About me:
A Biker, Traveler, Foodie and a Movie Buff from the city of Nizams and Biryani, I have graduated from Osmania university and worked with Accenture for 2.5 years before joining XLRI.
Pursuing my final year at XLRI in Human Resources, I believe I have had a very well-rounded MBA experience to be a 6 pointer (on an 8 point scale), being involved in both extra and co-curricular activities. As most of you must have heard, most learning during your MBA life happens amongst your peers and that is exactly what I take back from XLRI. In addition to the subject matter expertise, I believe it is this overall development in my behaviour and thought process which makes me stand out among my peers.
I have been fortunate enough to intern with ITC in the area of Talent management and to have secured a PPO from the same.
If you had a magic wand, what is the one problem in India that you would magically wish away? Explain why.
Lying in bed and before rushing off to sweet slumber or all those classes where I have never paid any attention, I have like most of us kept wondering about the things I could do if I had the superpowers of Harry Potter, Goku or Superman.
However, over the years the ways I hoped I would help them kept changing and now that I think about it, it is not enough to just help people but rather give them the ability to help themselves. It’s quite basic really, the teach a man to fish vs giving him a fish analogy.
Now If I had such a powerful wand, I could satisfy world hunger, eradicate poverty, cure diseases but what then? We would just become lazy and probably more opulent, consuming the planet faster until another flood washes all away. NO, rather how about I use the wand to instil the zeal to take action or take away inhibitions stopping anyone from taking an action regarding things they can help solve.
We possess a tremendous capacity to improve our lives. How else did we become the dominant species? But I believe, what stops us from helping or taking action when we could is one of 3 reasons.
· ‘The loog kya kahenge (What will other people think)’ attitude
· Not my problem attitude
· The most blatant of them all – selfishness
Now if I could someone remove these then imagine the 62 of the world’s richest could share even a part of their wealth that would profit ¼ of the world population at the least. People willing to help will help and better yet motivate those who can to do the same. It would be wonderful world indeed
Give us an instance when you failed miserably and how did you overcome that downfall?
As the lead of the operations team it was one of my responsibilities to ensure an error free order management process for our client. We had recently faced a glitch in the system when we upgraded our systems where about 10% of the orders would end up missing.
In an attempt to remedy the same, we had introduced a job that would alert us in such scenarios, unfortunately however this job generated a lot of junk alerts as well, which only helped our efforts on a minimal basis. This created more work for us in addition to the added task of identifying missing orders. Things did not work out as planned
We weren’t however going to give up that easy. We then gathered the logs using a logging tool and researched the source of these errors for about a week, to zero in on the channel which was causing the issue before we could completely fix the issue
What is the biggest risk that you have taken so far and why?
People are perhaps the most volatile resource you can work with betting on them is a riskier still situation and this was one of the prime reasons for me to pursue my education in Human Resources.
I think it started back At Bhumi (NGO), I was mentoring a 9th standard student (Nagaraj).The student and his parents decided that he drop out of school. Nagaraj, was one of the better pupils at school and being his mentor, I felt strongly that he should pursue Professional education for better prospects.
Through persistent counselling, motivation, inspiration and case studies, I was able to impart the need for a good Education in him. Recently, I have even helped Nagaraj secure a part-time job to support his higher education. I understood the risk that lay ahead if we failed, the opportunity cost of him not earning for those many years and the money that was spent on his education
But instead I realized one can create a brighter future through committed efforts. To move forward, some people look to the Bottom of the ravine not knowing what to do, while others, look to the sky and say, It is time to fly.