Reetu & Amit (PGP 2005)

Reetu Bhagat & Amit Kumar, PGP 2005

Reetu and Amit met during the first term at WIMWI. As fate had it, they had crossed their paths earlier as well – when Amit was pursuing his engineering degree at Kanpur where Reetu was also pursuing her under-grad studies – but did not recall that yet. At WIMWI, they were under the same group for some of the most terrifying courses in the first term – QM, OM, Manac, and so on. As the culture of the campus had it, stories of their togetherness started appearing within the first term on the Juice NB. By the end of the second term, Amit had proposed and Reetu had accepted.
The summer internship – for Amit at Bangalore and for Reetu at Delhi – was their first test in staying apart. Technology came to their rescue though. With some hunting, they managed to lay their hands on the yet-to-be-ubiquitous cell-phones. Before long, the internship stipend was being burned away in long calls.

The second year, in comparison, was a breeze for the duo as it was for everyone else in the batch. Before they knew, they were placed with different companies – in different cities. Well, that only advanced the decision to get married.
All was well with their togetherness by now. But, to make the story spicy, there had to be hiccups. Did someone say ‘resistance from parents’? Well, kind of! It took Reetu and Amit some time – one long year actually – to persuade them but it finally worked. By the end of the first year after they graduated from WIMWI, their families were ready to come along.
Skip a couple of years and Amit found himself co-founding a start-up – Beacon Analytics – with friends, including WIMWI batch-mate Abhinav. With Reetu taking care of the family hearth, Amit followed his heart. He pursued his entrepreneurial dream for a couple of years. The fledgling start-up, however, faced some hiccups even as the duo were considering a larger focus on their family. Finally, they took the call and Amit got back to his consulting career. Life got back on the regular track soon after.
Skip another couple of years and this time it was Reetu chasing her dreams as Amit supported the family. Reetu left her corporate career to start her venture – Bookelphia, a crowd-sourced library leveraging the growth of the sharing economy – which she is running currently.
In 2016, Reetu and Amit visited the campus as part of their batch’s ten-year reunion. The shared memories got a fresh dose of nostalgia as they did so.

Today, the couple – married for over ten years – lives in Mumbai. Amit is pursuing his career in consulting while Reetu is chasing her entrepreneurial dream.
They welcomed 2017 with Amit’s poem that he presented to Reetu as a new-year gift.