{"id":37539,"date":"2026-09-28T17:02:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T11:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/?p=37539"},"modified":"2026-09-28T17:02:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T11:32:20","slug":"the-conversations-mattered-but-the-moments-of-joy-between-them-stayed-with-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/the-conversations-mattered-but-the-moments-of-joy-between-them-stayed-with-me.html","title":{"rendered":"The conversations mattered. But the moments of joy between them stayed with me."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Dear Reader,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People keep asking me how The Festival of Joy went, and I keep finding it surprisingly hard to answer in one line. The easy answer is that it went well. The truer answer is that it felt joyful in ways I had not planned for. I expected the conversations, the panels, the questions, the reports, and the running around that comes with putting something like this together. What I did not expect was how often the day would make me stop, look around, and smile. Some of my favourite moments happened nowhere near the main stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


There was something lovely about watching a room full of people, many of whom had arrived carrying titles, agendas, and full calendars, simply become participants. I watched people try Tai Chi together, sit quietly through sound healing, bend over tables making and repairing things with their hands, laugh with strangers, and linger in conversations long after a session had ended. For a few minutes at a time, nobody seemed to be performing expertise or productivity. They were simply present. And perhaps because so much of our work at YourDOST begins with distress, it felt especially meaningful to see wellbeing expressed through curiosity, play, stillness, connection, and joy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For a few minutes at a time, nobody seemed to be performing expertise or productivity. They were simply present. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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We had gone into the festival with the theme \u201cDesigning a Conscious & Caring India\u201d and the thought \u201cCare is the New Culture.\u201d By the end of the day, I found myself thinking less about the words and more about what they looked like when people actually inhabited them. <\/strong>Care looked like listening without rushing to respond. It looked like leaders speaking openly about things that are usually kept behind closed doors, and students and professionals sharing the same spaces without hierarchy getting in the way. It also looked like people giving themselves permission to pause in the middle of a very full day. Joy, I realised again, is not the absence of difficult conversations. Sometimes, it is what gives us enough room to have them honestly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Leaders speaking openly about things that are usually kept behind closed doors, and students and professionals sharing the same spaces without hierarchy getting in the way. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There was another moment that felt important to me personally. On stage, we released two pieces of work that have taken months, and in one case years, to build: the Decade of Wellness Report<\/strong> and the YourDOST x Razorpay Emotional Wellbeing of Indian Entrepreneurs 2026.<\/strong> The first looks back at what more than a decade of listening has taught us about emotional wellbeing in India. The second looks at a very different kind of invisible load, the emotional cost of building a company and the pressure founders often carry behind the confidence the world sees. Releasing both of them at The Festival of Joy felt right, because the day itself held the same tension they do: serious questions, difficult realities, and still, plenty of hope.
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I would love for these reports to travel beyond the room in which we released them. You can read the Decade of Wellness Report<\/strong><\/a> here. If you would like a copy of the Emotional Wellbeing of Indian Entrepreneurs 2026, <\/strong>you can request it through this form<\/strong><\/a>. I hope both become more than documents that get downloaded and filed away. I hope they prompt conversations in leadership teams, classrooms, campuses, workplaces, founder circles, and perhaps even around dinner tables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Even now, the thing I am still carrying is not a particular quote from the stage or a statistic from a slide. It is the sight of people making room for one another, and making room for joy. <\/strong>We spend so much of our lives preparing for what might go wrong, solving what is already difficult, and moving quickly to whatever comes next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was good to spend a day remembering that wellbeing is also about what makes life feel alive, connected, playful, and worth showing up for. The festival is over, but I hope some of that joy keeps travelling with everyone who was there, <\/em><\/strong>and with those who encounter these conversations afterwards. That, more than anything, is what I would like us to carry forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep Rising & Shining,
Richa Singh<\/strong>
Co-Founder & CEO, YourDOST<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Reader, People keep asking me how The Festival of Joy went, and I keep finding it surprisingly hard to answer in one line. The easy answer is that it went well. The truer answer is that it felt joyful in ways I had not planned for. I expected the conversations, the panels, the questions, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":37551,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2,3,181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-business","category-marketing","category-yd-diaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37539"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37555,"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37539\/revisions\/37555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yourdost.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}