The Art of Gathering Online
I moved to Palakkad, Kerala in mid 2017 after quitting life in the big city. The reasons behind why I chose to move to a small town, away from the big city are not the subject of this blog post, I will address that another time. But the background is that I started a sustainable womenswear label called Ela India in February 2018, a few months after my big move.
It’s Wednesday, April 22nd 2020. I’ve just ended a Zoom call with two other women entrepreneurs. Anjali is a practising architect based in Singapore who manages her architecture studio in Goa remotely. Bhavya runs her own tech business in Canada. The nature of our individual businesses and our contexts couldn’t be more different. And yet, ever since we started this ritual of getting on a weekly call with each other, the sense of common ground that I feel at the end of every call always amazes me. The number of times, one of us has been able to provide an insight into the other’s business problem has truly been a revelation to all of us.
Let me dial back a bit. In late 2017, a few months after I made the move, I was still adjusting to life in a small town. Everything felt great, I was focused on starting my own womenswear label. I had been traveling around Kerala, visiting weaving clusters and sampling and sourcing handloom fabric. The only thing I missed was a sense of creative community.
Attending creative meet-ups, film screenings, panel discussions, musical concerts- there had never been a dearth of those opportunities in Bombay. In Palakkad, I struggled with a sense of isolation, feeling like I was working in a vacuum. Anyone who has worked from home alone, as I have for the last two years will understand what a terribly isolating experience this can be.
I was nostalgic for the times when I could meet friends or mentors for a cup of coffee and discuss potential ideas and projects. Given that I lived in a small town in Kerala, the options for events related to art and design were few and far between. Kochi was a great option, but it was also three hours away and required a lot of planning and effort.
It was at this time, that I came across Priya Parker’s book ‘The Art of Gathering.’ Parker interprets the art of gathering as a way of shaping the way we think, feel and make sense of our world. As Parker rightly points out in a Fast Company article by Laura M. Holson-
“We figure out not only who we are, but who we could be, through our gatherings. It’s an adage that birds of a feather flock together. But we have a choice of who we want our birds to be.”
Excerpts from Parker’s book ‘The Art of Gathering’
“You are not alone if you skip the first step in convening people meaningfully: committing to a bold, sharp purpose.
What are the ingredients worth gathering about? What are the ingredients for a sharp, bold, meaningful gathering purpose? Specificity is a crucial ingredient. The more focussed and particular a gathering is, the more narrowly it frames itself and the more passion it arouses”
She also suggests reverse engineering an outcome that you want from the gathering and then working backward from that outcome. I can count on my fingers the amount of times I have attended a creative talk and felt like I truly benefited from it. I looked at the idea of gathering or creative meet-ups in a very different light, by the time I was done reading her book. (Highly recommended for those who are interested!)
Reading Parker’s book validated my need for seeking a creative community, and led me to seek a sense of community online, in the absence of a physical community close by. Besides my womenswear label, I also do strategic communications on the side for Grounded, an architecture firm based in Singapore and Goa, headed by friend and amazingly talented architect Anjali Mangalgiri. It was during our weekly Skype work calls that we started discussing how we both felt disconnected from having access to a creative community of like-minded individuals. Slowly, our calls started diverging into the stuff that was bothering us, as business owners- productivity, long term goals, finding a work-life balance. Anjali suggested we create a Whatsapp group, with another friend of hers (and sister in law!) Bhavya, who was running a tech business in Canada. She also suggested that we start a weekly video call ritual to discuss ideas and problems we were facing individually.
The idea was to feel a sense of connection as women running their own businesses in different parts of the world, with remarkably similar concerns that were affecting our creative and entrepreneurial output.
I think what works for our weekly calls is the sense that someone else always manages to bring a fresh set of eyes to a problem that we are individually too close to be objective about. This has happened when I was struggling with the decision to launch a second business in a completely unrelated field to my first. I explained the business model to both of them, and Bhavya asked me if I could personally afford to invest in two slow-moving businesses at the same time. That perspective helped.
Studying the notes from our last two Zoom calls ( we take notes during the call and exchange minutes of what we discussed and important insights we came to, after the call ends) Bhavya suggested that we start recording the chats so we can track some of the more long term ideas and goals that have come up. Besides our weekly calls, we exchange podcast and book recommendations and productivity hacks on our Whatsapp group. I will update this post in a few months with results of short term and long term goals that came about as a result of our weekly meet-up.
( Editor’s Note: Ela India is made with love in Kerala and you can view our womenswear collection at http://www.elalabel.com )
