Part A
Life, for a middle-class Indian of my generation, is a beautiful thing. We look with fond nostalgia at the memories of our childhood, yearning to live them again. We have lived through changing times, and in these times, we have stamped meaning on to ordinary things. To others, they mean nothing. To us, they make us who we are. When we are able to find paths that resonate with this meaning within us, we embark on them with purpose. And thus, here we are.
My first memory of products of the Aditya Birla Group is walking with my mother around the marketplace, maybe at the age of six or so, looking at the “foreign” ‘Peter England’ shirts which the “big” people wore, and finding them classy. This wasn’t the age for me to buy shirts, and since my parents only bought formal shirts on those rare, once-in-a-year occasions, these shirts branded themselves in my head as a shirt for the elite, a shirt of perfect quality and fitting that all “good big men” wore. I didn’t need one, but I wanted to own one. To me, it represented quality.
We bought a new house when in November 1999. Some three years later, we had to extend the house and add a few more rooms. Of course, construction means cement. I don’t remember much about the work, since I stayed away from all the dust and noise. I remember my father watering the plastered walls. I remember cement bags being thrown away, and some kept in a corner for later use. Since concrete roofs were too hot, somebody suggested that we whitewash the roof so that it would reflect the light. Birla White Cement thus became the standard branded cement we bought then, and continued to buy for any small-scale repairs in the house henceforth. This part of my life left behind three things - the new wing of my house with my room in it, a very white roof that is vividly visible on Google Maps, and a realization that cement was required for building and fixing. It represented strength.
The first time I remember hearing the word ‘Birla’ though is when I visited Delhi. The one week packed with site-seeing involved a visit to the Birla House. I asked my uncle who had accompanied us there about why the house was named so. He mentioned something along the lines of it being owned (having been owned, perhaps) by the Birla Group. ‘Who?’, I asked. ‘The ones who make the cement’ he said. These weren’t the times of digital cameras, or of Facebook and Instagram, that I can now find the photo albums and refresh my memory by looking at the pictures, which are currently in an album in the shelf under my TV back in Goa. I only remember the walls of the Birla House. Old walls. Walls that had seen history. Indeed, all of Delhi was like this for me. I was walking on sacred grounds, grounds that my nation’s leaders had trod on during their struggle for Independence against the British. The Birla House was a national monument. To me, it represented dignity.
My father used to be someone who followed tradition and established norms. It was only natural then, that once mobile phones started trending, we would buy a BSNL SIM card. Of course, with a BSNL landline connection and a BSNL dial-up internet connection at home, this was perhaps only obvious. All was good, except for one thing. My house, at the base of a hilly region, came into what is called the shadow region for the network tower. We used to get connectivity outside our house, all the way to the doorstep, but inside, there were three spots where the phone would ring – the hall window, the door to the backyard, and the bathroom. This continued for quite a few years, with no one providing any sort of correction, until my father finally bought home an Idea SIM. Oh, the joy! We finally had a phone that didn’t need to be kept in the corner of a house 24x7. My sister and I could finally play games on the phone when not having to sit on that sofa in the corner. Life was better already. Had we just moved into the future? Seemed like it. To me, Idea, thus, represented a change.
Fast forward through school life, in which “Get an idea, sirji” and “No Idea? Get Vodafone” jokes have imprinted themselves through the sheer number of times they were used. I graduated as a metallurgical engineer, and bagged a job in one of the nation’s main iron making companies. Before I started my job, I met Mr. Tapan Patnaik, my father’s one-time boss. He told me about how his first job was at Hindalco, and how the first metal he worked with was aluminum. “Tata and Birla give the best trainings in India to freshers”, he said. “You are lucky if you get your first job with one of these organizations”. Well, one can’t have everything, and my first job was not at a company associated with either the Tata Group or the Birla Group. However, his statement is etched in my mind. Birla provided one of the best trainings in the country for metallurgical engineers. It ensured that its employees were skilled and competent, and did their job with ease. To me, this represented efficiency.
Job life started. It was probably around this time that I started associating that the common brands I had seen around the world were all owned by one group – The Aditya Birla Group. With money comes responsibility, and this drove me to visit the HDFC bank, and ask the manager of the branch about my best savings options. Invest in mutual funds, she said, and watch your money grow. She helped me choose two funds to invest in, the Aditya Birla Mutual Fund, and Kodak Mahindra. To a fresher just out of technical school, these were new terms, new things. But the confidence with which Ms Nasrin recommended the two funds to me, assuring a profit, spoke volumes to me of the amount of trust she placed in the Aditya Birla Group in the matters of finances. This represented growth.
Two years hence, I have quit my job, and started studying at IIM Ranchi. One of the first things that was impressed upon us here was how, as seekers of jobs in the corporate world, we need to target the very best – companies that produce quality; companies that show strength; companies that emboss dignity; companies that bring change; companies that are efficient; and companies that mean growth. Strange terms? Not to me. For you see, Life, for a middle-class Indian of my generation, is a beautiful thing. We look with fond nostalgia at our 90s memories, yearning to live them again. We have lived through changing times, in which we have etched meaning to ordinary things. To others, they mean nothing. To us, they make us who we are. – And when we are able to find paths that resonate with this meaning within us, we embark on them with purpose. And thus, here we are.
Part B
Most people have ambitions of one form or the other. Some want power, some want money, some want to relax in the future. What of me? What do I want? When I do sit and introspect, I imagine myself in various situations. Some involve me at the top of the corporate world. Some involve me researching deep into iron making metallurgy. Some involve me curled up in a corner of the house on a beanbag with a fantasy novel in my hand. Some involve me at home, with my family, having your everyday evening meal. The common link between all these scenarios is that I want myself to by happy,
One of the first times I set a goal for myself that I remember was when I was in standard two. My sister, two years my senior, was extremely talented at drawing. We had an annual drawing competition in school every year, and seeing her win it every year led me to wish for this victory too. The topic given was “Aesop’s Fables”. The night before the competition, I told my mother how much I wanted to win. My mother was not one to make me give up on my dream. We found a picture of ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’. I tried to copy it out. I could not. Eventually, my mother and I ended up measuring the entire picture into miniature squares, measuring out the simplest of things like the length of the hare’s ear and the distance between the mentioned ear and its leg, and using these to plot the entire graph onto the paper. Unknowingly, I was applying basic math to get my desired results. I memorized these random numbers, and the next day, I applied the same technique on paper in school. I bagged the first place.
My first taste of victory in a field that was outside my area of comfort allowed to me understand that any challenge could be overcome given enough hard work. If only life were that simple, however. In my college days, I’d learn the hard way that this motto of mine was wrong. Back in school, I continued to work with passion towards studies and overall development. When I graduated school, it was not just with a 95% in academics, or a Head Boy badge, no. My school had inculcated in me a value system and a love for reading that I carry around to this day.
A decent amount of hard-work, some luck and God’s grace took me sailing through my school and higher secondary school days, and I gained a seat for BTech in Metallurgical Engineering in NIT Rourkela. In my third year, I decided that the company I wanted to work for in the future was Tata Steel Ltd. The company, however, chose not to visit our campus for metallurgical students that year. Frustrated, I looked for other avenues, and found a competition that chose 10 teams from all over India to apply for a research internship of two months at Tata Steel. My friend and I worked hard to develop a project proposition, and we got the internship. At the competition, we worked hard. Harder than we had ever done before. We made innumerable samples, tested them, and finally developed a new product. We cleared Round 1 with ease. We then had to present our product to the Tata Steel top management for the final round. We gave it our best shot, but in the end, we did not win the competition.
Strangely enough, though, although we were sad that we did not win the competition, we did not feel disappointed. Sad, yes. Disappointed, no. Is there a difference? To me, yes. I realized that day that I was not unhappy with my work. I had put in a lot of effort. I had devoted my time and effort to this project. I had failed, yes. I could have done some other things which would have made my project better, yes. But I had tried my best to the best of my knowledge, and that kept me happy. Which led me to learn the second part of my mantra to success: That sometimes, you fail. But if you are sure you have failed after doing everything you could to succeed, if you can bring yourself to learn from your failure, then life is not all that bad.
Another aspect that impacted me when I was in college was a scholarship I had applied for. The test involved answers to certain factual questions. Somehow, that day, the internet was accessible to those of us answering the test. Some of my friends used the internet and cleared the test. They got the scholarship as well. I did not. I didn’t get the scholarship. Was this a success or a failure? To me it was a success. I was able to use the ethics that I had been learning from when I was a baby in a manner that did not make me get something I did not deserve.
Life worked out for me perfectly. I got a good CGPA from college. I got a job in another multinational corporation which posted me at a location five kilometers from my house. Since I was living at home again, my father was free to pursue his business which involved travelling around the country without having to worry about my mother at home. I was also able to help him with the same when he was at home. My area of interest was iron making, and I got the job in that sector itself. Life worked out perfectly and I was content. The next challenge I took up, when I was at home, was higher studies. Hard work and luck coupled with God’s grace brought me here to IIM Ranchi.
I have been lucky in life. My parents have ensured that I have lived a good life so far, and I have done well in my school life, college tenure, and at my job so far. My short-term goals were sometimes met, and sometimes not. But I am now able to align these goals so that no matter what, my primary current and long-term goal is continuously met – I am happy.
