Aasheesh

Abstract

I met Aasheesh when he was pursuing his management degree from a premier institution. Aged 27 years, he was a civil engineer from a reputed engineering college following which he worked for 3 years before he joined MBA. He helped coordinate a group of students for me to talk about my research work and enlist their participation in it. A shy and self-conscious person, he was initially hesitant to be a participant of the work, but later agreed with a request that he would need my inputs to improve upon himself. His request surprised me because it was the first of the kind made to me. I responded that I shall be happy to share my understandings and observations about his life and self as would emerge when we converse. However, the work was not evaluative in terms of judging someone’s strengths and limitations from a certain vantage point. But we could always discuss his concerns about the ‘grey areas’ of his life where he found the need of improvement and build understandings and solutions from there. He was fine with the arrangement, but over the four interactions, he never explicitly brought up the areas of his concerns. Even when I reminded him of it, he replied that he did not have much clue of where all he should get better, but he was looking forward to my help to develop himself. Thus, during one of the interactions, I asked him what he thought were his limitations. To that, he replied ‘I feel that I am not devoting that much of time which is required to excel in a field. I want the same result that others are getting but I am not putting the effort that is required to get that output. I am not studying as hard as I should. I am wasting my time listening to music, sleeping, going out, chatting. As far as analytical skills and communication skills are concerned, they can just be fine-tuned now. They can’t be improved to a great extent’. He described himself as ‘I am not completely useless but I can be set as a bad example’. These self-evaluations were found to be central in understanding his identity dynamics. Via the interactions, his growth contexts of family and education as well as his work life were explored.