iba
Alumni Magazine
July- Dec 2020

Batool Raza-Hussain, hails from the IBA Alumni BBA-MBA batch of 2008 and currently resides in Canada. Besides being a Project Manager for Hubbell Inc., she runs her own business and designs and personalizes cork yoga mats.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/batool-r-hussain-9966341b/

Business profile: https://thesamadhiinitiative.com/

With COVID-19 imposing new restrictions on everyone and completely changing the way we did things before 2020, the impact of this was felt globally. Moreover, the pandemic and the accompanying lockdown measures turned work-life balance topsy-turvy for so many of us. This imposed an enormous pressure on people's physical and mental wellbeing, while gyms and yoga studios were forced to shut down.

Aerobics and Yoga can be a powerful tool to deal with the lockdown's uncertainty and isolation, as well as to maintain physical well-being. During the lockdown and in its aftermath, an increasing number of people were turning to online yoga/Zumba classes to regain balance and strength. This sparked a great idea and one such event was hosted in Canada for the Alumni of IBA.

Before I delve deeper into the details let me first introduce myself. My name is Batool Raza-Hussain and from IBA, BBA-MBA Batch of 2008. Yes, I belong to that fortunate batch (read Guinea Pigs) when the four-year BBA was first introduced. Anyways, that is a discussion for another day!

I have been living in Canada for the past four years and I'm an active member of the IBA Alumni Canada. I am also one of the administrators of the IBA Alumni Canada Chapter -Women forum on Facebook. Besides working as a project manager, I am also a certified yoga instructor (200hrs) and manage a yoga-related business as a side-gig.

So, last year when the pandemic was still going strong, myself and fellow alumnus, who is a registered Zumba instructor, came up with the concept of an online event essentially a Zumba®/Yoga retreat for the female alumni in Canada. Heybah Sheikh (IBA Alumni BBA-MBA batch of 1998) is a registered Zumba® instructor who has been practicing as an instructor for many years now. She teaches at the Canadian YMCA and has been hosting virtual Zumba® classes for some time now even before the pandemic began.

Together we worked on this event, exclusively for female alumni and the idea was to give some relief to fellow IBians who are stuck at home managing full time jobs, home-schooling and household chores.

Since both Heybah and I are into fitness, this seemed to be the ideal thing to do by giving back to the IBA community here. Hence, we got in touch with the IACC board (IBA Alumni Canada Chapter) and discussed the dynamics and were immediately given a green signal to proceed.

IACC has been very active in Canada for the IBA Alumni members and they encourage the alumni to come forward and provide the necessary support and guidance to new immigrants especially graduates of IBA.

This event was supposed to be one such initiative where we wanted to share an hour-long session of Zumba® and yoga with our fellow alumni. The event was advertised on the IBA Alumni Canada page and the IACC women page on Facebook and other IBA alumni managed social media channels. We used the WhatsApp group to spread the word for this event and got an over-whelming response. People had no access to gyms/studios and were looking for an outlet even if it meant an hour-long activity.

The event was hosted by us through Zoom and was an hour-long session (30 minutes of Zumba® and 30 minutes of Yoga®) followed by a quick chat and a group photograph. We picked a weekend for the sake of convenience and we had a great turn-out with 25 participants attending the event virtually. We all practiced and exercised together, and the event proved to be a great success with alumni requesting more such events in the future. We also requested a survey from the participants post-event and the feedback was very positive with members rating the event very highly in terms of execution and overall benefit.