“One feels very blessed to be born into a family like the Birla family, which is a household name in India, which stands for tradition, is yet contemporary, stands for trust. “– Kumar Mangalam Birla
Growing up in India, its hard to not be familiar with the Birla group primarily due to the width and popularity of the brands and products under its umbrella. From its fabulous clothing range to telecommunication services, cement industry to carbon, metals to textiles it is associated with us in every walk of our lives and has also impacted us in a big way. It is India’s first multinational conglomerate that put India center stage on a global scale. After its inception in the early 19th century, the ABG family has not only grown manifold but has also reinvented itself whenever required, and its new logo is a testimony of this fascinating story of change and transformation. It has evolved with India to serve its growing and varying needs from something as small as packaging foils to something as big as aluminium extrusions, ABG has products and offerings in multitude of segments with major emphasis on quality, performance and perfection in all its products and offerings. I distinctly remember the Freshwrapp foil which my mother used to wrap my school lunch and later we used to roll it up in the shape of a ball and play hand cricket. Although during childhood we were not familiar with the company that used to manufacture it, but now if I think about it ABG Hindalco has been there in many of my memorable childhood experiences. More recently, many of its fashion brands like Allen Solly and Louis Philippe has become an integral part of my personal and professional life and it almost seems impossible to not come across a product of the ABG group on a daily basis, that’s how big of an impact ABG has on the lives of people knowingly or unknowingly.
“Life is like a video game, every time we level up the struggle remains and only the level of difficulty increases” – Vipul Goyal (Humorously Yours)
Life is a journey of varied experiences and there is no better way to understand this journey than thinking about it in terms of Video games as they beautifully capture the essence of life i.e. struggle would be always be there in our life in some form or another and we should be ready to face these challenges.
In video games like Contra/Mario there are multiple levels and at each level we need to kill certain villains/Boss Characters to proceed to the next level, but to kill those Boss Characters we only get a small gun with which it is extremely difficult to kill them.
So, we keep imagining how it would feel like to be on the next level where we would have this big machine gun with which we could easily kill this villain, but in this process, we don’t realize that at the next level the Boss Character is even more difficult to kill.
In life also, the struggles that we face in our daily lives where we constantly wish that if we would have this or that (read Level up) then we could have easily crossed this hurdle, but we don’t realize that even then some another form of struggle would crop up. During childhood, I constantly wished to be an outspoken person which would help me overcome my shyness in making new friends, when I was in my teens I just wanted to be done with social science, during adolescence I wanted to overcome my fear of failure and now not a day goes by when I am not fighting fires. As Steve Jobs once said its only looking backwards that we can connect the dots and I can say with certainty that all these hurdles and the experiences in overcoming them, be it fighting ones shyness by constantly exposing oneself to different cities and cultures, actually reading about social science not from the purpose of scoring marks but actually understanding it as a subject, facing my inhibitions that manifests in the form of fear of failure have actually shaped me as an individual and made me more confident in dealing with life’s upcoming challenges.
So, if we wish to level up in life, we should be prepared to handle the struggles that comes with it.