From Losing His Arm Just Two Months Before Joining A Masters' At Indiana University, To IIM Calcutta - Meet Ananth Adiga

An accomplished student all his life, Ananth Adiga went for research work at IIIT-B and IISc Bangalore after he completed his B.Tech. Then, he worked at JP Morgan, Microsoft, and Lowe's Company for 3 years and 9 months in total when he applied and got selected for an MBA degree at Indiana University, US.

Everything was in place, and he was all set to leave for the US, but fate would find a way to intervene and turn his world topsy turvy.

When Ananth was headed to Bangalore on a bus to get some documentation related to admission done, he met with a fateful accident. The bus collided with a bridge and rolled over down a hilly slope. This was the last memory he had of the incident.

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After that, Ananth woke up in the hospital with one less arm. He would slowly also realize that his life was no longer the same.

"As fate would have it, the arm that I lost was my right arm (I was right-handed). So, I had to start over. And I did," Ananth wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The challenges that a right-handed person faces when doing things with their left hand are not difficult to imagine. It involves going against a lifetime of learning.

Ananth learned how to tie shoelaces within a week. Within three weeks, he could already use his left hand to write.

Lowe's Company, where he was an employee, extended a lot of help as they allowed him to go on leave for 12 months when he was learning movements with his left hand from the very basic levels. Ananth, on his part, did not disappoint them as he was back to work within just 4 weeks, even though he was given the option to take leave for 12 months.

And guess what, it has been 13 months since the accident took place, and Ananth now is the youngest Software Engineer to take care of a repo at Lowe's Company! Unbelievable, yes, but from where he was just a year ago, Ananth was not satisfied.

He always had the ambition to do more - and he had to. However, things would not go as smoothly here as it had till then.

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"The past 13 months, since my accident, have been very hard, and this week the hardest," Ananth wrote.

"In the beginning I was okay. I think the first 11 months I coped but things changed beginning in February. Last 4-5 months, I have been the happiest and the saddest," he added. In fact, he wrote that there were days when he locked himself up in a room, cried, and asked- "Why Me?"

In spite of the fast pace at which Ananth recovered, his aspiration to do higher studies and research had remained unfulfilled.

"And the most painful of all... I applied to 12 universities for Fall 22 and got rejected by each one of them," his post said.

"I have had multiple therapy sessions and I realized that I have been waiting for others to accept me and I never really accepted myself," Ananth further said. However, Ananth's life changed when he had almost given up hopes for an MBA and studied just for 1-2 weeks for CAT. Just when he had no expectations of ever doing an MBA after the accident, he cracked CAT and got accepted into every IIM he interviewed for.

Eventually, he chose IIM-C and said that he had an epiphany that all his life that he was heading towards this.

"Still, I know it's not the end. As hard as it can seem, I drag myself out of bed every day because there are so many things I am grateful for, Friends, Family, and IIM-C," he wrote.

"I am a good person and I deserve a soft epilogue. We all do," Ananth said in final reflection.

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