“Well, I think the golden rule I can think of is the fact that you must follow your passion and do something that's close to your heart. And I think that that's very important, well, to be successful and to be happy”.
~ Kumar Mangalam Birla
Growing up in a semi-urban area, I always dreamt of working in a big MNC company as I saw my elder cousins talked about working in MNCs and the pride, which I saw in their eyes completely enthralled me.
Back then I did not know much about the big MNCs that were present. It was only when one of my cousins got a job in Aditya Birla group that I came to know about it. And after searching a lot about the company I was fascinated because the company not only does a tremendous business in all over India but also touches people’s lives in a subtle way.
The business they are into is also very big, with the merger of Idea Cellular and Vodafone India, it has become India's largest telecom service provider. It is 1st in aluminum rolling, 3rd in cement (UltraTech Cement), 4th largest producer of insulators, No. 1 fashion (branded apparel) and lifestyle player, a leading player in life insurance and asset management. Reaches out annually to 7.5 million people through the Aditya Birla Center for Community Initiatives and Rural Development, a very few companies can portray such numbers and rankings.
Talking about my personal experience, I am passionate about personal finance and before joining my current MBA program I used to regularly invest in Mutual Funds. Initially, I was confused as to where should I park my hard-earned money into and was bewildered by the plethora of choices that exists, large cap funds, small caps, midcaps, index funds, etc. So, my father who is equally passionate about mutual funds suggested me to go for Aditya Birla Sun Life Equity Growth Direct Plan. I followed him and within a year or two I was able to see the handsome return that the fund gave me. I was more than happy and recommend this to my friend too.
The most common fashion store that we all have encountered is Pantaloons. It houses a tremendous variety of collection of both men and women. While I was working in Kolkata, my default choice for shopping of good quality, value for money clothes was Pantaloons. During Durga puja, I bought almost all clothes for me and my family from Pantaloons store.
ABG has also touched lives of millions of people globally through its CSR activities. It works for 5000 villages globally. Merit scholarships are given to 24,000 children from the interiors. Providing mid-day meals to 74,000 children through Akshaya Patra, runs 56 schools which provide quality education to 46,500 children. Of these 18,000 students belong to the underprivileged segment.
So, given a chance I would definitely be a part of the esteemed Aditya Birla Group.
I’ve come too far to quit...
A challenge is something that tests the strength, skill or ability, especially is a way that is interesting. People face many difficulties throughout their lifetime but it the fittest of all that survives. We face problems in our life because our expectations do not match the harsh reality and so many of us succumbs to the immense mental pressure.
In my engineering days, I was always dreamt of winning in our Techno Management Fest that happened every year, popularly known as SRIJAN. It consisted of numerous events on hackathons, Robo-wars, FIFA, and many more. The amount of hard work that everybody puts in caught my attention in the first year itself. The preparations began months before the actual event and students worked day and night to win in the competitions that they were participating. So, there was an event called Rope-guided-Bot in which I along with 2 more members participated in. The challenge was to pick up few wooden blocks kept in vertical shells with the help of a bot which could move up and down guided by a rope.
We started working quite early, my job was to ensure that the bot could be actualized out of the design that we initially laid out. I arranged for the necessary parts for it and kickstarted working on it. The event was due in a week and we as a team were very excited. We used to work for long hours after our classes were over and devoted all our energies into it. I made sure all the parts that were soldered are in correct positioning and are functioning properly. And then came the challenge after almost finishing everything we tried to test run the bot, and to my amazement the bot was not gliding through the rope as was supposed to be. I could not figure out what could be the possible reasons as I had ensured everything and cross-checked multiple times to ensure it worked properly. I felt very nervous as the event was about to happen the next day and we weren’t ready.
Now, in this kind of situations sometimes we need to take a step backward to move forward. I did exactly that and found out a trivial mistake that I did, and it was that the pulleys attached to the frame in which the rope was moving were not greased and hence the rope was not properly moving. In engineering parlance everything is frictionless, whereas in reality friction is omnipresent and should be considered in design phase. Our issue was resolved immediately and finally on the mega day we outshined every other team and won the competition emphatically.
So, in hindsight I realized that to overcome challenges in our life, we need to sometimes look at problems from a bird’s-eye view, which gives us better perspectives.
#ABGLP #ABGWOOME #XIMB