Ravi Ram Ahuja – NPTEL STAR
As the sun set on another workday and colleagues powered down their laptops to embrace work-life balance, Ravi Ram Ahuja quietly began his personal second shift of work-study harmony. A corporate manager in international business at a manufacturing firm, he had stumbled upon NPTEL during the 2020 lockdown’s anxious hush, when days felt frozen and anxiety ran high. What began as a way to steady his evenings became a disciplined routine that pointed him toward the future instead of the crisis at hand.
A decade had passed since Ravi’s last full-time degree, and he wanted a structured education that fits a working professional’s life: government-recognized, taught by IIT professors, and built for today’s fast-moving industries. NPTEL checked every box. His first courses, ‘Marketing Management’ and ‘International Business’, were like his older textbooks rewritten for the real world, with each chapter enhanced, updated, and designed for how businesses actually work today.
For Ravi, flexibility was the very thing that kept the habit going. “You can do it on any device, anywhere, anytime,” he says. After a full day in the office, he would sit down in the evening from seven onward, often studying past midnight, even on weekdays. Long suburban train rides turned into moving classrooms where he watched lectures and revised concepts on his phone. When sleepless, he simply slipped on headphones at four in the morning and let another professor unpack a fresh concept.
Exams and assignments were the benchmarks that shaped Ravi’s weeks and months. Across 41 courses, he didn’t miss a weekly deadline. The proctored exams mattered to him; they felt serious, time-bound, and real, like a familiar echo of the exam halls he’d grown up with, only now lit by a screen instead of paper. On such days, he seemed to run on a rhythm of his own – arriving early at the center, doing one last round of revision before entering. “I used to sit under a tree, putting an umbrella and studying through my mobile phone,” he said.
Sometimes he leaned against a pole when the trees had no leaves; sometimes the same umbrella braced him against monsoon downpours. Each course wove sun, rain, and everything in between into memories.
With every semester, Ravi’s course list grew, all chosen carefully to sharpen his role in International Business. Along the way, NPTEL badges and recognitions also came: Superstar, Discipline Star, Motivated Learner, Believer, Evangelist, Enthusiast, and Domain Scholar certifications in ‘Marketing’ and ‘HRM’. He printed and laminated them all, putting the certificates into a bundle that he later carried to interviews as proof in his pocket.
In those rooms, when panels asked how a lesson worked in practice, he pointed to specific situations from his job. What he learned, he used, breaking down course ideas into everyday decisions at work.
And when he switched jobs, he earned a salary hike well above normal industry standards, arriving after the long run of 40-plus courses that had reshaped his evenings and weekends, an outcome he quietly credits to the learning NPTEL made possible.
NPTEL started out as a way for Ravi to stay stable, but it gradually became a way for him to move forward. He goes back to a belief that has guided him through every late night and early morning: whatever you learn never goes to waste; it stays with you when everything else is temporary. That belief, which he tested in midnight lectures and exam-center downpours, has made him, above all, a learner who refuses to stop learning!
– written by Nehansh Kesharwani