Fashion aspirations of small-towners used to begin and end with the next door garment shop, the owner of which had a long-standing relationship with your family. So was the case with me and my family. Regardless of the occasion, the source of our ‘trending’ apparels remained unchanged for the first decade of my life. We didn’t mind, to be honest, being a resident of a small town situated in North-east India in the early and late 90s with sub 5000 monthly household income and limited access to television, we only drew our inspirations from what the ‘coolest’ member of the family wore at the family functions.
As growth reached every nook and cranny of the country, nonetheless after a decade of latency, it changed everything along with our inspirations and aspirations. With extensive excess to television and later the Internet, we started drawing our inspiration from a multitude of sources, demand for branded clothing rose steadily. I still remember the first store of Peter England inaugurated at the hub of the town and how the place was flooded with Peter England shirts. This was a defining moment in the history of the town as Peter England was one of the first apparel brands to show up in Agartala, more so because of the trend that it had set and the gates that had been opened for other brands to arrive.
This is just an example of the role ABG has played in shaping up the society, and our mindsets, the presence it commands is enormous. The most memorable campaigns that we remember will that be of Walk and talk, What an Idea Sirji! By Idea cellular. It was surprising how complex social ideas were elucidated through these commercials while still creating that brand recall. Those campaigns were able to woo a generation and cultivate ideas that were thought-provoking.
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I have been a student who struggled to speak English right from an early age, being from a small town it didn’t matter until I went for my undergrads and decided to sit for CAT. My confidence was at an all-time low when I ended up scoring a meager 63 percentile in the VARC section in my first CAT attempt. The options were simple, either give up your dream if studying in a school or take up the challenge. I decided to do the former. In the next few years that followed, I started to read whenever I got some time from my hectic work schedule at one of the IT majors of the country. The first novel I read was at the age of 22; it took me three weeks to complete it.
In the year that followed, I read 23 books, mostly fiction. Then I shifted my focus to non-fiction making sure that I cover each genre, as CAT tests your comprehension skills and knowing a little about a lot of things was an important skill in the management domain in general. I developed a habit of reading books on my commute from my place to the office, which took around an hour. This was 2 hours every day. The books not only help me improve my vocabulary but added to my knowledge as well, reading about subjects like economics, public policy, art, history, anthropology, design, business gave new dimensions to my thought process.
By the time I was 25, I had already read 100 books. The objective because of which I began reading was also fulfilled that year as I scored a whopping 99.9+ percentile in the VARC section of CAT 2017.