GRATEFUL - Setu Parmar, SIBM Pune

It feels strange when you look back on your life. Stand at a turning point and look back on all the choices you made. How the choices you made, good and bad, have shaped you into the person you are today. Such is my story.

It was late into my under-graduate studies that I realised that I did not and could not visualise myself spending the rest of my life as an Electrical Engineer. To stare into those circuits, those gauges and terminals, and figure out how much power is being lost, what needs to be compensated and where the circuit breakers will be tripped. It was a disheartening notion to think that that was all there would be in my life. I found myself craving something more from life as I sat there contemplating my future.

My phone rang. It was my friend. He told me in an excited voice that the management test results were out. I started. I had given the exam for MBA because I have always loved working with people, wanted to work in the real corporate scenario and wanted to really kickstart my career. Moreover, the skills tested in the entrance were subjects I enjoyed.

I checked the results. I had received a high percentile and been shortlisted for some of the best management institutes in the country.

Fast forward to the day of the interview. I’m sitting there, outside the interviewers’ room, awaiting my turn. I was sweating, the collar of my shirt itchy, the tie tightening like a noose around my neck. I’m called in. I took a deep breath, and entered the room.

The first thing the interviewer said to me was that I carried a suit well. My confidence thus bolstered, I sat down and started telling them about myself, my life and how it led me to an MBA. The interviewers asked me if I knew where I would be in 5 years. I replied that I didn’t, but that I knew that wherever I were to end up, I would be doing something I liked and would be adding value to the organisation I belonged to. The interviewers looked at each other, then nodded and dismissed me. I panicked, since I thought that I had blundered and that my aspirations of MBA were over.

Later, I found out that I had been accepted to the institute! I was ecstatic. I shared the news with my parents, enjoying the look of pride that spread across their faces.

Now, here I am, in the B-school of my dreams, living the high life and working on this writeup. But, why would I be enumerating all these things? Because, even as I started writing this article, I realised that the phone I received that fateful phone call that changed my life was running on an Idea SIM card, but I didn’t care. The tie strangling me as I waited for my interview, was a Peter England tie, but I was too nervous to notice. And that blue suit, that beautiful, beautiful suit, that gave me my opening salvo when I entered that room, was a readymade Van Huesen that I had bought after trying out a dozen different brands and found the best fit. To make a long story short, all of these have one thing in common; they all come under the umbrella of the Aditya Birla Group conglomerate that has been influencing and impacting my life all along, without me realising it. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I feel like it is a quirk of destiny that ABG has been like a close friend, supporting and sustaining me from the shadows and never making its presence known. All I can say is, in this one chance that I’ve gotten, is that I am grateful.