Jashn Hai Zindagi

Much recently I’ve been reading about nurturing creative thinking, innovation and out-of-the-box thinking and how some purposeless and light and artful team-engagements can positively contribute to a team’s creativity. Some like to call this “planned spontaneity” ..and I like this phrase too 🙂

We are celebrating “Culture Week” at my organization this month where we celebrate “Diversity and Inclusion” in all it’s form and spread awareness about the same. This involves various fun as well as informative workshops and activities that help in spreading awareness about the matter.

In my parallel world, outside office that is :), since past few years I’ve been video-blogging extensively about a lot of ancient and medieval heritage and archaeological sites in and around my city…mostly on weekends. And seeing my video and photo blogs on social media, my office friends have often expressed their liking for such excursions and heritage/photo-walks….and how every time they are not able to find time for doing something that they like!

One fine day recently.. I was reading some articles on the web about best practices for nurturing Planned Spontaneity in Corporates when the “Culture Week” invitation mailer arrived in my inbox. The mailer mentioned about a “Photography Competition” with “Diversity and Inclusion” as the key theme. I suddenly saw some dots getting connected and thought that what if I take my team out for a heritage/photo-walk on a weekend …where we just walk sedately on the grass, take some candid snaps and also learn about how the culture has shaped up since the ancient ages through the medieval and modern times! I was perhaps very hopeful that this activity will help us experience some moments of planned spontaneity and creativity which we’ll be able to apply at our office work as well…and also will fetch us some nice shots for the photo-competition 🙂

I floated the idea with the team after our daily meeting and some of them seemed to like it….and it was fun to see the enthusiasm grow as the weekend arrived 🙂 We chose the Mehrauli Archaeological Park for our visit – it is a place that has been a major settlement ever since the ancient and medieval times and has seen so many human civilizations come and go! The area is still an active hub for archaeologists in this town and is literally littered with ruins from the ancient Indian empires, the Sultanate period as well as the British empire!

We reached the site early morning on a Saturday …roamed around…discussed about the history of the place..clicked snaps..played badminton and Frisbee.. had moments of hearty laughs.. and the heritage/photo walk was followed by some awesomely delicious authentic traditional food 🙂 It was fun to see grown-up “Engineers” playfully roam around like kids mimicking birds, enjoying the magic of trick-photography, clicking selfies and photographing cute little dogs and piglets apart from the monuments and ruins in that ridge!

The team seemed to have loved the experience and I’ve treasured some of these moments in the photos shown below. Really looking forward to more moments of such planned spontaneity ahead 🙂 Amen!