One of the hardest things about Ramadan for me is not being able to cycle around London. I know that getting on my bike might seem like a good idea at first, but the energy and fatigue it would cause just wouldn’t be worth it.
As a result, I’ve been reliant on the London bus network to get around. I’ve got a love (it’s cooler temperature-wise and has natural daylight) // hate (they’re always late and delayed) relationship with buses. But today sitting on the 453 to Deptford gave me a new found appreciation for something I’m so very passionate about.
Diversity.
I saw a black child and a white child playing and learning together as you see in this photo (it’s not creepy, I cropped out faces).
How amazing, I thought. The conditioning of their backgrounds and skin colour have no impact on them playing together and learning from one another.
It got me thinking about the Great British Diversity Experiment that I’ve been involved in lately. I was put in a very diverse team of 10 marketers in the bid to solve a brief from Tesco. We documented the experience and long story short our team (the ‘Diversiteam’) won!
A few weeks ago Renato Tata, Kat Murray-Clark and I were invited on stage to talk about our experience. There are a plethora of tweets with soundbites from our talk, but the one we ended on was “when will diversity stop being an experiment and just be the norm”.
Approaching six working years (oh how the time flies) I’m taking a bit of time to take stock about what I’ve learnt. Often you don’t know how much you know until you sit down and think it through. And that’s exactly why Ramadan is brilliant. It provides sorely needed reflection time and energy to think about what’s going on in my life and also in the world.
Sitting on the bus today I realised that we’re surrounded by diversity. It simply is the norm. It’s the norm on the bus, in the supermarket, out on the streets, but step into an advermarketingpr agency and it starts to disappear.
Change is going to take a long time and a lot of concerted effort (more to follow on that soon) but today I’m very happy to be on the diversity bus if it will lead to a world where the kids pictured grow up to work together in whatever field they choose to without the need for further experiments.
Asad Dhunna 