From the early days of my childhood, Aditya Birla Group has been an integral part of my life. My father used to work in Grasim Industries Limited in Birlagram, Nagda and I spent my childhood in Birlagram where we were part of one large family, the Birla family. The colony was situated near the picturesque banks of the Chambal river, this well-planned colony had everything you could ask Birla Mandir, Community Centre, Grasim Vidya Mandir school, playground for kids, open green spaces with the fruit giving plants, dispensary, and interestingly it also had a private aerodrome.
The connection with ABG grew stronger as I grew older and wiser, the campaign for Idea cellular caught my fascination, series of advertisements under the "What an Idea, Sirji!" campaign was the reason that I preferred Idea cellular over every other telecom provider. It had a connection to the common man as well as had a cause for the environment and social-wellness imbibed to it which I was able to associate with myself immediately.
Like every kid wanting to fill his father's shoes, I wanted to dress like my father and waited for many many years to get dressed in the same brands as he did. Van Heusen, Allen Solly, Louis Philippe became my favourite brands too, what started as just imitation soon grew into brand loyalty after witnessing their quality stitching and refined clothing materials.
Soon after my graduation, I started earning and I wanted to gift some dresses to my younger brother as he was soon to start his college life and making a style statement is important as it also raises the self-confidence of the wearer. I searched online options to ship them to my hometown, but this was not so easy, as there were multiple options online and with them came multiple problems. Once again ABG’s “abof” came to my rescue, with its easy return and refund policies, the exact description of products, variety of choices, standard fit, and sizes.
And the story continues, as he went to college he got the opportunity to apply for “Aditya Birla Scholar” scholarship program. At this time, I was sure that Aditya Birla Group is big in my life like its big in everyone’s life across countries and continents. I still haven't mentioned all the other sectors where the Aditya Birla Group makes its presence felt directly through hospitals, medical camps, schools, etc and indirectly, like railways, construction of Mumbai’s Bandra-Worli Sealink, tyres, dyes, chemicals and many more.
The greatest challenge I had to face came from myself until my junior high school I was an introvert person, the kind of person you won't even notice sitting there.
When I came to higher secondary, the thoughts of self-realization hit me hard enough to motivate me to overcome my inability to talk to people, being comfortable in public speaking.
Being an introvert, I was only comfortable in my own company, I made books my best friend. Started reading self-help books, human psychology, clinical psychology and tried to use the concepts learned in the text in my daily life. I faked it till I made it, I still have to gather confidence when I face people but hard work and commitment to overcome all my limitations with has pushed me to pursue this as my goal. With the self-learning and training, I was able to crack the PI of companies and management institutes. I also delivered seminars and training session on data science and machine learning in college as well as in professional setups.
Another moment which required me to gather a lot of courage and come up against the hardships was when the result of JEE - Mains were out. I was just able to make a cut in the top 1.5 lac students which meant that my whole year's preparation was futile and I was a total failure. I got admission to a little known private engineering college and decided to wash all my previous sins, I studied well, participated in competitions, leaned technologies like Python, machine learning, AI, cloud, data science all by myself and got an internship on my own which provided me with PPO. I then worked even more on my skills there and was promoted to Sr. Data Scientist within 6 months of passing from the college and then promoted to lead the product team. In the words of Mr Kumar Mangalam Birla Chairman, Aditya Birla Group I would like to conclude “Our values provide us with our roots and they provide us with our wings”.