These days I don’t accept invites to conferences, sorry. I would much rather go to unconferences. These, in case you don’t know, are informal gatherings of people discussing things in an unstructured way. So trendy are these becoming that event managers are now introducing an unconference session during their regular conferences.
For unconferences to be successful it may be better if the participants stay at unhotels. These can be anything from a homestay to custom made hospitality experiences. Ever since Airbnb arrived on the scene and disrupted everything with its unhotel concept, poor hoteliers have had to work extra hard to change their setting to please millennials who want everything different and customised. One hotelier in Kerala actually runs a hotel where just one single family can stay.
Global leaders may have their summits to attend, but the perpetual rebels go in for unsummits. Didn’t you read Arundhati Roy hold forth on her unsummit with whistleblower Edward Snowden along with John Cusack and Dan Ellsberg at a ritzy Moscow hotel room. At unsummits you can listen to the goings on sprawled on a bed, perched on a stool or leaning against the mantelpiece. It helps if there is some wine to loosen the tongue a bit. Yes, yes, we do unsummits all the time at bars and lounges with our friends but rarely do we take those deeply philosophical discussions on love and life and work seriously.
All the things the world took thousands of years to create and organise into neat little compartments are now being undone by simply prefixing two letters. Right now it’s only starting in small ways with hotels and conferences. But the way we are chafing at rules, soon we will probably have unbusinesses and unorganisations. Hmm, maybe dotcoms are just that. Children will go to unschools. Oh wait, they already are attending alternative educational institutions. It’s just a matter of putting a signboard on them calling them unschools.
Right now branded is cool and unbranded scorned at – but already I see my friends eschewing glitzily packaged soaps and going in for home-made soaps. Stands to reason that if we go to unhotels we might like unbranded stuff too.
Unsettled? Why should you be? Everything is uncertain after all. And it might be rather nice to have an ungovernment seeing that the one we voted for barely delivers.