Aasheesh Verma gives an interesting spin to his response when asked what personality traits he wished he possessed. “Once, while actor Dilip Kumar was presenting an award to actor Dharmendra, he commented that he wished he had the latter’s looks. I hope you understand the implication,” he jokes.

Lack of movie star looks notwithstanding, he seems quite content and talks with quiet pride about his family. “I am married, my wife is a teacher in a Delhi school and I have two young sons,” he says.

However, he does wish that he had more time to spend with them. “The lord has been kind. While I have been successful in making a positive difference in the places I have worked, I am unable to maintain a healthy balance between life and work,” he explains.

Nevertheless, he is eager to tackle work-related challenges. As chief operating officer of Tata Teleservices Limited’s (TTSL) Bihar and Jharkhand circle, his basic responsibilities include overseeing the profit and loss statements of the CDMA business, ensuring the welfare of employees and safety at the workplace.

What helps him is his over 22 years of work experience across various industries, including office automation, satellite data space and telecommunications. He has an engineering degree with a specialisation in electronics and telecommunications, and has worked in the telecom space for a decade now. Of this, his stint with TTSL has lasted six years.

Therefore, it is no surprise when he says his stint with TTSL in Delhi when he was head of the company’s post-paid business has been his most memorable assignment so far. “We witnessed a whopping 50 per cent growth in revenues and 80 per cent growth in acquisitions over a 12-month period,” he reminisces.

That was then. Currently, he is ready for the future and views the low teledensity in Bihar as a unique opportunity. “In terms of prospects, Bihar has one of the lowest levels of telecom penetration in the country. The scope of growth is tremendous and is only enhanced by the comprehensive development in the state,” he explains.

He has identified two key thrust areas for himself and his team. While reinforcing and enhancing TTSL’s brand equity in the state is an obvious target, Verma is also keen on providing uninterrupted services in areas where constant power cuts are a reality, aside from which there are environment-related challenges too.

At the end of a long day’s work, Verma finds solace at home and likes to unwind by playing cricket and football with his sons and also by reading fiction.