Everyone is shaped in part by the past, present and the future, in other words, what was, what is and what is to be. For our character is shaped by our past, our choices guided by the present and our dreams, well, they span the entirety of our future! Growing up in South India, born to a Tamilian family in Kerala, I’ve had the best of two cultures and yet, never had either of them ingrained in me. I was neither a Tamilian nor a Malayali, but an Indian in its truest sense, united in one being in the midst of diversity. Like many urban Indians nowadays who come from a potpourri of cultures, my mind is most comfortable in English, my blood is Tamilian and my heart is Malayali!
As if these cultures were not enough, life has seen it fit to take me to Pune in central India, Lamtaput in rural India and now to one if its best cities, albeit a tiny bit polluted in the heart of North India, Gurgaon. In every new phase, I’ve struggled to build an identity for myself that doesn’t restrict me, a box that doesn’t contain me and a mindset that doesn’t limit me. It hasn’t been easy; language is always a great binder but also a great divider. These experiences however, have taught me to look beyond what is visible on the surface into what is truly in the center, to look beyond the external to see what the heart truly desires, for at the end of the day, we are all woven from the same fabric, that of Indian society.
People come and go, but the heart that beats in the chest of every human speaks the same words over and over again, words of longing for comfort, friendship, understanding and companionship, and that is something that has helped me connect to people wherever I go. There are very few things that are so intertwined in our daily lives as our basic wants, but it is not just feelings that we fail to recognise, it is also organisations. Very few organisations are so deeply embedded in our unconscious that we see and touch the organisation every day, but yet, we don’t realise that what we take for granted as a part of our environment, is actually the result of many people working in tandem to give us the best quality of goods and services. Like the sun’s rays that reach us everyday in the morning signalling the start of the new day bringing with it, warmth and hope, so do organisations like the Aditya Birla Group hum quietly in the background sometimes in the carbon black present in the paints we use to colour our lives, in the trains we travel in to meet near and dear ones, or they burn bright in our lives in the brands that we buy with our first salaries because they are elegance personified, in the fabric that flows like liquid and drapes like a dream, in the carefully wrapped food that our mothers hand over before we travel, in the phones that we can’t live without, some organisations have permeated our lives to an extent where we have taken their loyalty and trust and thus their quiet presence in our lives for granted. My wish is that with every relationship I build in this journey called life, I will become as indispensable and central to my friends and family, as Aditya Birla group has become to our lives!