A CA who builds things, in a city most people drive past.

I'm a Chartered Accountant. I've been in practice for six years, in Raipur, a Tier-2 city in central India where the conversation about finance, technology, and entrepreneurship still mostly imports its vocabulary from Mumbai and Bangalore.

For the first few years, I did what most CAs do. GST, audit, tax filings, advisory. The work was real, the clients were good, and the practice grew. But somewhere along the way, two things started bothering me.

The first was that the software my clients used (for payroll, for invoicing, for HR) was almost always built by people who didn't understand the compliance reality of running a business in India. The forms were wrong, the workflows fought against the regulations, and we ended up doing manually what software should have done automatically. I kept thinking: someone should fix this. Eventually I realised the someone was probably going to have to be me.

The second was that everything interesting in the AI and automation conversation in India was happening in metro cities. Workshops, cohorts, founder communities, accelerators, all concentrated in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi. The CA students I taught at ICAI, the founders I met locally, the professionals around me in Raipur were curious, capable, and being treated as second-class participants in their own country's tech moment.

So six months ago I started Teknosage. It's an AI and ERP company. We've shipped an HRMS that's live with paying clients, and we're launching Solaris Suite next. The thesis is simple: software for Indian businesses, built by people who do the compliance work themselves.

Alongside, I've spent the last several years teaching: at ICAI, at universities like Amity and MIAC, for PSUs like the Chhattisgarh State Electricity Board, for banking professionals on audit, and for corporate teams on AI and automation. Different rooms, different audiences, same instinct: take the things metros are talking about and bring them, properly, to the people here.

Some of this isn't new for me. I've been part of JCI India since 2018, first as a member, then as Chapter President of Raipur Royal Capital in 2021, Chapter In-charge from 2023, Zone Vice President in 2024, and National Coordinator in 2025. JCI taught me that community is a thing you build slowly, in rooms full of imperfect people, year after year. A lot of how I think about The Secret Society, The Boardroom, and even how I run my CA practice came from learning, inside JCI, that the work of building people is the work that compounds.

This month, The Boardroom opens: a physical space in our office where we host AI cohorts, founder bootcamps, and Junior Builders (our AI program for ages 12–17). Same instinct again: build the rooms here, instead of telling people to leave for Mumbai.

I also run The Secret Society. It started eight months ago as an invite-only group of friends in Raipur. It grew into something layered: open events anyone can come to, a deeper circle for those who keep showing up, paid membership for the people who want more, and an invitation-only inner core that hasn't lost its original shape. 134 members. 22 events so far (game nights, murder mysteries, book clubs, themed evenings, Catan tournaments, Sunday coffee). The point isn't networking. It's the kind of relationships that change how you think and what you build.

Alongside all of this, the CA practice continues. I paint when I can.

I'm building from Raipur, by choice. The thing I want to exist is a place where you can run a serious finance practice, ship serious software, and find serious people to build alongside, without having to move to a metro to do any of it.