Back when I was a toddler, we had a regular visitor at home. The gentleman would arrive promptly at 3 pm every second Saturday of the month – just the right time for my mother would be making hot tea and savouries. I thought the gentleman was rather poor as I had never seen him wear clothes of any other colour other than dark grey. Back then I thought it was an adult uniform; I hear now that they call this particular attire a Safari suit. The gentleman, whom I thought was under-privileged, in reality apparently, is quite the opposite. The gentleman was an auditor. Although my own father is a Chartered Accountant, this man left a more impressionable mark. I recently met his grandson at their family office and he seems quite happy with his latest car – a swanky Honda Accord.
After school, I enrolled for the CA foundation course without even knowing what exactly ‘CA’ stood for – I would have even believed it to mean ‘Shattered Accountant’! The easier answer to the clichéd question of “Why CA” would have been: “I was inspired by my father, he is a CA!” Yes, my father did his CA and did nudge me in that direction, but to be honest the course was the result of my taking the Commerce group in my XIth grade. And the reason I took Commerce was because I wanted to escape Science records – they just got under my skin!
I was not dumb at all, my teachers and school said otherwise. Hence, they were bewildered when I chose a non-Science group and gave me the typical “You are smart, why aren’t you taking Science?” look. My dad was happy. I was happy as I escaped records for two years!
Immediately after school, I enrolled into CA Foundation. Often, the pressure of proving something, anything at all, comes more from you than anyone else. Today when I look back, I wish I had enjoyed three years of college rather than having jumped into serious studying from Day 1. Anyway, the end result was that I was a CA and a BCom grad by the time I was 21. It felt good, it felt serious! Between the crazy studying and cramming some 1,000 pages of the Indian Corporate Law, my most enjoyable time was spent in internship. I interned with an international accounting firm and got the exposure that came with its status – I went to factories, hotels, banks and financial institutions. I loved it all. But there was one huge problem – my managers pretty much wrote me off as a potential auditor.
You see, when you intern in a CA firm as an apprentice, you get to go to clients’ offices and check their bills, scrutinize their accounts, check bank statements and all that. Basically your job is to verify whether the numbers shown in the accounts are correct – is that huge number with many zeros in the right side indeed physically present in the Bank? I did all that, but my heart was not there. I used to hurry up my work and run to the operations department and then to the strategy department and then to the other departments. More than checking the numbers, I was keener to understand how businesses were run and how that money, which we auditors were diligently checking, was made in the first place!
I finished my internship and managed to clear my CA as well. But I got diverted! I knew then that I wanted to put my CA knowledge into being part of businesses rather than auditing them. Today, 10 years after being declared a CA, I run a business and my financial skills are simultaneously put to use as is my creativity. I love my job and I love the adrenaline levels. However, I also realize that to choose wisely, one needs to experience and my internship gave me that. A qualification is like clay in your hands – if you are smart, you can shape it to be anything that comes to your advantage.