Part A – Why Aditya Birla Group is big in my life
There are some brands which we know, which we see and then there are some which have always been an important part of our lives without us being aware of it. So much so that if they hadn’t been there, the picture that we see now would have been quite different altogether. Aditya Birla group is one which houses those brands.
When I was a kid I remember we used to go to multiple outlets for apparel shopping. Being from a humble family background I remember we had to go through several of them to get the right combination of the desired look and price. This went on for quite some time until More megastore was launched in our locality. More was quite close to our location, closer than all the outlets we would visit and the only megastore in the nearby region. Bigbazar and others were quite so far that I don’t even remember visiting them as a kid. I would frequent the store with my friends on my way back home from school on a bicycle. I would like it because it would provide a number of choices to pick from for biscuits, jams, sauce, and juices, unlike the Kirana stores. I remember that I bought my first pen drive from there. It was there that I bought my schoolbag shopping alone for the first time. I loved it and used it for quite some time. The best part I loved about the store was that I could visit it alone and spend as much as time I wanted exploring stuff. Often, I would go and look and shortlist the pair of jeans and shirts and would take my father in the evening after he returned from office. I would like to confess that until today I didn’t know that the store is part of the Aditya Birla group.
Whether it would be a formal pair that I had to buy for my first job or be it regular casual wear, the one brand I always used to end up was Peter England because it always provided quality apparel at a decent price. I always took it for a foreign brand until I came to know a few years back that it was long back acquired by Aditya Birla Group and is now India’s leading Menswear brand.
My first sim card was Docomo but then I switched to Vodafone because of network issues. I am glad to know that it too belongs to ABG now.
I would that ABG has been an indispensable part of all our lives. They are into our houses, the roads we walk, the trains we travel through, into the aluminum foils which keeps our food fresh and healthy and the telecommunication system we use in our day to day life.
Part B – How I overcame challenges to achieve my ambitions in life so far
I was one of those kids who would hate studying and would like to play video games all day long. But I was fortunate that I managed to get good grades despite that. It was because of two reasons, first is that I believed in the saying that adults would use to woo kids to study “grind now shine later or waste time much now only to suffer later” and second, I had a mother who would take a keen interest in my studies until I started self-studying. Some would say that you only need to work hard till you land in a decent engineering college. Yeah, that’s right they said it ‘engineering college’. So I opted for Science Stream and ground myself for those two years and got 99.94 percentile in 12
th standard state board with rank 31 at State Level merit list. I managed to get into best Government college in Gujarat into the desired area of my interest i.e. Mechanical Engineering. My interest in that area was primarily because of two reasons – one was that it was all based on physics and mathematics and they said one can visualize all the things that we study and second that it was the best field to be in to get a job in Gujarat in those days. There were a lot of jobs for mechanical engineers in Gujarat and it always used to be at the top of merit list preference for all colleges.
So I took admission in MSU and went in and felt that it will be all and the days of enjoying life were going to start soon and then reality struck me. I always used to get upset for not preparing for NITs and IITs though I was unaware of it till the time when it was too late to start. I performed decent enough through engineering and got placed soon enough in an MNC during the placement. It was Schneider Electric, and the job was a core operation job at a plant which manufactured medium voltage industrial equipment. The pay was decent for a fresh engineer graduate in Gujarat and the company looked promising during the induction. I was into Quality Assurance and I liked it but being in a plant, which manufactured customized products it was quite a hell of a job. Soon enough I would start coming late home and sometimes I would return in 2
nd shift bus which would start at 11:40 pm. But because of my dedication, I got several awards like open value, challenge value and one for implementing the highest number of process and product improvement ideas during the year. Yet I felt stranded, stagnant and stuck. I felt as if I was not moving forward at all and all my efforts were in vain. I guess everyone would get that feeling when one hears that event the meager increment you are going to get is delayed by 6 months for all the employees of the organization as the plant is not performing good enough. I felt like all those awards and the efforts were for nothing. I wanted to feel as if I am making a difference and it struck me that for that to happen I need to be in a senior management role. I made it as my goal and to pursue it I would steal some hours out of my busy schedule and prepare for CAT to do an MBA and now here I am at DMS IIT Delhi, one of the prestigious B- Schools of the country and I am very sure that it will help me achieve what I want, a feeling of being able to create a difference. One thing I have learned from all this is to never settle and always keep trying to find ways to beat self and do better.
#ABGLP WOO ME -SEASON 2 #ABGLP WOO ME SEASON 2 - DMSIITD #DMSIITD #IITDELHI