Are you the one who keeps the thread that no one sees?
The one who holds a family together — who remembers, who smooths, who notices what’s about to fall before it falls. Has that thread been cutting your fingers lately?
Maybe nothing has dramatically gone wrong. But the act of keeping everything together is becoming impossible, exhausting — and it’s landing hardest on you.
Things are harder than they used to be, aren’t they? The work stress. The pressure to earn more, to look a certain way, to stay composed, to keep doing the right things always. Phew. And to top it off — the incessant reels on how to be an endlessly supportive partner, which we still gamely attempt, while a pair of eyes from an older generation watches, wondering what we’re up to, quietly judging.
And for those of us trying to live differently — off the mainstream, redefining what success even means — the strain is layered and tender enough that sometimes we just laugh out loud in the pain of it. Because, let’s be honest, in a crooked way it is funny to choose a path with no map.
Now let us draw your attention to something quieter, and more serious. Underneath all these strains is a habit we slip into — because it’s the easy thing to do: when a relationship strains, we stop looking at the situation and start indicting the person. “He’s just like that.” “She’s always been this way.” And the moment we do, the door closes. There’s nothing left to work with — only someone to blame, and a knot that won’t loosen.
So we built a hackathon for it
The Relationship Hackathon is a Saturday afternoon spent unlearning that habit. No therapy. No advice. No long sermon on communication (we’ll spare you the eye-roll). Just a hands-on workshop where you work, in small teams, on real relational tangles — practising how to separate the person from the problem, and ask a better set of questions.
- What actually happened here?
- Where did the flow stop?
- How could this have been sensed, or handled, differently?
Don’t worry — the situations are made up. Not yours.
You come on your own. You practise on knots that aren’t yours first — so you can see clearly, with no one watching — and then, who knows: if this way of working works for you, maybe you take the skill home and start a little hackathon of your own, with the people you love.
Seeing the relationship, not the person
We work with five regenerative mindsets as the tools for this. Not steps in order — five angles of light on the same difficult moment.
Interconnectedness — nothing arrives from nowhere
You and the person you’re in difficulty with aren’t two separate units colliding; you’re one field, and what’s happening to one of you is already in the space between. The tired snap at dinner isn’t simply “him being unpleasant” — his hard day walked in the door and sat down with you. When we see the web a moment hangs in, we stop mistaking passing weather for someone’s permanent climate.What else is in this room right now that has nothing to do with me?
Potential for Change — a person is not a fixed thing
“This person is like that” is the sentence that ends all inquiry — it freezes a human into a trait and declares the situation hopeless. But if change is real, we’re looking at a moment, not an essence: someone doing something controlling, not a “controlling person.” Swap the noun for a verb. That reframe reopens a door the label had shut.Instead of “she’s controlling” — she’s holding on tightly right now. What is she afraid of losing?
Emergence — most conflicts have no author
We hunt for who started it. But a real fight rarely comes from one person’s intent; it emerges when small conditions meet — tiredness, an old sore spot, a misread tone, bad timing, an unspoken need. The argument “about the phone at dinner” was never about the phone. The search for a culprit dissolves into an understanding of conditions.Replace “who did this?” with “what happened here?”
Diversity — the same moment holds more than one true story
Your reading is one reading, not the whole. When she said “you never help,” he heard an attack; she meant a plea. Both true at once. Difference isn’t a threat to argue down into a single version — it’s information about what each person was carrying. Hold two readings of the same moment before deciding what it “was.”How else could this be seen? What version am I refusing to look at?
Two-way Relationships — find where the flow stopped
A relationship is a circulation — giving and receiving, both directions, including with ourselves. It lives while things keep moving; it stalls when flow goes one way too long: one person over-functions and empties out, giving continues but receiving has stopped, care flows out and resentment pools where it used to return.Where did the flow get blocked, and in which direction? What needs to move that isn’t moving — toward them, toward me, or back again?
The one move, five ways. Together, these let us do the thing that makes hard relationships survivable: turn from “what is wrong with this person” toward “what happened in this relationship, and where did the flow stop?” That is the whole skill. On Saturday, we practise it on situations that aren’t ours — so that, gently, we can begin to carry it home to the ones that are.
What you’ll leave with — the same evening
- A way of seeing conflict that doesn’t collapse into blame.
- Five mindsets you can actually use, on any relationship, that very night.
- The experience of working a real tangle from knot to opening.
The details
- When
- Saturday, 22 August 2026 · 2–6 pm
- Where
- LBR Towers, Teynampet, Chennai. The exact address is sent to you on registration.
- Who it’s for
- Anyone carrying a strained relationship, personal or interpersonal. You come on your own.
- Seats
- 20 only — by registration.
- Contribution
- ₹1,299.
- Language
- English, with Tamil wherever it helps.
- Register
- On Kyn, our ticket partner. That is the only way in.
Write to us if paying is difficult — we hold a few pay-it-forward seats, no questions asked.
Questions before you book? Write to us.
Why a hackathon, of all things?
A hackathon is a format borrowed from software. A fixed window of time. Small teams. A real problem on the table. Something built by the end of it. Nobody lectures; nobody waits for the expert at the front of the room.
We chose it for what it is not.
- Not therapy. You are not the case being examined.
- Not advice. Nobody hands you a rule for how you navigate your relationships from the front of the room.
- Not a talk. You don’t leave with three pages of notes you will never read again.
The other reason is the clock. Relational difficulty is the kind of thing we mean to get to and never do. A hackathon is time-boxed on purpose: four hours, a real tangle, and something to show at the end.
And the teams. Carrying a hard relationship is usually a solitary job — you turn it over alone, with the same three thoughts. Put four people around a knot that belongs to none of them and you see what you could not see by yourself. That is the part you take home.
