“Become a Birla in your life”. This was what my grandmother used to say whenever I touched her feet for blessings. My age changed; the world changed but the blessing didn’t.

Who was Birla? Why Should I become like him? I used to wonder about these and one day decided to browse about the Birla Group. The first brand which I came across was “Ultratech cement”- The same cement was used to make our house. Second brand – “Idea”, I was browsing using the sim of Idea. “Definitely, I am going to get a brand which will be unheard of”. Next – “freshwrapp”, my mother used to pack my lunchbox using this. “Van heusen, Peter England, Allen Solly” – my family had clothes belonging to all these brands and we bought it from “Pantaloons”, “Birla Balwan” – The fertilizer used frequently in my village. BITS Pilani, IIT Delhi and even IIM Ahmedabad – the chancellor and chairman for all these institutes was “Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla” – chairman of Aditya Birla Group. I continued my search, next came “Aditya Birla Memorial Hospital” in Maharashtra, the “Birla Sun Life Insurance”, no one in my family had insurance from any other provider. I closed my search, it seemed impossible to find a brand under ABG which was unheard of and a sector where ABG had not contributed.

I went to sleep and pondered over my grandma’s blessing and suddenly I realized something. My grandmother never wanted me to become a billionaire or have my conglomerate. It was never about any of these things, it was about to be present whenever someone needs you, it was about being humble, caring for all and not boasting about it whenever you did a good deed.

Truly, my grandmother was a Birla in her life, and I want it too – To be a Birla in my life.

Moving ahead without complaints-How I overcame challenges in my life

“My manager sends me to take a part in a cycle race. There are world champions competing, they have 10 years of experience in that field, they have cycles worth lakhs, everyone is cheering for them and I have nothing”.

This looks like a difficult challenge, but everyone faces this once he sets out to do something different.

I also faced this challenge when me being a fresher was told to handle client which was thinking of moving out of my company. I did not have much knowledge about the project, my team leader was managing two projects at the same time, this being the least important for him and we could not lower our cost we were charging for this project.

But I had always one quality which was inculcated in me. I was always proactive and never believed in making a fuss about something when nothing can be done in that regard. I learnt as much as I could, proactively determined the problems which our client was facing, developed a code which can tackle that and guess what, the client liked the idea. We were not able to get the entire project, but we were able to retain our existing project. We even expanded our team by 1 resource to work more on the code which we had developed.

The most important lesson which I learnt from this was never to accept defeats and always do something rather than sitting idle and complaining. Its not about winning all the times, it’s about what you gather from your experience and how you use it in future.

People always want to do easy jobs and get an easy project. I say, always look for the most difficult jobs and projects and after some time everything in your life will be easy because you have already handled the difficult ones.

rishav.kumar

Be a Birla in your life_IMI, New Delhi