Perseverance pays T. Petchi, Assistant Manager, Deloitte Haskins and Sells

Petchi first heard about Chartered Accountants when she was in Standard X. “If you can stand next to one, it is a blessing,” her teacher said. Puzzled, Petchi asked for the reason, and “the course is extremely difficult,” was the reply.

Petchi T., daughter of roadside vegetable-vendors in Madurai, Thangavelu and Pappa, has been fascinated by Chartered Accountancy since then. Today, at 27, she is a Chartered Accountant and works with Deloitte Haskins and Sells, of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, one of the Big Four auditors.

“Whenever anyone says something is tough, I have to crack it,” she says, pulling out a copy of a magazine. In it is a picture of her receiving a prize at the 17th All India Conference of Chartered Accountants. At the 16th conference as a listener, she decided to present a paper the following year. It was her first visit to Chennai and having studied in a Tamil medium school, she was still grappling with English. But at the 17th meet, she presented the paper “How to audit under computerised environment” and won a prize for the best paper.

In her school days, her elder brother Thangaiyya, a school-dropout, coaxed, threatened and punished her to make her study. Petchi says her parents were not too concerned about her studies, but her amma’s (as she addresses her mother’s widowed sister) last words were to, “never give up on your studies.” College was the turning point.

She had the marks for admission, but the principal doubted whether her parents could pay the Rs. 10,000 semester fee at the autonomous college in Madurai. Petchi crosses her hands and bows her head imitating her parents in the principal’s room. “‘We will suffer, but we’ll pay her fees,’ they insisted.” That scene moved Petchi and urged her to succeed.

The day after her B Com exams, she reported to a local audit firm and started preparing for her CA exams. Her tutor Seshadri took classes free of cost and helped her gain scholarship for the CA fees. He informed her of the better coaching facilities in Chennai. So, when T.N. Manoharan asked her, after she won the prize at the 17th conference, if he could help, she eagerly answered, “I want to study in Chennai.” She worked at his audit firm in return.

“I would prop the mattress against the wall when I leave for work, so that I don’t drop into it after a tiring day,” says Petchi. She battled with typhoid for a year because she could not afford to keep away from office for long. In Chennai, her coaching teacher Sivakumar asked his ex-students to teach poor students free-of-cost.

“I had not heard of Deloitte when I came to Chennai. I could not even pronounce it,” she says. Today her ID card reads Assistant Manager, Tax Department, Deloitte.

“CA is not difficult,” she says, as she speeds on my bike to drop me home. “You have to be confident and keep telling yourself that you can do it.” I was afraid of the T. Nagar traffic at 6 p.m.