Five years ago, almost to the month, I wrote a short piece here called As the journey begins. It was about going back to study for the US CPA in the middle of a pandemic, seventeen years after my last accounting degree, with ten-year-old twins and a husband cheering from the sidelines. I passed FAR first, then the rest by the following March. I ended that piece by saying I looked forward to a journey of knowledge — and of sharing it.
This is me keeping that promise, properly this time.
I qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 2003. Since then I have sat in three quite different chairs. I spent my early years inside industry — in finance and accounts at a chemicals company, and then at L&T's infrastructure arm, where I learned what it actually feels like to be the client: to carry the numbers, manage the bankers, answer to the board. Later I built an advisory practice, which taught me the consultant's craft of walking into someone else's problem and reframing it. And for the last few years my work has centred on building and leading offshore delivery for North American firms — the third chair, the one where you are responsible for the work getting done, on time, to a standard, far from where the client sits.
Most people in this profession occupy one of those chairs. A few move between two. I have spent real years in all three, and somewhere along the way I noticed it had changed how I see problems.
When you have only ever been the client, you see your own constraints. When you have only advised, you see the elegant answer but not always the cost of delivering it. When you have only delivered, you see the effort and not always why the client is anxious. Sitting in all three chairs, you stop taking sides. You start seeing the whole table — every seat's real constraint at once — and you look for the path that honours all of them rather than the one that wins for one.
That is the lens I bring to most things. It is not cleverness; it is just the accumulated habit of having been on every side of the same conversation.
Two other things shaped how I think, and they're worth naming because they'll show up often in what I write here. The first is governance. I have served as an independent director since 2015 — across a listed road-sector company and one of India's earliest InvITs, on the boards of a string of project companies through acquisitions, refinancings and ownership transitions. Board work teaches you a particular discipline: you cannot bluff your way through a hard call, and the quietest, best-prepared person in the room — the one who has actually read the notes, not just the numbers — is usually the one who turns it.
The second is evidence. For about a decade I chaired grievance and arbitration cases for the National Stock Exchange and a commodity exchange — hundreds of them. You learn something durable doing that. You learn that most disputes dissolve not when someone argues harder, but when someone calmly establishes what is actually true and stands on it. I have never lost that instinct. When something is contested, my first move is rarely to debate it. It is to go to the record.
So that is the mind you'll be reading. A Chartered Accountant and CPA who has been the client, the advisor and the one who delivers; who sits on boards and cares about how decisions actually get made; who trusts evidence over volume, and few words over many.
What I plan to do here is think out loud. Some of it will be about the work I know best — how India and the West are learning to build things together, what running delivery actually teaches you, where the profession is heading as technology rewrites it. Some will be about governance and judgement. And some will simply be about things I have read or listened to that changed how I see something — because I have never stopped being a student, and the best ideas rarely arrive from inside your own field.
I called the first piece As the journey begins. The journey did not end with a new set of letters after my name. It just got more interesting.
Welcome. I'm glad you're here.
This is the first in Perspectives, where I think out loud about the profession, governance, and the ideas that change how I see things. New pieces land here at psparikh.com — you're welcome to follow along, or to tell me where I'm wrong. Write to me at purvi@psparikh.com.