I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant, qualified in 2014 — though my career didn't begin in a tax practice. It began in SAP FICO, as a consultant with a France-headquartered IT MNC. For someone groomed in the discipline of the CA profession, stepping into corporate IT culture was an unconventional first move, and it taught me early that a career rarely follows the script you expect it to.
From EY, I moved to an Australian-based real estate giant in an in-house taxation role. It was a different kind of education — seeing how data is actually prepared before it reaches an advisor's desk, and understanding tax from the industry side of the table rather than the consulting side. In 2023, I moved to Dubai, taking on an indirect taxation role at Damac Properties, followed by a stint with excise client Tobacco Products International. TPI is where I fell in love with excise — its complexity, its precision, its constant evolution — and I went on to lead the implementation of the volumetric excise model for several clients across the UAE.
When I'm not deep in an excise or VAT engagement, I invest my time in training and mentorship — across professional and personal growth alike. I'm a Toastmaster, because I believe in the craft of public speaking. I'm an avid reader, a fitness enthusiast, and someone with a genuine curiosity for the occult sciences — I hold a certification in numerology from the Academy of Vedic Vidya, Kolkata.
That same curiosity — about what actually shapes a career, beneath the credentials and the job titles — is what led me to start Built, Not Born.
Every professional's LinkedIn profile tells you what they've achieved. Built, Not Born exists to ask the more interesting question: how?
This series is a set of first-hand conversations with leaders across the tax, finance, and professional services world — people who didn't arrive at their positions by accident, but built them, deliberately, through habits, discipline, and choices repeated long enough to become identity. Each feature goes beyond the resume to uncover the routines that shaped a career: the early mistakes, the mentors who mattered, the discipline practiced when no one was watching, and the mindset shifts that turned setbacks into direction.
The name says it plainly — nobody is born into mastery. It's built, one deliberate decision at a time, and the people who reach the top usually leave a trail of habits worth learning from, if you know to ask.
Built, Not Born is my way of pulling that trail into the open — straight from the horse's mouth — so that other professionals, wherever they are in their journey, can learn not just what to aim for, but how to actually get there.
