Work Hard, Play Hard

Meena Prathima R. S. Kumba, ’09, was too busy studying to take in any live music when she was a student at Booth. But if she’d started piano back then, perhaps she would have been able to make the time.

Kumba, a finance manager at Paris-based logistics and supply chain company GEODIS, moved from India to the United States in 2003 to pursue a career shift from IT consulting to business. “I wanted to do more business strategy work,” she said. “That’s when I thought I should do an MBA. I had a good engineering background but no business knowledge at all.” Booth also gave her an opportunity to gain some softer business skills. “I didn’t know a lot of the cultural aspects of American business. The Booth education taught many nuances that I leveraged, like phrases we use and why we use them.”

Kumba now lives with her husband and 11-year-old son in Los Angeles. Giving her son a cultural education led to a discovery. She put him into piano lessons, and her son didn’t enjoy them a whole lot. “He was not very interested. He stopped after three or four years.” But she found herself drawn to piano’s art and theory. She started taking her own lessons two and a half years ago, switching to virtual instruction after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Classical music in general, not to mention performing, was new to Kumba, who now enjoys playing pieces by Chopin, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. “I didn’t grow up listening to this music. When I started taking lessons, it didn’t make sense in the beginning. No one from my family is related to art. Everyone was either a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer.” As a child, she expressed interest in possibly learning to play the traditional stringed veena. “My mom said, ‘You need to study,’” she recalled.

Now, after the workday is done and her family has had dinner, Kumba practices between 7 and 9 p.m. on her Irmler piano. Paradoxically, she thinks that taking the time to learn piano has made her better at time management. “As your playing improves, your productivity at work also improves. I feel good about myself because I’m able to manage so many things. I am able to push myself beyond my comfort zone and grow my skills.” she said. “It gives kind of a moral boost. I wish I had started it earlier.”