Sabyasachi Dasgupta is presently a Student Council member in the 2nd Year of IIM Shillong. Having worked multiple years in the IT industry, he decided to pursue an MBA to get a much more specialized knowledge on the various nooks and corners of business that he felt were missing from his experience at his job. Having almost finished the 2 years of his MBA journey, he is quite confident to be able to apply the knowledge he gained there and tackle the problem in a much more holistic manner. In his free time, he loves to read books on mythology specifically Greek and Hindu and plans to someday write a detailed volume on the various knowledge and ideas that mythology gives which can even be applied to modern business situations.
Name an instance where you wanted something and went out of your comfort zone to achieve it OR Tell us the biggest risk you have taken so far in your life.
I believe that my greatest achievement or the risk that accompanied it was not one of the professional ones but one of a complete personal significance which I believe not only helped me to reach a new zenith of confidence but also taught me a very valuable lesson that I have always tried to follow.
This experience was preceded by an accident that ended up in an operation which resulted in the removal of a ligament from my right leg. Being an avid trekker, this was a huge setback for me as I was instructed to strictly avoid any sort of strenuous activity. The test came to me as a chance to trek to the highest peak of West Bengal (Sandakphu) with a select group of people. Now there were two choices in front of me. I could either decide not to take a risk and continue my normal life or take a risk where both gains and losses would be tremendous. I decided to take the second road. I still remember the steep gravelly path, incessant rains, flowing mud and multiple times when I was advised to stay back in the next village that came. I also remember my determination to keep going a little bit more to at least have the consolation that I tried my best. At one step a time I did finally reach the peak. The achievement and the feeling that I felt while looking back at all the risks that I took and that it paid off was one that I had never felt before.
This experience not only made me a much more confident person but also helped me to understand the best way to dispel failure fears to tackle that fear head-on because either you win or you lose and still know that you had tried your best.
When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act.
The best sort of learning happens when you are doing it out of sheer pleasure and not for some aim. Though it might seem quite bookish and not at all practical but situations like this where you help someone out with no expectations of any return is where you truly grow as a person.
I experienced a similar phenomenon during my undergraduate years. My grandfather had always been a man of his letters and would spend days on a book and never a day passed when he wasn't engrossed in one. But recently he had started developing sight problems and the readings that would come so fluidly at first were becoming a struggle. Many days while starting for college I could see my grandfather bent down over a newspaper trying with utmost concentration to read and decipher what was written. On encountering similar scenario multiple times, I decided to do something about it. I suggested that I read him the newspaper every morning which though quite hesitant at first he soon readily agreed to. From that day onward everyday morning, I would sit with my grandfather and read all the news aloud. It soon became not a chore but something that I thoroughly enjoyed. The smile and comments that my grandfather made now and then was the best prize that I could gain. We soon moved to books and documentaries. Not only was I helping my grandfather but I was learning a lot. I soon started an initiative with all my local friends to undergo a similar exercise with all the elderly of our society. And in a few days, we could hear every house ringing with the laughter of the old ones. Not only did it immensely increase the knowledge of the young ones but also helped in creating an everlasting bond between the opposites of life stages.
Now with my grandfather long gone, when I sit down to read a book or a newspaper to quench the never-ending thirst for reading I feel my grandfather sitting with me and can only reminiscence on how a simple, selfless act that I started has now not only blossomed to many more children in my locality but has also made me a much wiser knowledgeable and well-rounded individual.
Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?
I believe one very important quality of a confident person is when he dares to voice his disagreement based on sound logical sense no matter what the stature of the audience is.
I have always been a person who likes to have a healthy discussion on any issue of disagreement with the stakeholders involved. A similar and most memorable incident occurred to me while in my tenure in Wipro Technologies. I was a Senior Developer for a US-based retail giant and had worked in multiple projects for the same. While working in one such project, I had once spotted a requirement put by the client for people knowing Tableau, on multiple future correspondences I could understand that multiple stakeholders in the client side had a genuine interest in the future in the technology above when I brought this observation up to my managers as a potential area for future enhancement I was met with the age-old resistance to change. Our account was doing well, and no one saw the need to change or take a risk to do the same. I met the same decision from all quarters that there was no need to search for new avenue at that present scenario. I disagreed with it and tried to voice my opinion but was not taken heed of much. The break came to me when I saw one of our locations taking a special course on the same technology. As this was something of an intraoffice thing and did not require any investment I was able to arrange the required permissions to attend the same. This five days of the course helped me to be more confident about my opinion and also confirmed in me that it was a lack of far sight that was resulting in my application getting rejected.
On my return, I started working on this with renewed vigour. Though I did attract a lot of disapproving glances from my managers due to their disagreement on the fact, they decided to let me try it out. I held sessions and KT sessions for my colleague. Showed them how training on this might help them ease the same job that they were currently doing. Though met with resistance at the early stages my continuous promotion of the virtues of the system encouraged many of my colleagues to take up the same and learn with me. The Client soon took notice of this and started inquiring about it. On finding that we do have a strong pool in that technology the client decided to give to us a pilot project on it which then blossomed to a 7 million $ project.
The same project has now bifurcated into multiple new ones and continues to draw revenue even now. This experience helped me learn that it is completely OK to disagree when you think you can do something in a better way. It not only helps you to clear any doubt that you might have but also helps you to become an all-rounded individual who knows what and why he is doing something and thus positively contributing to the ecosystem instead of being a person who will just follow a given set of ideas and rules without ever having the urge or interest to question and thus maybe improving it.
What is the one thing you can claim to have some level of expertise or depth of knowledge in - it could be anything - a subject, a sport, a hobby, a venture, an initiative which has led you to do deep work in that field?
The thing that I believe I have a significant amount of expertise in stemming from the fact that I am tremendously and almost perennially interested towards it is also a thing that I very heavily entwined to my life. It’s my hobby. And my hobby is reading books on mythology specifically the Greek and Hindu ones.
From a very young age, I have found this to be an endless well of knowledge and fascination. No matter how deep you delve into it there always a new incident to learn from, a new idea to ponder upon, a new character to idolize. Continuous and in-depth study of the same has helped me to find out a fascinating part of the mythology. I could soon decipher that most of the mythologies are it Greek or Indian or Roman seemed to have similar stories similar character and similar Gods and deities. This uncanny resemblance made in delve further into this domain and I could faintly ascertain that all this event idols and characters are not to be taken at their face value. They are symbols proclaiming some value, a side of human nature, or maybe an embodiment of virtue/vice and as they remain common across human culture throughout the time, they also seem to portray or give birth to similar stories across the ages. I plan to research more deeply into it shortly.
I, in my tenure as an MBA student, also could make a connection in multiple places between management lessons and maybe an incident or sermon in a mythological text. Multiple occurrences of the same made me show my finding to one of our esteemed professor with a plea to inculcate a new subject combining the treasure trove of Indian mythology with management. On seeing the authenticity of my claim the professor decided to go ahead with it, and we in our institute now have an elective on "Strategic Management & Indian Mythology" which now boasts a candidature of 90 students.
I believe that no interest, no matter how absurd it may sound, is unimportant and if followed and researched meticulously may blossom and bring about wisdom in the strangest of places and situations.