'My Need For Expression Stems From Being An Avid Reader' - Riddhi R Kalra, IIM Trichy - Best30 - Class Of 2019

Back home, I used to enjoy playing the guitar, and since I have a penchant for independence, I decided to earn my guitar coaching fee by tutoring school students in French.  Music is the second twin of the creativity that my writing is part of, since the feeling of playing is what has kept me going during the toughest of times. Teaching French was perhaps a tribute to one of the best teachers I had, who had a great deal of confidence in me. I am an avid reader and enjoy fiction, particularly fantasy and historical fiction.  My need for expression stems from this habit and has a significant influence on my manner of communication which has served me well all this time. Looking back, I think words have been my constant companion that was with me, and it is here that I would agree with the author I look up to the most, JK Rowling: “We have all the magic we need inside ourselves, in the form of words”

Name an instance where you wanted something and went out of your comfort zone to achieve it OR Tell us the biggest risk you have taken so far in your life.

In most Indian Business schools (except in the case of specialised schools/ courses), it is common knowledge that Human Resources has very few takers as a domain. The affirmation that HR was what I wanted to do came after my second year and perhaps this was why I did not make an attempt to get into a specialised school for HR. That being said, I found that it would take a lot of mental resilience to face setbacks. This meant that I could hardly find any alumni in the domain, (mine being a young institution), roles offered during placements were very rare, the club on campus had a hard time getting participation and courses floated were fewer and more generalised. What I really wanted, was one fair chance to learn something practical in the domain. Live Projects turned out to be my answer. I had to scout for contacts using my fathers’ AGM calendar, my friends’ HR contacts during their internship and cold call through LinkedIn. For someone who absolutely hated asking for contacts and favours from people I am not acquainted with, this was an uphill task for me. I would send email upon email every night, send reminders a couple of days later, and speak on call to ultimately be denied. A month later, Rane Group agreed to provide me with a three-month project. Eventually, I roped in a faculty mentor and learned Organization Justice, suggested a Fairness scorecard and am on my way to getting my first case on the same published in a leading international business publishing body. The biggest perk I would say is the fact that I overcame my inhibition to network and did so with confidence.

When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act.

In the year 2016, I happened to meet a boy who was about 13 years old. This boy was the brother of a student my mother was tutoring for a while. Since I had enrolled in guitar classes as a hobby, I wanted to fund my own fees. I was already tutoring another student for French, but since my guitar fees had substantially increased, I was looking for another way to fund my fees. This boys’ mother had approached my mother to help him learn something for his upcoming test in English. My mom promptly put me forward. Before I began, his mother told me that I need not worry about teaching him everything, just something to help him attempt would do. The next day, while I was waiting to take his first class, my mother took me aside and told me, “Riddhi, this boy…he is special. He has a problem, a mental disorder. His sister confided in me that he does not have a lifespan beyond a few years, so they just want him to have a normal life.” Needless to say, I was shaken to the core, because here was someone relying on me to give that boy a small slice of childhood. I decided that I first had to keep my emotions in check. He had a blank expression on his face more than half the time I tried to help him learn five meanings. So I remembered the movie “Black” starring Amitabh Bachchan. I tried to get him to repeat syllables by breaking words into fragments. He seemed to remember a couple of words out of five, and his mother said with a smile that she counted that as progress enough. That was when I decided that I would not be charging him, if I had the courage to continue to teach this boy. Because of the lesson I was learning too- to value all the little things I had that I wasn’t appreciating enough.

What is the one thing you can claim to have some level of expertise or depth of knowledge in - it could be anything - a subject, a sport, a hobby, a venture, an initiative which has led you to do deep work in that field?

“Words are the most inexhaustible sources of magic, capable of inflicting harm and remedying it.”

Since six years now, I have been associated with content management in various capacities since my schooling. I was the youngest in my year to have the privilege to write the “From the Editors’ Desk” column in the Ewart School Magazine in 2012. In my under-graduation, I was associated with the Journal Committee for three years in the capacities of Sub-Editor, Joint-Editor and Editor. The main responsibility the committee had was to generate secondary research-based articles, review & edit and curate fillers and interviews. What seemed like an incredibly boring job to many was a cathartic experience for me and I truly felt like I belonged. The articles I wrote won Best Article Award twice in a row and led me to be the Editor of the Silver Jubilee Journal of the college. Over the years, I learned how to be better at editing, but also how to bring out the best from people by way of their writing. Sometimes, all people need is a push-most people have words held inside them already. On joining IIM Trichy, I had the privilege to be a member of the Student Team 3.1 of InsideIIM, which was such a blessing. I say this because it gave me free rein to channel my emotions into words that had the power of helping people and for the first time I truly understood what my writing meant to a lot of people. It is truly a touching experience when strangers came to me and said- “I loved what you wrote, it was beautifully honest”.