Sunday, March 30, 2008

Long Long Ago....

PR (Public Relations) Session series @ CBS offered by Mr.Arup Kavan, CEO, WellSpring, An independent brand communication practice

Telling a story is not everybody' cup of tea. I believe it's an art in itself. After all not everyone can have that natural flow of thoughts and coherent sense of relevant meaning to what is being told. You must have it in you, to capture the sense of imagination of your audience and yet connect with their emotions, to strike the right chord. We were awe-struck to see one person who had this in abundance, Mr .Arup Kavan CEO, Wellspring PR.

Vibrant, Whacky, Smart, Witty, Energetic, Sophisticated are a few words that are my Top of the Mind recall currently to describe Arup in a few words. I was really impressed at the beginning of the session looking at the way he handled the idea of telling stories .Stories are an essential part of us. We all love to listen to them and at the same time a few love to narrate them.

This was the important insight that he asked us to work on. By asking us to think about the relevance of any incident that might have occurred with us at any point in our life to help us understand a point, was the essential tool he used to get us close to the concept of Public Relations.

He started off with sharing a story that was close to his heart, the story of the Snooker Table. It basically had the essence of possessing a particular thing which was always a prized possession in one's life, to having seen it getting ruined due to peripheral reasons attached to it. In a way it helped him understand, how important Customer Service is to any shop and how one can spoil all the hard work done in acquiring the good will of a customer within no time.

The lessons to be learnt from every story take us a long way in our life. This helps us look back at things , in a way which we would not have bothered to at some point of time. That's the power of a story.

Everyone has a story to tell, and every story has something to take away.

Arup wanted us to learn the relevance of this exercise and asked us to peep into our lives to resurrect any such incident that enlightened us to a new fact of life. This was the high point of the session, as he was able to get each one of us to reflect back and come up with instances which made us come in close quarters with customer service and its realities. A job neatly done.

Another important aspect that he discussed was the requirement of being specific in life. We always tend to think and act on things without getting into the skin of a matter. This ends up making us superficially, long drawn out, and beaters around the bush. The necessity to be specific and getting to understand the reason behind doing a particular task, always helps us understand it better and makes the person who gave us the task feel more confident about us. Hence , whenever we embark on a new task, the foremost thing to be done is , get to the roots, find out its value and then chart out strategy to accomplish it.

Some sessions leave you, with your jaws dropping in awe, while this one made my mind working, to take a big bow in front of one of those awe inspiring men who have visited our campus. Looking forward to some more exciting stuffs from Mr Arup....what a great start to this 15 session series !!!

By Pradeep,Marcom Varsity,CBS

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