From Duck to Century: The Long Game Across Three Generations

What Sumit Kukreja inherited from one generation, built through his own, and is quietly trying to pass on to the next.

Sumit Kukreja is an entrepreneur, finance professional and the founder of PV Advisory, labels that tell only part of the story. His journey has moved through cricket grounds, classrooms, corporate corridors, EY, entrepreneurship, financial pressure, reinvention and eventually authorship.

Duck to Century is his attempt to make sense of that journey: the setbacks that once felt definitive, the decisions that changed direction, and the long game of building a life with more resilience, perspective and purpose.

The boy who walked away from the crease

Cricket came early to Sumit and he was good at it too. His childhood friend Karan remembers him walking to school with a bag on one shoulder and a cricket kit on the other. Practice regularly ran into the first period, and the sound of a ball meeting the middle of the bat could be heard from the classrooms. Very often, Sumit was the batsman at the crease.

Then came one tournament that changed the course of Sumit's future. The Cibaca Cup in 2001. Five matches. Twenty-one runs.

For a young player who had expected much more from himself, the disappointment landed heavily. At that age, failure can feel like the end. For 17-year old Sumit, it felt like proof that he wasn't cut out for cricket. He decided to walk away from his passion.

In Duck to Century, he writes retrospectively:

“Failure is not a verdict. It is an event, a single ball in a very long innings.”

A duck, in cricket, is brutal in its simplicity. Zero runs. Walk back to the pavilion.

A century sits at the other end of the imagination: 100 runs, patience, discipline, survival and a long stay at the crease. Sumit's life gave him plenty of both.

A résumé rarely tells you what the journey cost

On paper, his career eventually became the kind people like putting into introductions.

Economics. An MBA in Finance. EY. International work. Finance transformation. Entrepreneurship. Founder of PV Advisory. Fractional CFO. Author.

The route between those milestones was considerably more interesting.

School itself delivered an early lesson.

Sumit wanted Commerce with Mathematics but his marks closed that route at his existing school. He moved from St. Mark's to Bosco Public School, an institution his father remembers as being considered the “lesser” school at the time.

However, this seemingly 'negative' change had within it, a blessing in disguise.

Economics, the subject Sumit once considered dropping, eventually became the subject in which he topped his school. That pattern would repeat throughout his life. An outcome that looked disappointing in the moment would push him toward something that eventually suited him better.

The polished résumé came much later. Long before that came tuition classes.

As a young man, Sumit began earning by teaching Mathematics, Accountancy and Economics. Those small earnings mattered in a household where money was watched closely.

Then came EY

In March 2009, Sumit received an offer from Ernst & Young. The relationship would stretch, in different forms, across more than a decade. There were exits and returns along the way.

At one point, early in his EY career, Sumit resigned because the work felt beneath what he imagined an MBA should be doing. A conversation changed his mind and he stayed.

Later, he left EY for a smaller consulting organisation, returned again, rose to Assistant Director, worked across countries and eventually left once more to build his own firm.

Seen as bullet points, it looks like career movement. However, seen through the lens of Duck to Century, it becomes something else: a sequence of decisions whose meaning kept changing with time.

That is one of the clever devices in the book.

Sumit creates what might be called an anti-LinkedIn résumé — a timeline of events beside another column showing how society might have judged him at that particular moment.

Failure. Success. Fluke. Stupidity. “Good for nothing.” Then success again.

The labels change almost comically quickly.

The person living through the events remains the same.

Building something of his own

Today, Sumit runs PV Advisory, the consulting firm he founded after leaving EY.

His work sits at the intersection of finance, technology and business growth: helping growing companies build stronger financial structures, improve visibility, use automation intelligently and make better strategic decisions.

There is an interesting connection between that work and the life described in the book.

Much of Sumit's professional career has been spent bringing structure to uncertainty.

And much of his personal journey has involved learning how to function inside uncertainty himself.

He speaks passionately about financial literacy because money, for him, has never existed purely as an abstract subject on a spreadsheet. He grew up watching what its absence could constrain. He began earning young. He saw his father open a shop seven days a week because an extra few hundred rupees mattered.

He watched a house become part of the cost of moving a family forward.

Later, as an entrepreneur, he experienced his own periods of financial pressure, uncertainty and rebuilding. Perhaps that is why his conversations about finance rarely feel limited to finance. They tend to become conversations about choices.

The third generation

And then there is his daughter.

Ten years old. Growing up in circumstances dramatically different from the ones her father knew.

This may actually be one of Sumit's more complicated challenges.

How do you give your child the comfort you worked so hard to create while preserving some understanding of effort?

His approach is intriguing.

Education, school trips, meaningful experiences and things he considers important are provided generously.

The “good to haves” sometimes wait.

Sometimes she hears yes.

She also learns to live with “later”.

And sometimes she works.

Recently, Sumit gave his ten-year-old daughter an internship at his company.

A real one. For a month, she worked alongside a member of his team and helped plan the launch of Duck to Century. She created a mind map, thought through the event flow, discussed her ideas and helped shape the final experience.

Her stipend?

₹500.

The amount is almost beside the point. The lesson is not. She experienced the relationship between work, contribution and money.

Sumit's philosophy of inheritance follows the same line. What he has built, he tells her, belongs to him. If one day she demonstrates that she is the right person to carry the business forward, that possibility exists.

Until then, her job is to think independently and build a life of her own.

There is something rather lovely about this when placed beside her grandfather's story.

One generation kept a tiny shop open 365 days a year so his son could study.

The next built a business that now allows his daughter to grow up with comfort.

And instead of simply handing over the rewards, he is trying to pass on the mindset that created them.

The things a father discovered in his son's book

After Sumit finished school, his father, Gulshan Kukreja, thought one large financial responsibility had eased.

Then college arrived. Unlike school fees paid month by month, the new expenses often came together. Tuition fees. Daily expenses. Travel. The mathematics of keeping a household running changed.

Around that time, Sumit's grandfather offered to buy him a motorcycle.

Gulshan's first question was practical: who would pay for the petrol?

Sumit had an answer.

“I will.”

How?

“By teaching tuition.”

For Gulshan, that was the story he knew. Then, years later, he read his son's book and discovered another one. Sumit had also tried working at McDonald's. His father had never known.

“Earlier, people knew Sumit as Gulshan Kukreja’s son. Today, people introduce me as Sumit Kukreja’s father.” Gulshan Kukreja, says it simply.

There is pride in his voice, of course. But behind that sentence lies a story of a very different India, a five-foot-wide shop, education loans, missed anniversaries, cricket grounds, corporate corridors, entrepreneurship, financial pressure, mental-health struggles and a father who once told his son that somehow, even if it meant selling the house, he would make sure he completed his MBA.

There is an unusual intimacy in reading a memoir written by someone you raised.

You recognise the house. The people. The milestones.

And then you turn a page and discover parts of your child's life that happened while you were standing somewhere nearby. Gulshan is more comfortable reading Hindi than English. Still, he read Duck to Century. All of it. Some passages surprised him, but one shook him.

Sumit writes openly about a period when he experienced a panic attack and clinical depression. His father knew that his health had been affected. He had sensed that something was wrong. He asked questions.

He had never understood the extent of it. “When I read it in the book,” Gulshan told me, “there were tears in my eyes.”Reading those pages meant discovering how much his son had carried privately. And perhaps that is one of the quieter achievements of this book.

It allowed a conversation to happen backwards.

Three hundred and sixty-five days

To understand why education mattered so intensely in the Kukreja household, you have to understand Gulshan's own relationship with work. For roughly five years, he says, he kept his shop open every single day.Wednesday was supposed to be his weekly holiday.

He stopped taking it and his reasoning was almost mathematical.

If he took Wednesday off and stepped outside, he might spend ₹200 or ₹500. If he opened the shop, he might earn ₹200 or ₹500. Sumit was studying. Money would be needed.

So the shutter went up. Wednesday after Wednesday. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year for 5 years. For us corporate employees, that is unfathomable.

There is another memory he still carries. His 25th wedding anniversary.

Relatives were travelling from Shimla and wanted the family to celebrate. Gulshan was struggling to find the money even for the occasion itself.Sumit was studying in Pune.

His father did not call him home. Later Sumit told him that he had kept expecting the call.

“Maybe today Papa will ask me to come. Maybe tomorrow.” The invitation never came. Gulshan simply could not afford the additional expense. These are small moments when described decades later. Inside a family living them, they become formative.

“Even if I have to sell the house”

The MBA years brought another turning point. When Sumit told his father he wanted to pursue an MBA, Gulshan's answer was immediate: he did not have the money.

A cousin stepped in and offered to guarantee an education loan and Sumit enrolled.

Then came another academic hurdle. His undergraduate percentage fell marginally short of the requirement for him to continue at the institute. Gulshan travelled there with his brother-in-law. They met the dean. They appealed, but the decision stood.

Gulshan remembers crying in a way he rarely had before. Then he walked into the room where Sumit was sitting and made him a promise. Whatever happened, his son would complete an MBA.“Even if I have to sell the house.”

The house was eventually sold. For Sumit, that became another burden to carry: the belief that the family home had gone because of him. For Gulshan, the decision contained something else. Years earlier, someone had told him, in effect, to recognise his limits.

His shop was tiny. His earning capacity was limited. Other relatives were doing better.

The words stung.

He decided that his circumstances could define his own choices, but they would not define the possibilities available to his children. Education became the lever. Sumit eventually completed his MBA from Bharati Vidyapeeth.

And Gulshan took away a lesson that he repeats today with considerable conviction:

A school name can change. A college can change. The trajectory can change.

A person's determination travels with them.

It is also, perhaps, the real story behind Duck to Century.

Because Sumit Kukreja's first book may use cricket as its metaphor, but the innings it describes was never played on a single ground. It has been playing out across generations.