The Chandrayaan 3 milestone has given us reason to look again to Seb, our co-founder & CEO and ex-employee of ISRO, for untold anecdotes on his experience while there of excellence, attention to detail, running a tight ship, inclusion (did you notice just how many women were part of the ISRO visuals on TV?), how passion translates into action, and how ownership becomes part of workplace culture.

Milestones, by their very nature, require you to look back and take stock of the learnings, transformations, crossroads, and pivots that are part of the journey, and we’ve been reflecting on these as well.

A convenient outcome for our clients is that we’re now more than just the ex-WorldSpace team, known for their deep expertise in music and non-music radio programming. Time and disruptions in the content and communication landscape have seen us evolve into storytellers in more than just audio. We can now tell compelling stories in video and the written word too. That last one, for me personally, is coming full circle, or should I Chandrayaan-ly say, sphere, given I started out my working life on the edit desk of The Sunday Observer.

We’ve also begun to engage with a wider stakeholder community compared to when we began in 2011. Back then, we’d almost always engage with HR and Internal Communications teams. Over time, we’ve managed to establish the value of podcast communication firmly in the minds of people from other functions: ethics and compliance, marketing, branding, admin, operations, the CIO’s team, CTO teams, talent acquisition leads, sales and business functions, finance teams, and indeed even directly with the CEO’s office.

The arrival of a new Beolit 20 bluetooth speaker at home takes me back to a time when it was only about our music capabilities.

So, happily, there’s a playlist for milestones, for there are milestones to cherish and bask in: Ashok Leyland’s 75th anniversary celebrations with a new tagline, Koi Manzil Door Nahin, that is so apt for the Chandrayaan 3 feat as well; our podcast series for TCS cruising towards the 100th episode mark; our GreytFM podcasts for GreytHR soft landing on the 1,00,000 listens mark...

And my playlist to reflect on them:
Sting’s There’s a Moon Over Bourbon Street, Savage Garden’s To the Moon & Back, the Hindi song Neele Neele Ambar back to back with the original Tamil version by Ilayaraja, Ilaya Nila, then Chand Chupa Badal Mein, Yeh Raat Yeh Chandni, and for good measure, the ones that spawned a bunch of memes the week of August 23rd—Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, and that one from Pakeezah that reminds us and our clients that there’s miles to go: Naushad’s Chalo Dildar Chalo, Chand Ke Paar Chalo, Ham Hain Tayyar Chalo...

Seetal Iyer
Co-Founder & Head of Content