The relationship metric

GREAT BUSINESS IS BUILT ON LOYALTY AND HAVING THE RIGHT PEOPLE BY YOUR SIDE

- ANEES HUSSAIN

THERE WERE TIMES when hundred-day power cuts were normal in Bhagalpur, Bihar. For young Abhishek Ganguly, the world seemed confined to the cross-section of the literary wisdom of his father, an English literature professor, and the rough and tough streets outside. "Inside home, you're listening to Rabindranath Tagore, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot; you're debating eloquently, but the outside world is completely in a different zone," he recalls.

When his mother finally convinced him to try for IIT, he went to Chennai for coaching—and experienced freedom for the first time. "I was enjoying a different environment — freedom, safety, big city. But I didn't study in those four months," he admits with a laugh. He returned home without taking the entrance exam. But something had shifted. He had learnt that you become who you surround yourself with.

He eventually made it to IIM Lucknow. But even there, the relationship dynamics proved brutal in unexpected ways. "At IIMs, the workload was relentless. But the academic pressure wasn't the hardest part. It was the social architecture of judgment that nearly broke him. "People are judged by what their grades are, which school or college they came from. Where did you do your summer internship? I didn't fit this bill."