Really this needs a guide?

Anyone that has worked on big corp gets thrown into office politics since day one.

Yes.

It sure would have helped with my learning curve. Coming from a home and a college where it was ok to criticize or examine ideas openly, it took me a while to figure out what was I doing wrong.

There is a big cultural aspects too. This was in India. Questioning seniors in group meetings is usually a big no no that I wasn't aware of.

Well, I was aware, but I thought that an international big corp would not have that problem. Was I wrong.

This was not my experience. I had to climb a few levels to really start interacting with other teams on a consistent basis and see how politics plays out and how it could affect my own career. In particular, learning that while at a high level teams may be aligned but on a lower level there are a lot of natural reasons why individual team goals may end up in conflict with each other and how to have empathy for the goals of folks outside myself was something that took a long time to come into focus. A large number of folks seem to live in eternal ignorance of politics for most of their careers. Sometimes you just need to be exposed to the right situations to grow.