As a kid, I always tried to read everything and anything I could. I was the kid who read labels on each product lying around the house or when shopping in the market. That has been a peculiar habit of mine that I have always carried around me through my life. As a kid, I could hardly wrap my head around ideas like brands, entities, or companies, but I pretty much could identify or distinguish products depending on their logos and names. Reading these simple things always bought a tiny bit of joy and curiosity.
As I grew, I realized that one name that repeated many times was that of “The Aditya Birla Group” and I took pride in listing all products that I could from memory from this brand, it was almost a game between my friends and me. Around this time, my parents were finalizing their plans for their dream home, and being the curious kid, I would always accompany my dad around the site or the architect’s office. The first time I encountered Ultratech Cement was during this time, my dad was always patient with me and explained to me in detail, why the logo on the cement was the same one as the one I found in supermarkets, on the postpaid Idea bills or on various other places my sister loved to shop. That is the first conversation I truly remember which introduced me to the word “Conglomerate,” and that has always been a definition of Aditya Birla Group etched into my memory.
Challenges I overcame to achieve my ambitions in life so far:
I had always struggled with learning languages as a kid, I had good grades in all subjects but fared poorly in Telugu and Hindi. Though I had immensely supportive parents, who helped me learn this language, I would somehow get scared at the mention of these subjects. I excelled in most of the main subjects like mathematics, science, and social, so even the prospect of failing any other subject was a nightmare. My Telugu teacher at school was extremely supportive of me through the years and was a strong advocate of me excelling in the language. She chalked out a plan to target my irrational fears. She set out a simple task for me. I was supposed to read out major headlines of the day from the Telugu daily newspaper each day to the collective joint family.
Along with this each day, I was instructed to write about 5 – 10 lines about my day in Telugu. Simple as they may seem, these two small acts helped me improve my language skills immensely. I was overjoyed when I secured 80% in my tenth board exams in Telugu.
Overcoming a small fear of language has helped grow in various ways. During my engineering years from SRM University at Chennai, I learned Tamil from my batchmates which helped me in navigating through Tamilnadu and till today, Tamil remains my favorite language to watch movies. Once, I moved to Bengaluru for my work, in that cultural hotchpotch of a place, I tried my best to learn Kannada and Malayalam, it has helped me build a long-lasting friendship and boatloads of memories. Now, as I pursue my MBA at IIM Nagpur, I am more than hopeful to learn Marathi, Bengali, and build every lasting bridge on the foundations of language.