The Death of the Conference Circuit

Some call it the cocktail circuit. To attend one of those you had to pay an entry fee of $1500, then travel and hotel expenses would add up to say, another $2000. If you were a presenter or speaker, some organizers would let you attend all other sessions free or at a discounted rate. Of course, there were coffee, cookies and “networking dinners” thrown in. Some sight-seeing too, if the locale was exotic – wasn’t that the basic idea, to begin with? One could then also write a new bullet point in the CV and earn some bragging rights back home or in office.

COVID-19 and the restrictions it has imposed on our lives, vis-à-vis travel, congregation, hotels stays, buffet walk-around-dinners and the collective boat-rides on the Seine, Thames, Tigris or Lake Cuomo, Why didn’t someone think of videoconferences, zoom meetings or the mighty Webex earlier?

Well, the number of conferences and seminars have not gone down; they have skyrocketed on the contrary, in a new avatar, the “Webinar”. So, while I never understood the fine distinction between a conference and a seminar, I feel vindicated now that they are all clubbed as Webinar. It is now so easy to send emails to prospective attendees with the schema of the next Webinar, which would be addressed by the most burnished luminaries on the planet. Now, whereas the organizers would earlier charge an attendance fee, set deadlines for registration and offer a $5.50 discount to early-birds, they now request, almost plead on bended knees, through repeated emails and phone calls, “Oh, please, please, Sir! Do join the webinar. At least the opening session.” Once you acquiesce, you name is added to the list of “participating luminaries” to lure even more luminaries to participate.

The speaking luminary has agreed in advance since he/she is now spared the travel, time-out-from-office and now addresses the audience through a pin-hole on a table-top “device”. The paradigm of eye-contact has changed to eye-camera contact and even the shyest speaker pulls it off with aplomb. The luminary speaker also, regrettably, loses out on his fat speaking fee and free travel and stay, away from the humdrum of monotonous office routine.

O! How I mourn the death of a major corporate perk that has vanished into thin air – one of travel and holidaying at the employer’s expense and a chit-chat with a long lost friend, who may be on the same jaunt. How I miss the cocktails and the networking dinners! And, don’t forget the faux-leather shoulder bag stuffed with sanitized handouts, sanitized in the business way not medical or hygienic. The generations to come will never know that there were events called conferences and seminars that laid out the chart humanity must follow. Maybe they will gawk and wonder at some rundown ruins of conference venues just the way we admire the Forum of Rome.