ABGL – IIM ROHTAK – SAMEET AHZAM KHAN
ABGL
Seth Shiv Narayan Birla is the founder of Aditya Birla group, he founded it in 1857. Aditya Birla group has presence over 30 countries and employees a dedicated staff of over 110,000 with different nationalities.
Aditya Birla group touches life of every person though its presence in different sectors. They are involved from clothing to housing finance. The group is also present in chemicals and life insurance.
I think most of peoples first memory of Aditya Birla product is the Freshwrapp. I remember using Freshwrapp which kept my food hot and warm. I still remember the school days when I opened my lunch box and finding my food wrapped in Freshwrapp assured me that the food will be still hot and would taste the same. Till now whenever I see food wrapped I Freshwrapp I am reminded of my school days.
Every person sooner or later has to buy their first formal wear which is a important point in life and everyone want it to be of great quality, brand like peter England, Allen Solly and Van heusen enter their life which are part of Aditya Birla group. I bought my first formal wear from Van heusen during my college days and I have been a brand loyal customer since then. All our demand of formal clothing is catered by Aditya Birla group.
life is most important for any human being; Aditya Birla life insurance helps us to take care of us and our family in time of crises. Since very young age I have been seeing Aditya Birla life insurance documents in our house, but it was later that I realised how the life insurance plans from Aditya Birla has impacted in life. It gives me assurance in hard time as helps me worry less. Life is full of unexpected events and under such condition Aditya Birla sun life insurance provides assurance.
Vodafone is the most important item that Aditya Birla Group has provided me with. In this fast-moving world where so much emphasis is place on digitalization. Aditya Birla Group touched life of most of the people and help them stay connected to each other through its Idea network. Idea is present in almost every part of the country and has good reach.
Using all these products I am very excited about their upcoming products; optical cable net connection is an example. With its revolutionary products Aditya Birla is Changing and impacting life of most of the people and holds lot of potential to touch each and every part of their life starting the day they are born to the time they old.
MY PERSONAL HISTORY
“Who was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park?” the teacher asked her third-grade class. I knew the answer and excitedly raised my hand. “Thomas Alva Edison”, I said in my head, willing my tongue to form the words; but I stood transfixed, my limbs drew themselves into unnatural positions, my head made spasmodic movements, muscles of my throat swelled, lips puckered up, and my tongue refused to separate itself from the palate. Left nervous by these paroxysms, I sank back to my chair amidst a peel of derisive laughter. Looking out of the window through a tearful mist of anger and frustration, I wished I had become invisible. For years I locked that and other stuttering wounds and nursed my wrath to keep it warm, dreaming that someday I would right all those unrightable wrongs.
My stuttering began in the pre-school years. My s.. sp.. spee… s-p-e-e-c-h consisted of long silent blocks. Before I entered school, those around me were my family, my relatives and my friends - people who were very kind and considerate, who never spoke of my difficulty in my presence, and certainly never laughed at me. At school, outside the protective cocoon, it was quite another matter. It was fun for the other boys to hear me speak and it was common pastime with them to get me to talk whenever possible; they would jibe and jeer. I detested the very thought of school in the morning - not because I disliked to go to school, but because I was sure to meet some of my taunting comrades, sure to be humiliated and laughed at because I stammered. Upon reaching the school room, I had to face the prospect of failing every time I stood up. When I did speak, every eye was turned on me, with now and then a half-suppressed laugh, which worked me up to a nervous state that was almost hysterical, causing me to stutter worse than at any other time. My parents were initially not unduly concerned with my problem as they felt it would disappear as I grow. Soon, I reached junior secondary school and the problem increased in severity. It killed my social life. I was a pariah. I became awkward.
I compensated for my stuttering with my aptitude for academics and sought escape in electronic kits. Seething in humiliation, I dreamt of building a ‘secret laboratory’ to design a death ray to kill all who mocked, imitated and irritated me. In my quest for death ray, I fiddled with electronic circuits and ended up designing robots, which became my alter ego. My ability to conjure amazing tricks with electronic circuits did win some admiration from my peers, but my awkward social manners didn’t win me any friends. The joy of winning the science fair was followed by the horror of the award acceptance speech. Bursting into tears, I ran away from the podium without even accepting the trophy.
By now, my stuttering had crept into major aspects of my life and brought it to a standstill. The belief held by both my parents and myself that I would outgrow my difficulty was one of the gravest mistakes. In a desperate attempt to cure their son’s chronic speech problem, my parents spent a fortune to send me to a commercial school for stammering. Alas, to their dismay and my deepening feeling of hopelessness, it was just another futile attempt. Driven by despair, my parents even sought a self-styled Druid Getafix who promised the ‘magic’ potion; but it only served to debilitate me further. My disability became a ‘big deal’ for my family and teachers. Everybody I knew suddenly became an amateur speech therapist; and on came plethora of solutions. Numerous workshops, self-help books, self-help groups, countless speech pathologists and ‘proven procedures’ were all to no avail. My academic performance reached an all time nadir and I started to fall out of love with practical electronics.
One day, when I was an awkward 14 years old, a number of people were invited at home. A large table had been set and loaded with good things. We sat down; many dishes were passed around the table, as was the custom at our home, and I said not a word. But before long the first helping was gone and I was about to ask for more when I bethought myself - “Please pass…”. I could never do it; “p” was one of the hard sounds for me. “Please pass…” No, I couldn’t do it. So busying myself with the things that were near at hand and helping myself to those things which came my way, I made out the meal - but I got up from the table hungry and with a deeper consciousness of the awfulness of my affliction. It began to dawn on me that as long as I stammered I was doomed to do without much of the world’s goods. I began to see that although I might for a time sit at the “World’s Table of Good Things in Life”, I could hope to have little save that which someone passed on to me gratuitously.
This epiphanic realization turned out to be the watershed moment. I decided to stop dwelling longingly on my fluency in the magical belief that someday my speech blocks would disappear. Like the lion in the Wizard of Oz, I suddenly found courage. I decided to forsake all help; my first step in this mission was to dismiss the commonly suggested solutions as they were aimed at masking my stuttering rather than curing it. I steeled myself to endure temporary discomfort, perhaps even agony, for long-range improvement. I asked my sister to record my day-to-day conversation to familiarize myself with my stuttering pattern, to be able to alter them and to stutter more easily and openly. I also used word substitution to help me enunciate. I even worked on stuttering on purpose to drain away the fear. Soon, I could tell when I was going to stutter; at least three words ahead. Instead of pushing hard, I now tried to ease out of the blocks by sliding into the first syllable of the word; I tried to start the movement and sound flow at the same time and glide into the word. The pathway to better speech was fraught with blind alleys, dark frightening tunnels and arduous climbs. I lurched between the troughs of despondency and the crests of hope. Mastering my mouth took time, but I worked around the clock and my stuttering reduced dramatically. This was the much-needed injection of confidence. My academic performance started improving and my love for electronics was rekindled.
By the time I joined my undergraduate study, my cure was complete - confounding the large body of speech therapists who believe that one can at the most ‘come to an arrangement’ with stammering and debunking one strand of theory that there is never a permanent cure for this handicap. Buoyed by my new-found confidence, I joined the IEEE chapter at Jamia Millia Islamia and was soon elected as the Technical Joint Secretary of the organization. I was tasked with the responsibility of conducting a workshop on web designing. Standing on the pulpit in front of a group of students, I pursed my lips tightly, tensed my lower jaw trying to say “Hi!”; for a moment it felt like the old demons had returned, but I pushed harder and finally uttered the word. From that point on, everything flew smoothly; I had finally learnt to get the fluttering butterflies (in the stomach) to fly in a planned formation. I had finally conquered my fear of public speaking and won the war against stuttering. That third-grade mumbler had now shed the cocoon and metamorphosed into an effective communicator.