The story of Aditya Birla group is an underdog’s story—from the humble beginnings of cotton trading in Rajasthan to the stature of being the biggest conglomerate of India. Being from a small town of Uttar Pradesh, Kanpur, I remember growing up shopping for clothes from the local retail shops. Kanpur did not have its first mall until the 2000s which is when the city its first branded fashion retail store - Pantaloons. When my cousins from New Delhi came down that summer to visit us, I remember gloating about the new fashion store in my seemingly lesser developed city. The conversations among the family adults on the dinner table used to be centred around the fact that if a nation-wide recognized fashion store saw potential in our city, the city must be on its way to further development—Pantaloons brought with it, a collective hope.
Aditya Birla Group is attributed with bringing contemporary American fashion brands like Forever 21 and American Eagle Outfitters to India at affordable prices which allowed me to explore fashion as a young woman. Owing to this exposure to global fashion arena, I found my inclination towards understanding the impact of Fashion on women’s life. The constraints of women’s fashion are not limited to the clothing they wear. Fashion impacts how women perceive themselves as well as how they perceive their position in the society. It feeds into how liberated and empowered they feel in their surroundings. Aditya Birla Group has played a significant role, through its endeavours in the fashion industry, in instilling a sense of agency and freedom in women such as myself.
Resilience. My mother always tells me that it’s okay to not be the smartest, the most intelligent, the most talented, the most gifted person in the room, as long as I am the most resilient person in the room. When intelligence and talent betray us, it is our grit and determination to win that takes us to the finishing line. As an undergraduate student of BBA at Northeastern University in Boston, I set my goal to intern at the most selective company that came to campus: Amazon Web Services.
Starting from my first semester, I worked hard to maintain a high GPA which as I learned from the faculty, the company gave preference to. My major was Marketing which demands excellent communication skills as a prerequisite. In addition to the constraints of limited resources in my hometown Kanpur, there was a constraint that English was not my native language. To hone my communication skills in a non-native language, to bring them at par with a native speaker, I joined multiple student debate clubs and dialogue clubs that served an environment where I could express my ideas more coherently in a language that I was not perfectly comfortable with. Through concentrated efforts, practice and peer-learning, I learned about the finest detail of a language that is most often ignored: intonations. I worked hard to overcome these seemingly minute but significant barriers to effective communication and assimilation.
Apart from the aforementioned soft skill, I diligently worked towards acquiring a few hard skills that come handy in the marketing domain. For example, I learned to use marketing automation softwares that facilitate web analytics, a highly sought after practice in most companies in the recent times. By the time Amazon Web Services came to campus to recruit for internships, through consistent efforts and diligence, I had turned my weaknesses into my strengths. I ended up being the only international student among the 7 recruits that the company had selected. It wasn’t intelligence or talent that helped me achieve my goal. It was the resilience my mother instilled in me that took me to the finish line.