Born in Mumbai with a silver spoon in my mouth, as a young boy I had no dreams in sight. It took my cousin Vikas, from my village of Ratnagiri to shoe me that life is not a bed full of roses; for life was not sparing for him. At the tender age of seven, he had lost his eyesight and to make matters worse, five years later his father died in an accident. His father (my uncle) was a plant worker at the Ratnagiri Cement Factory (Ultra Tech Cement). Life had been cruel to him for it had taken away more than it had given. Yet, there was always a smiling face awaiting those who would encounter him. His confidence in the face of adversity was truly remarkable. Yet in his journey he was not alone. It was the people from Ultratech cement who ensured that my aunt joined a self-help group to earn money. The Ultratech management had also decided to sponsor Vikas’s fees until his undergraduate college. Vikas could not see but he could dream. He had a desire to help all those who were in a similar position like him. His struggle became my biggest inspiration for my life. Such was the impact, here was an Aditya Birla group company I had never heard off bringing about a direct change to the heart and lives of their people. The company had a bigger relationship than this with me. As a child, I was fascinated by branded clothes. One of my friends had a beautiful collection of Van Heusen t-shirts which would make me envious. When I asked my parents to buy one, they insisted that I would get one only if I did good in my school final exam in 8
th grade. Therefore, to get hold of a Van-Heusen t-shirt, I worked very hard and came up in the top 10 of the class. My parents were not satisfied as I did not top the class and my dream remained a dream. These were the days when there was no free flow of information due to lack of internet. A few years later in my junior college, I happened to see an Aditya Birla group advertisement which showed Van Heusen as a part of it .This was the level of ignorance I had whereby our own Indian brand was thought of aspiration because of foreign sounding name. Van Heusen thus, had a bigger role in getting myself exposed to the world of fashion brands. It is for this reason that I always look forward to the work the Aditya Birla Group does and will continue to do because at many levels it has already touched my life.
As a child I had a love for numbers and hence thought that engineering would suit me the most. Therefore, I joined VJTI, one of the foremost engineering colleges in India to undertake a course in engineering. I enjoyed my time at VJTI and liked the learnings I was getting out over there. After my third year at the college I interned with a major IT company in India. I got a glimpse of how corporate world works and was fascinated by the work ethics which were shown by our mentor and which were expected of us. Out of the total duration of 8 weeks, my team was able to work in three different projects which were related after a rigorous domain training from our side. At the time of leaving the company after internship, I had this image of how the companies operate and was very much willing to again be a part of it, which required creativity, intelligence and hard work. For my performance in the internship I was offered a pre-placement offer which I happily took because of the pleasant experience that I had. However, one year later after joining the company, my current experience was far from satisfactory. The kind of work that the company does depends upon the projects that get assigned and a lot of people are assigned to support related projects where the engineer has no major role to play. I felt cheated for joining the company because I had signed up for doing some cutting-edge work but here, I was sitting at the office doing mundane work. Each step taken forward always put me one step backwards. It was time for me to get out of this and so I started preparing for all the entrance exams for institutions which provide challenges. For more than a year I faced rejections, due to poor scores in entrance exams but finally after two years, I worked hard and cracked the interview for joining IIFT. All the hard work done to get out of the office trap was finally successful.