My parents, being from poor family background and building their lives to middle-class, always told me the struggles of old time, the pain and dark days one used to bear because of education, job, marriage, etc., and living apart from family for days without contact. I being a very pampered child, never truly understood the meaning, but the day was coming closer when I would realize how important family support is in someone’s life. One day my father received a transfer letter and he had to serve govt. in a different state, so he went for his service leaving me, my mom and my sister back in the home. We used to miss him so much even though we always had conversations through the phone. Well yes, my whole family prefer ‘IDEA Cellular Network’ which helped us being in touch with each other and my extended family but the thing that I’m most grateful for is when I was preparing for CAT in the third year of under graduation (BBA) and didn’t receive calls from any good B-School and I ended up taking a job of sales executive. Initial days went by in the company and my passion for my dreams grew stronger. I told my parents on call that I want to achieve more and going to one of the top B-School is the stepping stone which I must cross for which I’ll have to take a drop, at that movement he said, “I believe in you and your dreams” and tears came out of my eyes. I am grateful that my father, mother and sister were always there to support me in my ups and downs and I’m glad that ABG’s IDEA was always there to support my family in good and bad conditions.
A challenging situation that I have encountered in my life was when I volunteered to coordinate for two days entrepreneurship event organised by IIM Calcutta at Aisect University in Bhopal. We were given a target of enrolling sixty students for organising the event. After contacting my friends from different colleges, I came to know that semester examination was scheduled during the event and few colleges had scheduled exams after 10-15 days of the event around Bhopal, so enrolling sixty students was very difficult. Therefore, we came up with the following solutions to achieve our targets-
1. Sending invitations to all the colleges/universities in Bhopal to increase the number of enrolments.
2. Identifying and visiting college hostels and hostels which were occupied by college students in Bhopal to inform and enrol maximum students for the event.
Initially, we had low enrolments, therefore, we modified our plans and decided to visit colleges and take permission for presenting 2 minutes presentation about the event and its benefits. We also visited education hub of Bhopal to target more college students about the event and slowly but steadily we saw an increase in enrolments and within the stipulated time we were able to achieve our target by meeting people and informing them about the benefits of the workshop.
The lessons I learnt from this situation is to stay positive, advance preparation is necessary for handling different situations and always be ready to go beyond your comfort zone to achieve what is desired.