1. Why ABG is big in your life?
Having been a huge cricket fanatic for more than a decade and a half now, one thing that has remained a constant in the game over the years is the yellow colored boundary cushion with the name “UltraTech Cement” on it. That, that was my very first introduction to this multinational conglomerate, that started out of the small town of Pilani in Rajasthan, about a hundred and sixty-two years ago. Before I talk about how big of a role Aditya Birla group has played in my life, I think I would be doing grave injustice if I don’t mention Mr. Seth Shiv Narayan Birla, for the inception of this great organisation, Mr Ghanshyam Das Birla for setting up the various critical industries across India during the pre-independence era, and finally Mr. Aditya Vikram Birla for putting our country on the international map, by making ABG the first India based multinational.Growing up in India, it is very hard to have not used at least one ABG product in our lives. They have such a wide and diverse range of products, from carbon black to cement, to textile industry, to fashion, to telecommunication. Name it and their presence can be felt in the various industries.
Thanks to ABG, various foreign clothing brands like Allen Solly, Louis Phillippe, etc have been able to bring in their collections into this country. Other than this, ABG acquired pantaloons from the future group and has created a separate market for it.
Yet another important venture of ABG that we are all extremely familiar with is its latest merger with Vodafone India, thereby making it the largest telecom company in our country in terms of the number of subscribers.
The thing that we have to understand from all of this is, under a firm and concentrated vision, it is possible to reach great heights, under an able leader, even a small cotton producing company from Pilani can go on to become India’s third largest company, one among the fortune 500 companies. Life is not always about making the best out of the opportunities available, but creating the best opportunities, and this is what the Aditya Birla Group has taught me.
2. “How you overcame challenges to achieve your ambitions in life so far?”
It was the first of July 1, 2018, when I took my GRE exam and scored a 321/340 (A split of 169 in quants and 152 in verbal out of a possible 170 in each). I went into the exam hall with one goal, to secure a perfect score in quants, so that my GRE coaching centre will post a photo of me at the centre. But sadly, that wasn’t to be. Forward another 45 days, on the 15
th of August, 2018, after a lot of deliberation, I decided to join CAT classes and do an MBA in India, instead of going abroad like I had previously planned to. I was not a hundred percent sure of my decision, but at the same time there was this fire inside of me that wanted to prove something to myself more than anybody in this world. By the time I took my preparations seriously, it was the first week of September, and all of a sudden, my grandfather fell extremely ill and was put on a ventilator. Despite him being in Canada, I couldn’t deal with it easily, as all my childhood, I grew up with my grandfather and my grandmother. Within a week, on the twelfth of September, he passed away, and all of us at home were at shock, I was in a state of internal conflict as I didn’t know how to process the entire thing, and also had to be there for my mother, my father and my sister. Another week passed away just like that, and CAT was just a little over two months away. That is when I took it upon myself, that I would give it my best shot, and work as hard as I possibly could. That is when the rigour started, being in my final year of under graduation I had my semester exams the same week as CAT, I put up a study plan, to ensure I did not lose out on my grades, nor my CAT performance. 2 months of hard work all proved fruitful on the 5
th of January when the results were out and I got a 99.84 percentile. I had never been more proud of myself, and in my mind I knew there was one major driving force, and that was my grandfather, he had always valued education more than anything else, and wherever he is now, he would be proud of me for what I achieved, and would not want me to stop at anything. Also, another bonus that I got from all of this was, the photo that I couldn’t get from my GRE score was compensated by the numerous articles and hoardings that were put up by my CAT coaching institute for my performance.