If you make it big, make it visible – This is the motto with which the Aditya Birla Group (ABG) has functioned. But the differentiating factor for ABG has always been the way in which it percolates into the life of the ordinary Indian consumer. This could include the products which he uses or happily endorses or his place of stay or even the things which he ends up buying – sometimes out of necessity, sometimes just because of a strong faith.
Beginning of good things:
When I was young, I used to enjoy putting on my father’s over sized shirts. As I went about the act with small hands and tiny fingers, I would look at the collar logo and wonder what the names signify – Peter England, Allen Solly and the difficult to pronounce, VanHeusen. On asking, my father would tell that these were clothing brands, clothes that many aspired to wear just for the sheer comfort and grace that they provided. Though the explanation meant very little then, with age I realized the enormity of the brands.
How people associate with your brand and what the brand means to them significantly affects the number of takers. From wearing over sized clothes to buying exactly the ones which fit well, I realized how ABG has continued to influence generations and still remained extremely relevant in all our lives – not just due to its style and uniqueness but because of the trust it has built over the years.
Strengthening the belief:
When we used to forget to take wickets to the ground, we used to jointly hunt for sticks or stones to place as wickets and begin our game. But there have been instances when we found huge cement packets, with the name Ultra-tech cement on it (picked up from nearby construction sites). It had images of a gigantic man on its front. What then served our purpose temporarily also had a strong history. From the houses we stay in – every bit of it, the ceiling or the surrounding walls to the offices we inherit or the highways we travel on, ABG has been present everywhere. In short, it connects us to our everyday activities. It unites different geographies, different cultures, different lifestyles - from the rich who stay in luxurious abodes to the poor living in huts and slogging for their daily meal, ABG subtly influences everyone without ever boasting of its presence.
Going strong since almost forever, ABG can only be described as a recurrent force in driving lives - by its sheer presence, by its ability to seamlessly integrate and affect human lives and with a large heart, which has hardly diminished across generations.
Unified by certain impeccable values and operating on the virtues of strength and tenacity, the different services of ABG (Metals - Hindalco, Textiles – Nuvo and Grasim Bhawani, Fashion – Louis Phillippe, Peter England etc., Financial Services – Capital, Education – Funds and scholarships, and many others) have all contributed to make this brand omnipresent. Since they are economically mighty now, they now aim to provide even better value to the consumer.
“NOT JUST BIG, ABG IS ALSO BIG IN YOUR LIFE”
Challenges are what make life more meaningful. I can surely vouch for this fact because without these, I would hardly have stories to tell.
The first dose of responsibility:
In the summer of 2008, after my father’s transfer to Gulbarga and my grandfather’s move to Chennai, looking after the house was my duty. My mother called me that night and handed over the keys of the house to me. Responsibility had somehow dawned in the oddest of hours. This transformed an angry, impulsive kid into a responsible custodian – one who would safely carry the keys to school, switch off the lights of the empty rooms, even wake his sister up and keep her lunch ready to prevent her from getting delayed for tuition.
My studies and games also were hardly affected. This allowed my mother to stay in peace during her office hours. The keys were a reminder, I believe, a reminder to put the needs of the house before mine. This was the incident which changed my perspective towards life – to think beyond myself, for the bigger cause.
The path of self-discovery:
However, this child was yet to face the toughest phase of his life and this happened during his stint at Jadavpur University. After failing to earn an engineering seat, he settled for a graduation in Pharmaceutical Technology.
A few months into the course, he lost interest. Courses on Biology were getting all the more tedious. Incessant mugging up of scientific terms, names of compounds, names of drugs and their compositions was becoming hard to handle. He would flare up at friends or family, not participate in social forums or events, hardly mingle with friends online or his batch-mates and bunked classes to reduce interactions with teachers as well. The remorse of not earning an engineering seat in a prestigious institution along with the strong dislike for the course and the pressure of surviving two more years with it had made his nights longer. He finally decided to quit everything and write exams to work as a clerk or assistant in the public sector. There was a battle in his mind – a part of it highlighting his childhood achievements and reassuring that failures like these were temporary and had to be overcome, the other part asking him to stay firm in his dislike and end up in a small office without any future aspirations rather than fulfilling his graduation.
He finally went on to write an exam for the same. But while returning from the exam, he tore up the application and threw it. The limits that he had imposed on himself, the apprehensions that he had chained himself with and the failure to identify as to where his life was heading, all gave way to a huge outburst on the roadside and he ended up doing this. He wanted to dream big, achieve greater things in life and realized the importance of not giving up. His own childhood flashed across his eyes - the image of a young boy running freely across fields and juggling activities of school and household, each with due diligence, came to his mind.
His dislike propelled him to value things more, complain less and be more determined to achieve things that he believed in. As he slowly grappled with the reality over the next few years, he resorted to stories, poems and music to dissipate his pain and to let go of his sorrow. By giving more attention to classes, he improved his academics and went on to get placed in the Analytics sector. Exposure to various fests and events in college also brought out the writer in him and he employed this to participate and win in various competitions.
Today, around 4 years later we find him at IIFT Delhi, the only pharma guy in a batch of 173 students. From being confined to a room in 2015 to pursuing management from a top B-school – this has been a journey of grit, strength and self-belief.
As Sean said, in the movie Goodwill Hunting, “You’ll have bad times but it will always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to.”
