Failure is not fatal, failure is inevitable. If you don’t fail, it perhaps means you aren’t taking enough risks – Kumar Mangalam Birla
The first thing that strikes my mind when I hear Aditya Birla Group is the memory of the days when I left my house to live in a hostel for the first time at the age of 15 to study in Chandigarh. The hostel was owned by a private trust fund and not by my school and so there was no age restriction on students who could join the hostel. I was a little nervous to join the new place as I came from a small city and had never stayed away from home before this. One of the other things that concerned me was the fact that all the other students seemed way older than me. The first day in though, I saw a little sticker of a logo of the Aditya Birla group on the wall in my room. The logo, to me, gave the resemblance of the rising sun. I never tried to find out the real meaning of the logo because to me, it just symbolized hope and an ability to embrace change. With each passing day, I would occasionally look at it and felt the slow change in myself adapting to the environment.
Being a new boy from a small city, I faced a lot of difficulty in making friends and handle stereotypes like the assumption that I was not smart enough to be a part of any group in my school. I would sit alone my room feeling anxious and scared but never gaining enough courage to go out and share my problems with anyone in my hostel. The little sun logo meant a great deal of hope for me at this moment. All the problems I faced resulted in a major decline in marks in my first semester exams of class 11 as compared to my marks in class 10. This was a terrible failure for me and I felt really low. I remember my uncle taking me out on a trip to talk to me about this. We went to sector 17 and sat on a bench near the showroom of Peter England and he talked to me about how failure was just part of the process and how I should focus on my strengths and keep working hard instead of feeling disheartened. As a way to cheer me up, we went to the showroom and I purchased shirts and t-shirts. This was the first time I found out that Peter England was an Indian brand owned by Aditya Birla group whose logo was so relatable to me. Instead of having a sad face because of my failure, I was happy and had three new shirts from Peter England and a new outlook towards my life.
That day, I was ready to go interact with everyone else in my hostel with confidence wearing my new Peter England armor. The armor I wore that day is gone now along with the sticker logo but the confidence they brought in me is still here. With time, interacting with people in the hostel, I came to know my strengths and also found some lifelong friends. One of those friends suggested that I should get a new Vodafone connection to video call my parents whenever I miss them. The hostel now started to feel like home to me and Vodafone played a big role in it for me and also for many other students living in hostels. Here in my hostel, I found out that I had an analytical mind and I was very good at subjects like mathematics and accounts and I started working better on these specific subjects. Not only did I work on these subjects, I also taught these subjects to almost everyone in my hostel and even went on to pursue a graduation in statistics.
Now, from a little kid fearing life and people, I had transformed into a teacher, teaching my friends mathematics and basic quantitative aptitude and my rising sun and newfound armor played a major role in this.
#ABGLPWoome