Why ABG is big in your Life?
The year was 2010, it was my cousin’s marriage, the eldest one in the nuclear family. I was studying in standard 10 and was one of the organizing members of the organizing members of the ceremony. Be reminded those were the days where in marriages, people used to spend time discussing peoples outlooks rather than being on virtual world and being in the ceremony simultaneously. By age I was 4th eldest person in our joint family and every one of our cousins were attending the ceremony and delved into organizing it in the best way possible. So, it began, we worked like it was no next day and the day arrived. My parents had bought me a shirt and jeans which I wore on the eve of the marriage ceremony while also involved in the responsibilities allotted. Everything was going smoothly well until I saw 2 of my cousin’s moving around in Peter England suits. When they moved around, it felt like both of them were like oasis in the desert they matched up with the bridegroom as if it were bread and butter. I felt I missed the occasion to show I was as connected to the bridegroom as my elder cousin’s. The ceremony ended with much fun fare but inside me an enigma arose about the suits. Next day I went to my parents and asked why did I not get the suit as my cousin’s wore, pat came the reply you haven’t earned it. I strived to know what needs to be earned to wear a suit. Soon I found it, it was the ambition and passion to achieve the ambition is what they wanted me to have in order to stake a claim to earn it. So, it began my quest to do something in life as the teen years came to close, I used to dream about wearing the Peter England suit. And 7 years later I achieved the feat when I graduated from college when I completed my ambition of being self-dependent as I got the first job of my career. My parents rewarded me with a Peter England suit which looked quite stunning as I wore it. My hands on the clothing, the soothe-ness with which it was made of, brought the same calmness inside me. After 7 years of hard work, here I was wearing my favorite clothing in my graduation ceremony to celebrate my passion my zeal and an achievement of ambition. For people in life caught moving aimlessly you need a spark to move towards your destiny. And the dream of the right to earn the Peter England suit was the spark that drove me towards being self-dependent. It felt like a shining armor of a knight as I moved around the graduation ceremony complimenting me everywhere, the feeling no other clothing can provide. The Aditya Birla Group created the suit that made people like me discover their ambitions. And that is how big Aditya Birla Group took me to the cusp of my destiny.
How have you made an impact?
A small-town boy moving to a metro city to fight the odds and overcome the challenges is like a normal story in every Indian metro. But it’s the experiences and the journey through it make it a unique experience. My story began when I arrived in Delhi from a small town Purnia in Bihar. Life was fast, and I was slow needless to say it took time. And a couple of years passed before I got to my senses with what was happening in and around me, and I found myself in an engineering college which again was in Delhi. A state engineering college in the capital of the country is bound to have people from different regions in the country. People were expected to live together, eat together but what happened was anything but that. People got divided on regionalism and it didn’t seem pretty at all. In the middle of this storm I was trying to maintain equal distances from all these volunteers of supporting differences. In my mind, I thought everything will be smooth within a year but the differences grew from root to a tree. For a while it looked like there was no turning back. It was that time in the middle of 2nd year of under- graduation when I felt it was enough. So, I started having conversations with one person from every group to get to know about their thoughts and the differences that they were proud of. What I realized that it is in the environment where we grow up the poison of inferior and superior gets embedded into the memory. Slowly by slowly I started speaking about people from one group to another group about how much the other group appreciated their unity and the attributes that they loved about the group. This brought tongue waging between people in the group about people whom they thought weren’t like them. The start of conversation was enough to break small chinks ice of the iceberg. Just then a Cricket competition propped up in the college. The timing couldn’t be better than this. I tried and got the opportunity to create the Cricket team. An opportunity to bring everyone on the table. A team in a sport is an epitome of togetherness. When you are part of a team, you lose as a team, you win as a team. Reaching the finals of the cricket tournament worked wonders. Though the team lost the final battle, the war was on. The coordination and the efforts during the matches created the feeling of brotherhood that had been missing from ever since the first day. Today when I look back, I feel proud of what I have done, this was better than getting upwards of 95 in the 12th board exams. The next year we won the cricket tournament. Finally, the batch photo at the graduation ceremony is a proof that no matter where we are from, we are at first human beings and all the emotions & empathy is there to celebrate the equality. And that is how I made an impact in the lives of 59 students from different places.
