Once Upon a Time in Compliance...

Compliance is an area which is generally described as dry and boring. The same is often labeled on those who work within the area of Compliance (Now this statement doesn’t exactly make me feel happy since I love my Job). So there we were one day on a typical Monday morning trying to go through those never ending emails with attachments the size of Mount Everest just begging to be reviewed and approved when we all started complaining about needing a break from this typical routine. Suddenly, Sabeen Hassan and Mona Khalid (Heading Regulatory Compliance and AML Compliance respectively) came up with an amazing idea (Ok, so it wasn’t exactly an idea of the century but it WAS something we all agreed on immediately which to me at least was a positive sign). What we came up with was spending an entire Saturday at the beach. The whole concept was just a silly joke initially and we started getting feedback from everyone on it when eventually the supposedly cool dude, yep, Mr. Bilal Rasul – Head of Financial Crimes (Don’t ya just LOVE the title?) entered and took the idea a bit too seriously and within an hour we were discussing what to arrange for lunch and getting into all the required details. At first the idea was just a small group at the beach for only people within our department but Bilal ever the genius suggested that we invite a few close friends from within B Bank as well. When everyone got to jotting down the number of possible invitees the list never seemed to come to an end keeping in mind the interactivity of Compliance with their fellow B members on a daily basis. With much editing we ended with a list of 50 people and that too of those whose names kept popping up in mind and unfortunately during the process even missed out names of some unintentionally (Though I still wonder why we were so restless while planning the whole thing – Guess it was the desperate need to run away from the work environment).
Unexpectedly a good bit of crowd showed up on the big day for which we all are thankful as the event wouldn’t have been a success without them. It was a bright and way too sunny Saturday afternoon but the excitement was definitely there. Some of our colleagues showed to enjoy with their kids, some were there just for the sake of hanging out and some were there to feel what it’s like being a fish. My first achievement of the day was convincing Saarim Hakim (Liabilities) to hit the water with me followed by which Sabeen and I decided to be a bit creative and started work on a Sand Castle which turned out to be so weird that we decided to take opinions and probed a happily walking Azam Akhtar (MT – IT) to guess what he saw before his eyes and to our absolute horror his guess was an Indian Temple so to cover up any further embarrassment Sabeen and I decided to call it a Mexican Hat (An ugly one at that!). Still desperate to come up with something Picasso would die for we decided to plunge for our next move and then it was ultimately decided to make a Mermaid out of Mr. Tariq Shakir (Risk) and we actually ended up doing a comparatively better job thanks to assistance offered by Tariq’s wife and Tariq’s amazing knowledge on female anatomy. Later, getting back to the hut we were greeted by a very enthusiastic Sara Zahid and Nida Rehman (AML and Training respectively - Compliance) trying to get people to dance on all the Desi Tracks they could come up with. Most of the people being a lil shy our interns decided to go for it and surprised us with some pretty spiffy moves especially on a Sindhi Tune which was a riot. So basically all the efforts put in by the Compliance team to make the event happening turned out to be fruitful as everyone managed to unwind at the beach and the day passed by nicely but most of all the supposedly dry people in Compliance managed to come up with something fun to do for a change.