Recently, the leakage of NEET and other national and state exam papers has become a hot issue, even in parliament. In the tenth grade, my math teacher was interested in me taking tuition from him, but I didn’t. However, four months before the board examination, I had some doubts, so I approached a neighborhood English teacher for paid math tuition. Initially, he refused, but upon my request, he agreed, as I believed that being with him would help solve my questions with his guidance. I passed the board examination and won the national scholarship, which many teachers did not appreciate.
Reflecting on the past, in the ninth grade, our Hindi teacher, who rarely taught seriously in class and often resorted to beating students, allowed everyone to copy in exams. However, I and a few other students declined to do so. I was fortunate to have good company in the ninth and tenth grades, alongside friends in the eighth grade who were also good in studies.
This was a government school up to class XII, and entry was through an entrance test in the sixth grade, so generally, good students attended this school. The school excelled due to two principals who were very strict about discipline for both students and teachers.
However, the school did not offer commerce as a stream, and a few of us, who were academically strong, did not want to attend the other two schools with commerce streams, as they were known for indiscipline and rowdy students. For two months, we tried, through the journalist father of one student, to get the school to offer commerce by writing numerous letters to the Chief Minister. It eventually took a year, so after two months, I got admitted to an old Gujarati school where I was completely shattered by the nexus of rowdy students and teachers.
Just before two months of the board exam, the half-yearly results were declared, and I barely passed in accounts. Worried, I approached the school teacher for tuition, but he initially refused, stating he taught only a limited number of students and that all his four batches were full. However, after persuasion through my cousin, who was a lecturer, he agreed. The teacher was so excellent in accounts that, with two months of study, I became a position holder again, and that foundation has served me well in life, including in my CA exams. For more than 20 years, my younger brother (also a CA and a well-known accounts teacher) and I have referred to the registers of that accounts teacher.
Returning to the stories of paper leaks, during the tenth board exams, there was a popular guess paper called “Saraswati and Vishal Guess Paper.” In the last paper, at the gate of the examination hall, a slightly naughty student showed me the Vishal Guess Paper. I glanced at it and dismissed it as fake. However, after an hour, I saw that the exam paper was an exact copy of it, and I regretted my decision not to take it seriously. Despite this, I still secured a position.
In the class XII exams, even at a disciplined center, I observed some rowdy youths of the town forcing teachers to allow students to copy in certain papers, which I strongly disliked. During my graduation, several experiences made me realize that this town was not worth living in unless one joined the muscle power. However, I secured a distinction in graduation and became a position holder, but obtaining the scholarship was a horrible experience.
Reflecting further, in class VI, after passing the exam and filling out the admission form, the class teacher was initially not ready to enroll me in the attendance register because I was only eight and a half years old. But I kept attending class, arguing that no such age restriction was mentioned in the entrance exam or admission form. Finally, my cousin…
There was one Chief Minister in U.P., Mr. Kalyan Singh, who enforced discipline in education. As market forces evolved, privatization of education emerged with economic growth, but this has now reached a collapsing stage due to the burdened syllabus, unchecked class strength, undue pressure on teachers, and the race to get the maximum number of students on the topper list, all of which stifle good human qualities and intelligence.
After graduation, I moved to Delhi, became a CA, and joined a public sector company as an officer. Despite encountering many thugs and uncivil behavior, which has increased over time, my journey in Delhi was quite enlightening and helped me develop a thoughtful process with wisdom. Gradually, I developed a lot of civic sense.
Thanks to the public sector, which uplifted people from rustic and semi-urban backgrounds, I gained a lot. After leaving the sector, I worked in the private sector, hoping for a better working and learning environment. However, on the first day, I realized that the private sector is focused on numbers and maximizing the exploitation of natural resources by any means. There’s no significant difference because the people come from the same system.
By the way, the private sector never pulls you up; rather, you have to push yourself up. The lack of civic sense and rowdiness is even more pronounced in the private sector. My overall experience in the private sector was not one of learning but of understanding things that are not visible from the outside.
In my 28 years of experience, I observed that, in terms of business acumen, we lag significantly behind. Moreover, macro-level understanding is often missing at the top level, where it is most needed. However, by making people friendly, one can have a peaceful job.
Petty politics runs in people’s veins, and corruption in various forms is on the rise; it’s just shifting locations. In both the public and private sectors, there was no individual race to excel in work benchmarking. In teams, everyone wanted to take credit for the team’s success, so there was never synergy, only energy spent on pulling each other down. This is why employee costs are so high.
Subordinates never wanted their boss to succeed, and bosses never wanted their subordinates to excel, resulting in diagonal and alternative hierarchies of communication. However, the success of these institutions is heavily reliant on a bureaucratic system, which yields results but at a very high cost and slow speed.
Very few people owned responsibility, and most claimed rewards for the hard work of others, adhering to the principle of “tu karam kiye ja insaan, fal ki ichchha mat kar…” (Do your work without expecting the fruits…).
Now, let’s come to post-job life when I started my practice. I was shocked to see that the profession I had left more than two decades ago had slid from being a center of knowledge and guidance for business, protecting businesses from bureaucratic onslaughts, to becoming an outsourcing service provider for routine work. Furthermore, finding good accounting and secretarial staff is increasingly difficult, thanks to software developers, and now tools like ChatGPT are a great help to CAs. There is a great need for one-year practical training in accounts at the graduation level to fill the gap of accountants in the nation.
From a client’s perspective, I see that people are not willing to pay even for the basic costs, let alone a reasonable fee structure. This is especially true for public sector banks and corporations. They prefer to pay for smart work, which has led to the mushrooming of intermediaries in every office, both private and public, to ensure smooth service. Over time, a robust mechanism of corruption has evolved.
