remainder of our lives. Our life becomes much more about what we have already done than about what we are yet to do and time begins to move both backwards and forwards. We consume our own past as we begin a new journey back into time, armed with fading memories working overtime, filling in details where none existed.

In our organisation, we have always found ways of marking time. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, both of good things and bad as we mark the passage of time as we have just done with the new year celebrations. By doing so, we give shape to something as relentlessly fluid as time as it keeps running thinly out of our grasp. We build monuments with the otherwise fickle running sands of time by these contrivances of memory. An offsite is a device that allows for the past to take on a shape and for memory to become a living presence. Our own past becomes an asset, a site on which we built the rest of our lives. We go back to the roots to irrigate them and pay tribute to the source.

The need for such leadership connects, in part to a desire to make sense of one’s own life. We see reflections of ourselves in the others who knew us then and we understand the changes we have undergone through their eyes. We confer on them an empathy that comes from the fact that they are always once an extended part of our own selves, One ISS family. And while the pleasure of such meets comes from the bond we renew with others, in some way what we are really seeking is a deeper bond with our own selves.

Many more to come !