THE PASSION PROJECT : PART VII | Nandita Ramesh
As far as I can retreat to retrieve into depths of my mature mind, there has always been this one obsessive idea that has propelled me through my professional life – “Why work doesn’t feel like work for some people?”. Some people seem to breeze through the weekdays, hardly waiting for the weekend to come and when it does, they simply carry on working, oblivious of the calendar constraints. Monday morning blues is not a relevant thing for them. They get up every day rejuvenated with a sense of excitement for the day ahead and what they are about to achieve. These are of course people who have found their passion in life that is now leading them purposefully in whatever they do. And yet, as we have these real-life examples strutting around, it seems like an almost-alien concept that doing something you love, professionally, is even a remote possibility. It’s just a myth they say, something out of a fantasy film they feel. “Nobody is that happy with their job”. But that is exactly the point. For these people, what they do isn’t a mere job, it is the joy of their existence. I have stumbled through life, trying to find that joy for myself. And while I still may be an amateur, I thought to seek out the experts who may help shed some light to find what we all are looking for. This series encapsulates those people who have not only found their passion but are living it. And I hope their stories will inspire you to live your purpose too.
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“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
– Albert Einstein
“I don’t know if I am the one you are looking for. I mean, passion for what you do, isn’t it quite a big ask? I just like what I do. And even if I may not love it, I keep an open mind to what may come my way. Because you can find the most surprising things when you are not expecting to.”
It was late on a Friday night. In my quest to tell stories about people who live their passion, I had been connected to one such person by my friend. “You should talk to her. She has found a love for something that many don’t even like.” So, I had reached out, called her up and explained what the series was about. “…and that is what I am looking for – people who have a passion for what they do.” I ended my five-minute-long monologue. That was when I was served with the sweet laughter and antinomy of Nandita Ramesh, refuting my presumptions. “Well, I suppose I have been told that I am atypically enthusiastic about what I do. But for me, being passionate about something is being the best at it. I am far from being the best at what I do, but whatever I do, I do it with an intent and interest.” And what Nandita does is, sales. Unadulterated, traditional, exhausting, source-of-scorn-for-branding-people-like-me kind of sales. Not the savvy digital marketing sales, not the glamourous consulting sales, but just your everyday demanding kind of sales.
Nandita is the area sales manager for the Trichy region in Tamil Nadu for Colgate Palmolive. She got her bachelor’s degree in economics degree at Symbiosis and her master’s degree in general management at XLRI. “From there I was looking to do a marketing role, and I never really thought that I would end up doing sales. But the more I was exposed to it, the more I understood this is something that I really enjoyed doing”, she explains to a flabbergasted me, concerned whether I am interviewing the right person. But then I remember the conviction with which my friend had told me about her, and I persist. “So how was that journey for you?”, I enquire.
“Interestingly, quite a few members from my dad’s family are into sales. But I had never been as exposed to it so I didn’t jump right in. In fact, when I had to choose my discipline after 10th class, I went for career guidance, attended seminars, got an understanding of all the options that I had. I found commerce and liked it, particularly economics. The whole idea of how man-made principles could influence choices and control consumptions was really fascinating to me. I imagined my career in planning & strategy for some big multi-national company. I was all set. But like with all education, I found the real-world applications to be far from theories. So, I did what I had done before, started my search again.”
Consequently, in the third and final year of her under graduation, Nandita set out to decipher what else excited her. She joined a program, conducted by an organization that had tied up with one of the clubs of her college, which gave students a glimpse of working for a day in diverse domains. Trying out industry after industry, she stumbled into advertising, and it was a match! “I was so mesmerized that I actually changed my final year dissertation topic from economics to advertising. Even putting that together, I reveled in reading about advertising and marketing. It just reaffirmed that this was something that I really wanted to try. But a surprising revelation was also why I liked it so much. Marketing revolves a lot around consumer behavior and if you were to try and rationalize it, that’s just a part of behavioral economics. I guess I had found that perfect overlap in the Venn diagram between marketing and economics. Two things that I really enjoyed.”
But reality had other plans.
“In my postgraduate, I thought marketing was the way to go. It had a great balance of creativity and analytics. I thought it would help me dabble a bit in everything. I worked hard to get that opportunity too. Took courses, participated in competitions, analyzed case studies – and finally got through to a job that gave me that opportunity. But as I walked that line, I realized myself liking other aspects of marketing than what I had anticipated. I had always loved a sense of autonomy, doing what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it. I crave to learn and grow at every turn. I like to get results. Travelling, interacting with people, and having a hand in mentoring them, all were plus points for me. So naturally, I gravitated towards sales. Being responsible for a P&L, setting your targets and finding your own way to reach them, it was like my own world which I could shape as I wanted to.”
She paused as I pondered, “You have hopped, skipped and jumped from commerce to advertising to sales. Were there any roadblocks though?”. “Well, not exactly. But there was one time when I was forced to take a stock check, so to say, of what I wanted to do. My parents have never interfered with what their children want to do. However, when I told them I wanted to do sales, they were a little apprehensive because they have seen how grueling it is – the late nights, the travel, the exertion. But my father has this thing that he does. Whenever we want to do something, we have to kind of give him a proposal for it. Logical points about why we want to do it. If it holds up to his questioning, we are free to do it. And after a good grilling, I was too”, she says in a way that I could just imagine her smiling on the other end of the phone.
But not all days are rosy and full of smiles when you are in sales. There are month-end tensions, unpredictability of the market, pressures from above and what not. And yet Nandita gets up every day to go to work with the same enthusiasm. “It’s all about the mindset. You have to realize what is going to be temporary and what is not. I know when the stress is going to come, and I try to plan around it as much as I can. But I also remember that at the end of it, I will have achieved things, I will have learnt thing and I will have made myself better. And that is something no one can take away from me.”
As she spoke, I realized why my friend had suggested her name after all. There is an infatuated way to think about your passion and an intelligent way too. Not all stories of passion are about finding that one thing that gives your life meaning but they could also be about exploring different things that fulfil your life in different ways. “I think, to find out what we actually want to do, we have to be willing to be open minded, you know. Open to find new things, open to try them and open to even stick them out. I didn’t like sales right away. It’s only when I could learn to appreciate the different aspects of it that I realized how much fun it can be. It reminds me of something that I was told by a person during this interaction with senior salespersons across the globe as a company initiative. They had said, ‘You must learn to bridge the gap between your skills and your interests. Either build your skills to reach what you like to do or use your skills to find out what may interest you.’ I certainly come in the second group. I didn’t have a passion, but I looked at what I am good at and found out what I would, hence, like. I researched myself and my options. That’s what a lot of people aren’t willing to do – a recce of themselves and their destination. But if you want to go anywhere that you like, you must.”
As we draw a curtain on our conversation, I ask her what’s next, what will keep her going, what’s her next adventure. I am serenaded to that sweet laughter again as she surmises, “I don’t know, whatever comes my way. Many times, we constraint ourselves to a routine so much that it makes us think we hate our jobs. But I think we start to hate the monotony, not the work. During lockdown, I was staying alone in Trichy, with zero percent human contact and hundred percent prone to boredom. But I pushed myself to do something new every Sunday. Either read or sketch or write or walk. I slowly started realizing I don’t have to even wait for a Sunday to do it. I like photography and if I am feeling low any point through the week, I just take out my camera. Even that small action can help trigger something in me and keep me going.” And so she will, as she moves on from sales to her next role as brand manager, her next world to conquer, her next world of possibilities.
This is second in the series of The Passion Project. To know more about the author and the origination of this series, read here.
