“Taking India to the world”, an apt campaign for a company that consistently lives it. With a global presence in over 36 countries and employees from 42 different nationalities, Aditya Birla Group has truly managed to take India and set it on the global stage. With a massive presence in apparels, chemicals, construction, Insurance and financial services, the Aditya Birla Group has pervasively managed to shape millions of lives through quality products and social initiatives. Despite the massive outreach, and consumer base, the conglomerate has managed to cater personally to every one of its customers, something which I can personally attest to. My father’s lifelong dream of building a house was recently realized. He always says “Build something in your life. It may be small, but it should be your own, and it should be beautiful the way you want it to be”. He has followed this principle to the letter, and adhered to it his whole life. He personally made the plans for the house, and himself selected the materials to be used, one of them being UltraTech Cement, while achieving his lifelong dream. It was one of the most joyous moments of our lives to see him working with the kind of passion and heart he poured into this project. It has been 3 years since the day we had the house-warming, and the house stands tall in the shadow of my father, in the suburbs of Mohali. This was my take on how a simple product of the Aditya Birla Group contributed in such a big way to an extraordinary dream.
It’s a competitive world out there, and without the right traits to back you up, you’ll be left behind in the dust. Some people like to take on challenges, go out of their comfort zones and excel. Others don’t, a category I unfortunately belonged to. My fear of failure had me missing out on opportunities staring me right in the face, asking what I was going to do with them. My ability and willingness to take risks fell far short of my ambitions. They just couldn’t match up. I refused to participate in public speaking events and I refused to mingle socially. This fear that I had instilled in myself, something I had become dangerously comfortable with, represented a chronic, gangrenous limb which had to be severed. One of my teachers in school recognized this and signed me up for an intra school extempore coming up later in the week, without telling me about it. One day before the competition, she tells me about it, and ours being a formal relationship, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. So, with that in place, I decided to go all for it. I went home, stood in front of the mirror and practiced. I practiced speaking in Hindi, and then in English, all the while imagining I was addressing a crowd. It wasn’t easy though. I’d start stuttering, my palms would become sweaty, while my voice trembled, and this was during a simulation. It was my mother who picked me up. She urged me to go on, all the while pouring her confidence into me, pushing me to realize what I could be capable of. The day of the competition, they called me onstage, and I distinctly remember that I messed up, in a really bad way. I couldn’t get half the information out articulately, and I couldn’t stop fumbling while delivering the other half. And still, it was the teacher who had signed me up who clapped the hardest. I left the stage that day with a smile. That little experience hadn’t done much for my oratory skills, but it had definitely pushed me into the abyss that exists outside the bubble called the comfort zone, and I had managed to come out, a little weathered, but a whole lot happier. This experience not only gave me the courage to go from Chandigarh to Calcutta for my UG course, but also dare to dream of applying to IIFT, one of the most premier B-schools in the country. This incident changed my outlook for the better, an experience for which I’ll be eternally grateful.