Connecting the Dots ......

I have flair to enjoy ambiguities. By design or default, life has thrown me to ambiguous situations, time and again.

After kindergarten, I failed to clear the school’s admission test and had to join a class below the one I was supposed to join. I failed not because I didn’t know the answers but coz I wasn’t well and I never knew that a one-hour test could decide my fate for a year. I came out of the exam hall and told mom that I would come down later and write all the answers. During the next twelve months, I jumped three classes and effectively ended up one class ahead. My parents objected to this erratic move by the school but they were finally convinced that if I stay at a lower class, I loose my edge.

The next two years happened to be the toughest part of my life. I was a classic case of someone who went to write sentences straight after he learned the alphabets and skipped almost all his lessons on words. Life was difficult, situations unclear, almost everything was ambiguous. I never knew what was happening to all around.

I tried to make out meanings from these ambiguous and unclear situations. I tried to identify patterns and figure out some guiding principle rules etc.

When I look back today, I think those were the most constructive years of my life. I was exposed to uncertainties at a pretty young age. Many psychologists believe that the personality develops by the age of 5 or so, I fortunate to have seen vague, unclear and intriguing situations at the formative stages of my personality. I don’t fear uncertainty, I love thinking and tinkering around with unclear and vague situations.

This is not a one off example. Just like my early part of education, my early part of work life also threw me to enough ambiguous situations. I graduated out with a degree in Metallurgy and Materials Engineering, worked for about six years and ended up doing Finance, Logistics, Contracts, International Business …almost everything and only a very little of engineering. I ended up heading one of India’s largest import facilities and really enjoyed the cross functional roles. It wasn’t as tough as my earlier story. In fact, I enjoyed it this time as a ‘Déjà vu’. At times, I must admit, it was frustrating but it gave me a overall exposure to major aspects of business and since most of the problems need a cross functional approach , I can now look at those soft corners with a more meaningful insight. After working for six years, I joined XLRI for an MBA and found that this cross functional exposure enhanced my ability to analyze cases, decipher problems and put forward solutions that can stand the tests.