This CA went on to reinvent himself as an educator and mentor

Challenges of urbanization

I began my schooling in a small village of Pahira, Rajasthan.

Coming from a semi-rural family, education and academics have always confounded me.

But something that has always been my mortal enemy is the English barrier. As a kid, I had my first interaction with the English alphabet in standard 6th. Naturally, that was a rather traumatic experience as I always felt a lack of ability in classes.

Although growing up, I had an analytical mind and loved calculations and stuff, but unfortunately, exams required writing answers. That too in a language that I still can’t call my own.

Naturally, that led me to be a class failure. Someone who just couldn’t learn or study. 

At the time, I got afraid of writing. I tried hard but I just couldn’t write properly. I mixed up the alphabet, got them all wrong, and of course got punished multiple times because of it.

For this and so many other reasons, I consider my school life to be the worst period of my life.

But it was all to change. (Fortunately!)

(I know, it's ironic that someone who couldn’t study properly is now a full-time educator, but I have seen stranger things happen.😅)

After around my 12th, I went to Mumbai to start helping my cousin with some work who was also a CA.

It might be the environment, or it might be the inspiration that I got while browsing through his books, but I too got the motivation of becoming a CA. (I will let you know in advance, that it was a mistake.)

Traversing the language barrier

The challenge I had taken was monumental, but I knew that I had to keep going.

I found some solace in the fact that the first step was the CPT exam. It was all objective questions so the one thing that had always held me back in life wouldn’t be a problem this time.

I put everything I had into the preparation. I studied hard, gave it all, and as luck would have it, I did succeed.

Now for someone like me, who had borderline dyslexia, and was so far away from academics, clearing the CPT was a great feat.

But now lay the major challenges ahead.

They were the IPCC and the CA finals.

But I was still going strong. 

Introspection

The years following my 2012 failed attempt at CA finals were quite important for me. Not because I was doing something important, but because I was not. This led me to self-introspect a lot.

For the first time, I started thinking about what I really wanted to do in life. 

About my reasons to pursue CA! 

Was that something that I really wanted to do?

That’s when I started exploring myself.

I began questioning my life choices, analyzing them, and trying to make sense of their outcomes.

My family is religious, and so am I. Hence, we decided to consult an astrologer.

And he told me that I just couldn’t ever become a CA. (I know, pretty disheartening!)

But surprisingly, it didn’t really let me down. What he said only solidified what I already knew.

It was that I didn’t really want to be a CA. It was something that I took up because of my own hot-headedness.

Although I did complete my CA finals eventually some years down the line, I had given up on the idea of practicing CA in the future.

I needed to do something else.

My first attempt at entrepreneurship

My first attempt at entrepreneurship was with Finshorts! It was around 2015. It was an information content website. I literally dived into the project with a lot of expectations and vigor.

I invested a lot of resources into it, both monetary and mental.

But as you might have heard, ‘not every seed you sow turns into a tree’.

I failed! Yet again in life and more.

But if there is one thing I had learned in the process, it was that I wanted to make a difference.

I wanted to educate people.

Over time I also learned the arts of Astrology myself. I learned how to predict people with their movements. To learn what’s going on with them simply by the virtue of their speech or motion of hands.

I also dabbled in the art of Graphology. (that is the art of understanding a person’s characteristics by their handwriting)

It allowed me to understand people more. Allowed me to understand the psychological aspects of an individual by examining him/her from a distance or by judging their handwriting.

It was all very fascinating to me at that moment.

But I had no idea how useful these skills are going to prove for me in the future.

Starting out with Skillshort

After the failed attempt at Finshorts, if there was one thing I had realized, it was that I was meant to be an educator. I wanted to influence people, and make them learn from the failures of my life. 

I knew the difficulties I faced studying when I was a child. And I was resolved to never let other kids go through them again.

I had developed an ability to understand people through their motions and their subtle behaviors and I knew I could help students learn better by understanding their exact problems and helping them overcome them.

Thus emerged the first foundations of Skillshort.

It was around 2 years before the covid started. We initiated in offline mode, and onboarded students for corporate training programs to train them in crucial corporate skills such as GST, accounting, Tally, Excel, etc.

Our USP was that we provided a job guarantee program that could train students in all the major corporate skills they would need in accounting, and auditing jobs.

Most importantly, the duration of this program was set to 5 weeks. It was a big commitment to train students in so many skills in such a short time period, but our team had managed to devise study plans to achieve exactly that.

By the year 2020, we had opened 5 branches of Skillshorts in the city of Kolkata, 2 of which were in partnership with a local NGO.

Recently, we have also extended our 5 weeks job guarantee program into a 3 months extensive training program to better train students in real-life corporate projects.

And the response that we have gotten afterward has been nothing short of overwhelming.

What I would like to convey!

The reason why I was fixated on being a mentor was that I truly believed that my students could learn from my failures.

In fact, I frequently discuss my past and my shortcomings with my students. The goal is to let them know that shortcomings can be overcome. Problems can be solved. And hurdles are there to be crossed over.

I would also like to stress the importance of self-introspection. When I pursued the CA course, I forgot to analyze my own abilities and ended up making a decision that could have been better.

So here’s something that I often tell my students, 

‘Be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. It’s good to have a dream. But only if it's yours. Don’t spend your life following someone else’s dream.

And here’s something else,

Anger management will take you a long way ahead!’

Thank you!

This story is brought to you in association with Jobaaj.com.