In 2006, I was delivering Home Guard attendance sheets to a DSO office in Delhi. I saw a screen full of numbers, moving in neat rows and columns, and I asked the executive sitting there what it was.
He looked at me — a Home Guard constable in uniform, not an accountant, not anyone he had reason to take seriously — and said: "Ye tumhare bus ki cheez nahi hai." This is not something you're capable of. The room laughed.
I didn't say anything back. I finished the delivery and went home.
What happened that evening
A friend installed a pirated copy of Excel 2003 on an old Lenovo desktop. I connected my mobile phone as an internet connection — slow, and expensive per minute back then. I opened Google and typed, as plainly as I'm writing it now: how to use Microsoft Excel.
I wrote the notes by hand, in a notebook, the way I'd learned to study for every exam that mattered. The next morning, I was up at 5AM, and the first thing I did — before anything else — was open Excel.
That was the beginning. Not of a hobby. Of twenty years of daily automation work — Excel first, then VBA and Power Query, then Power BI, Python and SQL as the work grew — that eventually became a career, then a consultancy, then a product.
Why I tell this story
Not for sympathy. I tell it because it's the cleanest example I have of a pattern that has repeated itself throughout my career: someone tells you a room you're standing in isn't yours, and the only real answer is to go build a reason to be there.
The Excel file I couldn't read that day became, over two decades, the tool I used to catch ₹40–50 crore in fraud and leakage across companies that trusted me with their numbers. It became the engine behind seven books. It became the reason 7AM & Realtime CFO™ exists at all — because I know, from that Lenovo desktop, exactly how much clarity a spreadsheet can hold if you're willing to sit with it at 5AM.
The room that laughs at you today is rarely in the room when the work pays off.
I still open my laptop early. Not because anyone's watching anymore — but because that habit, formed out of an insult, never had a reason to stop.