Fast forward to 2015, I had shifted to VIT, Chennai, my undergraduate college. That time, we were shifting to 4G from 3G. Airtel wasn’t working out very well. Neither was idea. Jio hadn’t been born by then. Guess who helped me upload videos etc. for my assignments at the last moment? Guess who made it possible for me to listen to songs on YouTube without any lag while completing my assignments? Yes, it was Vodafone.
Come to 2019, I wanted a proper formal dress for my B School, most of the other companies had stopped making double pleated pants. Guess who saved me there? None other than Van Heusen.
Hence, from a long time, since I was the 6th standard excited teenager, Aditya Birla Group has influenced my life in more ways than one, and given any day, this is one company I would always like to be a part of.
PART – B
I had, with great enthusiasm, taken admission in a boarding school in Vishakhapatnam for my high school education of classes 11th and 12th. Having no experience in hostel life, I was not aware of what could go wrong and I was not aware that my preconceived notion of the world being filled by only good people, could be wrong. As a result, I trusted everyone blindly the first time I met them.
What followed in the next 2 years was nothing short of a nightmare for me. A lot of people took advantage of my blind trust and leaked my secrets to get an edge over me. Casual jokes and leg-pulling slowly escalated into full-fledged bullying.
After Class 11th, I was selected to be in the top 10 batch, or the “Intensive batch” as they called it, for class 12. Unfortunately, out of the 10 of us selected for it, 7 were from the group that somehow, loved bullying me. In the year that followed, any voice I raised against them, were made to look like invitations to a one-on-one fight. From hiding my stationaries and belongings to devising a plan to beat me up right in front of me, I went through it all.
Somehow, someone whom I had trusted with the information that I loved animals, leaked it to the group. The next day, in class when I tried to look tough, having the “don’t care” attitude towards their bullying; they caught a mouse from the school backyard and killed it right in front of me, just to get the feeling of ecstasy on the sight of me, suffering.
I tried to hold all of these to myself; but one evening, while talking to my father on the phone, I broke down. He forced me to tell everything in details to him and on hearing everything, he just told two things to me:
1. “This is life; people won’t always be just the way you want them to be. Somehow, YOU enabled them to take advantage of you and now they won’t stop. This is how the world works. But, remember, no matter how hard it is, don’t let them shift your focus from your ultimate goal of securing good marks in your 12th board exams and getting admission in a good engineering college. No revenge is better than success!”
2. “I know it’s very hard for you to experience this 24X7 on a daily basis, first hand. So before talking to your mother every evening, call me up and cry as much as you want, but never, I repeat, NEVER cry in front of her. She is your mother and she is already weak with the fact that you are living 900 kms. away from her. If she hears her only son crying on the phone, she’ll break down. Do this for me please. I will speak to your principal and see what can be done.”
It’s been 6 years since this incident but I still remember his words. Since we were all in the ‘Intensive’ batch, I made a vow to myself to score better than them and prove my worth. I started studying late nights when others slept as they couldn’t bully me then.
Meanwhile as soon as word got out that I have told my family about the bullying, the intensity of the bullying increased manifold. The administration tried their best to control this but somehow, the more they tried to control, the more it increased. The group that used to bully me, started brainwashing everyone against me and most people being the “let’s-do-what-others-are-doing” type, they succeeded to a great extent. Few people who actually empathized with me, were scared of talking to me in broad daylight because they were threatened to be treated the same way I was treated, if they even tried to talk to me.
Fast-forward four months, I had scored 93.8% in my boards and had secured a 1st category seat in VIT University’s B. Tech program of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (The No. 1 private University as per MHRD 2016). The people who bullied me, being the brilliant minds that they were, were struck by Karma when they came a little short of their expectations and couldn’t secure any seat in any reputed college.
The day my CBSE board results were declared, the day I saw “93.8%” written beside my name, that was one moment where I overcame a bundle full of hurdles to achieve something in my life that actually mattered.
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