Aditya Birla Group: Rooted in my essentials and luxuries of life- By Shivika Sinha, IIM Visakhapatnam

“No matter what people say, you’re never as good or as bad as they believe. You can be as empowered as you think you are.” It was the first year of my college life. I had taken part in a mechanical fest held in my college and was very excited about it. It was the first time I was taking part in Contraption- a battle of chain reaction and we were the junior-most group in that competition. We were in a group of 6 in which I was the only female participant. We started with our planning. We designed a blue-print for the chain of events and due to space constraints, it was decided that the boys will do the set-up in their hostel. I had been facing a little bias during the whole preparation phase. Apparently, it was a mechanical fest, involved things such as building some circuits, small wooden parts, and blocks to complete our chain, all of which required some mechanical work and logical alignment. They took all the accessories we had built so far and tried to assemble them. But the chain continued to break at every step. I insisted that I wanted to try, and we should try the set-up at some common place, but I faced an intrinsic bias that I won’t be able to do it as they themselves have tried too many times. This might not even be intentional, but I was feeling an outsider within my own group. They had almost given up and decided to change the blue-print to a simpler one. It was that moment I decided that it’s not going to change until I change this myself. I insisted them to bring all the accessories to me and we will try together. After some resistance they agreed, however, it was a failed project for them already. They were convinced not to waste more time by allowing me a chance. Anyway, I brought it to a garden area, tried the set-up, and after a few iterations, it worked with the exact road-map we had planned. I excitedly called my teammates who went for a walk around the premises presuming that it will anyway fail. They were not ready to believe at first, but after multiple successful attempts, they not only realized that set-up would work, but I also felt a change in the prejudice in them. We worked together on many other projects during my four years of engineering, and I’m glad to say that I never had to prove my existence to them in future projects. I had always been a savior instead.