Part A: Why Aditya Birla Group is big in your lifeI belong to a middle-class family and my father is a government servant. As we all know, a government service means that you have to move to different cities after every 4-5 years due to transfers. Same was the case with my family. We had to shift from one city to another in every four years and that resulted in my schooling being done from 5 different cities. So naturally, I made friends in every school I went to but then there was the problem. No matter how many good friends I made or how deep our friendships were, I had to leave them in 4 years and travel to a new place. Things were fine till I was a child but as I grew, friendships with people became deeper and there was a need for staying connected. But how? That was the time when hardly anyone was on social media, I myself wasn’t (2005-09). This was when The Aditya Birla Group came to the rescue. I got my first mobile phone with an ‘Idea cellular’ telecom network. And they did what they promised, ‘Ek Idea jo badal de aapki duniya’. Idea was the company which got me connected to my friends. Idea was the company which made sure that my bond with my friends continued. Idea is the reason I am still close friends with them even after all these years. And this is just one instance where Aditya Birla Group has helped me. Through its various brands and subsidiaries, ABG products are a constant in my life. Be it the clothes from Pantaloons and Peter England or the houses we live in made of UltraTech cement, ABG products are a part of every Indians life and the fact is that many of us do not even realize that so many products we use are from the Aditya Birla Group. Surely, ABG is big in not just my life but in the lives of many people around me.Part B: Challenges I overcame to achieve my ambitions in life so farAfter completing class 12th in science stream, like every science student, I also gave the IIT JEE exam and cracked it. According to my rank in the exam, I was allotted Process Engineering in IIT Roorkee which I chose over a branch of my choice in a top NIT so as to get better exposure as well as the IIT tag that would stay with me for life. But after going there, the story changed. I came to know that Process Engineering was a branch that was run in a smaller campus and also that the branch was shutting down, my batch being the last batch in the branch. This had a psychological blow on me and I started feeling less and less motivated to continue studying the course. Thus, I decided to drop out of engineering and started pursuing BA (Hons) in Economics. Now I had a target in mind, which was to crack CAT and to secure a seat in one of India’s premier B-Schools. But I knew that the path won’t be easy. Having a dropped out earlier, I had also lost confidence and had started questioning myself if I would be able to do it or not and that too along with my bachelors’ degree. It was a challenge for me which I had to overcome. I had to put in all my efforts to build back my confidence and prepare for one of the toughest exams of the country. The result? Was I able to crack the exam? Oh yes, I did and that too with flying colors. Not only did I crack the exam, but was also able to land calls from all the 20 IIMs as well as FMS. But wait it was not over there itself. I was also able to convert all my interview calls except for IIM Ahmedabad which in itself was a very big achievement for me.#FMS #ABGLP