The reluctant Chartered Accountant — Be still, my beating heart!
By: Dwarak Narasimhan
Tags: Failure, Courage, Corporate Culture, Fiction, Work

It was that time of year again. The smell of Deepavali crackers hung heavy in the cool winter air. The familiar knot had started to form in the pit of my (now not insubstantial) stomach a month back. My nights were spent tossing and turning at the prospect of another upcoming exam. One that I would doubtless fail. Again.

It is said that success begets success. But failure begets failure too. Breaking the endless cycle of failure feels near impossible when one is in the middle of that cycle. I had failed my intermediate exams four times. My humiliation was complete. Any shred of ego and hope that remained had been ripped from me. Mercilessly. Ruthlessly. Relentlessly. Publicly. I had stopped caring as one does when one has nothing to look forward to and nothing to fall back upon. Try as I might to live up to my own belief that success and failure in exams do not define a person, the constant scrutiny and judgement (real or perceived) of people around me — family, friends, colleagues, even people I didn’t even know — had started taking its toll.

I had ballooned to over 90 kg from barely 75 kg. I slept no more than four hours on a good day and ate whatever I could, whenever I could. Exercise was alien to my body and my mind was constantly under the stress of having to answer that dreaded question — why aren’t you passing? — from everyone and their grandmother (not to mention my own). I went through life dragging my soul behind me like a worn-out coat. I existed. Because I couldn’t see any other path out.

In all this, only one thing would keep me sane — my work. If I believed that exams teach us nothing, then I equally believed that whatever lessons we need could be learnt at work. And so, I threw myself into my work whole-heartedly. I pushed myself to the limit every day to over-compensate for my examination results. It is a tribute to the organization that I worked for and the people that I worked with that they did not ever let my exam results become the basis for evaluating my work. I was duly promoted at work — a testament to my hard work.

***

I had done nothing different this time. Same exams. Same exam hall. Same pen. Same prayers on my lips. The brain blanking out the minute the question papers were distributed. The unsuccessful attempts to steady my breathing and calm myself. The shaking legs. The unsteady hands. The ink marks left on my fingers as they scrambled to write the last words before the final bell rang. That sense of doom that comes when doing something with absolutely no expectation of succeeding.

***

I wanted to be alone. This time my failure would be my own. I would not give anyone the pleasure of mocking me. I stared at the screen as it downloaded the page. Slowly. Ever so slowly. One word. Pass. I stared. I closed the page. Reopened it. Repeated the same process. Stared again. Pass. Success, like failure, comes alone.

How life changes in an instant.

I walked out of the room, numb. I felt nothing. No emotion. Just an almighty calm. Before an almighty storm. For life to get better, it must first get worse.

To be continued…

Also read: The reluctant Chartered Accountant — Failure in slow motion | by Dwarak Narasimhan | Dec, 2020 | Medium

The reluctant chartered accountant | by Dwarak Narasimhan | Dec, 2020 | Medium