The reluctant chartered accountant
I am a reluctant chartered accountant. I never wanted to be one. I still don’t. But life has a way of taking us down strange paths. Paths that we question as we traverse them, but that we eventually realize were always destined to be…
But I get ahead of myself. To understand, you need to go back 23 years to 1998…
Ah, what can I say about the spring of ’98? The freshness of youth, that illusion of invincibility that only that age can give us. The brightness in our eyes, the spring in our step, the audacity of hope, the sparkle of ambition. We walked out of college — confident, upbeat, assured that we would change the world. The future beckoned us. The world was ours to conquer. The world was mine to take.
I had an offer from one of India’s leading business schools to pursue an MBA, a result that although considered unlikely given my general propensity to fail examinations, I had somehow achieved through a combination of hard work, discipline and wanting to prove a point to the girl I loved then (who then proceeded to spurn me, but that’s a story for another day). Invited to interview with the Big Six accounting firms (two of them were to merge later that year) in the interregnum between being selected for and joining the Business School, I proceeded to attend each interview with ever-increasing arrogance. Unsurprisingly, five of them rejected me (a taste of what was to come in life? But what does youth know of failure?). The sixth humoured me. And for 6 consecutive weeks, they quizzed me each Saturday, until one fine day they made me an offer for the then-princely sum of Rs 78,000 per annum along with overtime pay of Rs 31.50 per hour.
Forced to choose between studying for two years to acquire a masters in business (doubtless with the likelihood of it culminating in a sparkling five-figure salary) and starting off in one of the best accounting firms in the world, I made my first, real, life-choice. I didn’t know what the future would hold. I didn’t know if I was ready for a corporate environment at the age of 20. I had no precedent to follow from amongst my friends or family. I only had the supreme confidence and self-belief that I would make something of myself. And the belief that Rs 78,000 per year plus overtime today was worth a hell of a lot more than a potential five-figure salary two years hence. And thus started my journey in the profession that I find myself in today — twenty-three years later.
The first days were exciting, exhilarating. I worked hard, only to be told that I had to party even harder. Sixteen-hour work-days gave way to drunken revelries through the night. Work, eat, drink, party, sleep (barely). Repeat. If this was the way of the corporate world, I told myself, I could certainly get used to it. This was the heady stuff we’d all dreamed of! This was what John Grisham wrote about! This was the life!
Or was it?
To be continued…
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