‘How I Went From Selling Vegetables in a Small Village To Becoming a Chartered Accountant' |
At 5:30 am, Nadarpur is already stirring.
The village roads carry the dampness of early-morning dew, and the air smells of soil and fresh produce. For Sudarshan Nikam, that hour once meant movement. A brisk walk to the main market. Fresh vegetables bought before the sun climbed higher. Coins counted carefully. A wooden stall stacked, crate by crate.
He was 10 years old then, running between sellers and sacks of produce, learning the rhythm of the bazaar long before he understood what the word “career” could mean.
“I used to wake up at 5.30 every morning and rush to the main market to buy fresh vegetables,” he tells The Better India.
“From morning till evening, I helped my parents at the shop. Back then, success simply meant earning money. Even Rs 10,000 felt like the biggest achievement.”
Sudarshan comes from Nadarpur, a small village in Maharashtra’s Kannad taluka of Sambhaji Nagar district, where life follows the rhythm of farms and weekly bazaars, not traffic signals or office clocks.
Mumbai, at the time, felt like a distant idea. A city meant for “big people”, far removed from his everyday reality. He never imagined he would one day belong there.
Today, at 26, Sudarshan stands in Mumbai as a newly qualified Chartered Accountant. His days now revolve around balance sheets, audits, and a profession he once did not even know existed.
The distance between these two lives was covered slowly. Dawn hours in the village market. Nights spent with textbooks. A steady determination that stayed with him even when the path ahead felt unclear.
As a child, Sudarshan never held on to one dream for very long.
“Whenever someone asked what I wanted to be, I just copied my friends,” he says. “Some days I said ‘policeman’, other days ‘doctor’. Once, very casually, I even said ‘CA’. I had no idea that would actually become my reality.”
At that age, the answers came without weight. They were words borrowed for the moment, not plans for the future.
As Sudarshan grew older, they began to matter. School choices slowly shaped what lay ahead, and the idea of a career moved from something distant to something he would have to decide for himself.
Through these years of uncertainty, one thing remained steady. His family’s belief in education.
Sudarshan is........