Why Zara Dar topped ACCA and still wants her own firm

A military childhood and the standardisation of army schools

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Zara Dar as the ACCA global prize winner he had first met on March 23, when she received the Pride of Pakistan award from ISPR. He asks her to begin at the beginning. Zara’s answer reframes what most listeners would expect from a topper’s biography. Her childhood, she says, was the best a child in Pakistan could have, and the reason was the army. Her father was in the military, the family moved every one or two years, and she grew up inside the closed, safe ecosystem of cantonment colonies.

She lists the postings without effort: Kohat, Okara, Jhelum where she was born, Sialkot, Taxila, Sukkur. “We’ve been everywhere,” she tells Muzamil. The disadvantage was obvious, every two years she had to close one book and open another, but the advantage compounded silently. Across stations she kept collecting class fellows, and over the years the good ones stayed. “You can keep quality friends,” she says. “You can make quality friends.” In one place for a decade, she argues, your circle widens but your understanding of people narrows.

Muzamil draws out the second-order effect: army children, in his experience, are easy to spot before they tell you, because there is a standardisation, a discipline, a cultural fluency that travels with them. Zara agrees. The shock came when the army schools ended.

The private-school shock and a tough six months in Gujranwala

Before her O-levels she shifted to Taxila, where her chosen business subjects were not available, and she began commuting to Islamabad to attend a private school. The cultural gap from APS and garrison schools floored her. “I cried so much, I don’t remember when I had the worst time,” she says. The teaching, she is careful to credit, was good. The students were not welcoming. Where in an army school a new child would be approached on day one, in a private school she had to wait six to eight months to make friends she still has today.

A second shift, this time to Gujranwala in the final six months of her O-levels, was worse. “The environment there was very off, very off,” she says, “and I had a really hard time adjusting again.” She finished her A-levels at City School Lahore, where she finally felt settled, and by that point the question was no longer where to study but what to study.

Choosing business when nobody in the family had

Zara was the first in her family to opt for business subjects. Her eldest sister had done gender studies, the next had done BBA at NUST and somehow walked out with a gold medal despite not particularly enjoying the work, and Zara herself had wanted, at various points, to be a doctor, a businesswoman, and an army officer like her father. She has also always painted and sketched. None of those threads gave a clean answer at O-level age, so she chose business and let the rest run.

Her cousins were not kind about the choice. “What will you do studying accountancy? CA people are so dull. You’ll become so dull. A dull personality is not good for girls.” She mentions this in the context of a separate point, which is that the same people, after she topped the world, told her they had always known she could do it. “This happens to girls. This has to change.”

The accountancy interest itself, she insists, traces back to a single teacher. “If you don’t have a good teacher for technical subjects, your base never forms.” She has watched ACCA students stuck precisely because that base was never laid. She took a gap year after A-levels to decide between a four-year degree and a professional qualification, and concluded that she wanted to spend her time inside the subject, not around it.

Why ACCA over CA

Muzamil asks the obvious follow-up. Why ACCA and not CA. Zara’s answer is unromantic and clear. She was used to moving around. CA is useful in Pakistan. ACCA is recognised worldwide. CA has more modules, is lengthier, and is probably harder. The decisive difference is jurisdictional: CA students learn Pakistani tax, ACCA students learn UK tax. For someone who expected her life to keep moving, the second was the right bet.

She walks through the architecture for the listener who does not know it. Thirteen exams in total. After the first nine you can submit a thesis to Oxford Brookes and convert your credits into a bachelor’s in finance, because ACCA itself is not a degree, it is a certification equivalent to a master’s. You have ten years to finish. If you blow the window, you start over. Most people finish in three or four. After the exams you complete three years of articleship before you can call yourself an ACCA member, and from there the road forks into CFA, law, tax, or a charter.

Four marks off a hundred and an email at 1am

The distinction came in F7, financial reporting, a paper Zara had loved since the O-level base her teacher gave her. She gave the exam in December 2020, walked out unsure how it had gone, and was, by her own account, not hopeful. Then the result came at fajr time, UK schedule, and she had lost only four marks out of a hundred.

Two days later an email arrived at one in the morning while she was studying. “Global prize winner, December 2020.” She thought it was spam. “Nigerian Prince wala type lag raha tha,” she tells Muzamil, and they both laugh. She had taken a national prize in management accounting in 2019, so the institute had her number, but the global email looked too generic to trust. She went to her parents. Her mother, in classic form, asked whether anyone had scored higher. Her father had told her, jokingly, before the results that of course she had topped, there are people like that in the world.

The cash prize was not large, about £200, but it was real. What she did not expect was what came next. ACCA Pakistan contacted her to write an article. Within a week she was on the Facebook pages she herself had favourited, including Startup Pakistan. The marketing manager at ACCA Pakistan sent her screenshots. “Oh, you’re viral.” She did not understand what he meant at first. Then she saw her face on pages she scrolled past every morning.

The mixed account: accountancy student and beauty creator

The virality landed on a profile that was not built for it. Zara had been public on Instagram before ACCA, but public in a very different lane. “I was posting makeup tutorials,” she says. Her father had pushed her toward freelance makeup as a creative outlet, she had done makeup on family and friends, and her medium-term aim had been her own makeup line, which is why she had started putting her face on the brand in the first place.

Then ACCA arrived in the middle of that account. The accountancy community, she explains, was almost entirely private. Everyone else’s profile was locked. Hers was open. “Everyone was private before that and I was public, and the public I was was very different from a typical ACCA public.” The questions she began to receive were not all about accountancy. They were about her hair, her clothes, the vase on the shelf behind her.

The cost of going viral on an achievement

Muzamil presses on this. He has watched the local internet for a year, watched several people get suddenly very online, and he wants to know how it feels from the inside. Zara is candid. The judgement came fast. “How do you do fashion? Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that?” She found herself wanting to explain to strangers that she had a life, that she was a person, that posting a picture from a friend’s wedding did not undo the fact that she had topped a paper.

She did not expect the small things to land as hard as they did. “You topped, and then you did this?” came up over a wedding photo. “I have good people around me,” she says of her own circle, “and then the public hits you, and there’s good and there’s bad and there’s brutal.” Eventually she stopped reading comments. “I just look at the top ones, stay happy, live.”

Muzamil names something she does not quite name herself. As you grow in a public space, he says, it becomes increasingly lonely, because even your closest friends do not understand what you are going through. They see the free PR and the visibility. They do not see the cost. Zara does not disagree. The honesty of that beat, more than any of her credentials, is what carries this episode.

The female-led firm she wants to build

The professional plan, when Muzamil asks, is straightforward. She wants to join the Big Four after her exams. She is open about this. “I’ve wanted it since I figured I wanted to do accountancy. That obsession is real and I have not let go of it.” Beyond articleship, she has a longer goal that she states plainly: she wants to start her own firm.

The reason is specific. She has visited one or two of the Big Four and the cultural fit, for her, is not quite there. She is careful with the language. It is not bad. It is reasonable. It could be better. “Pakistani public places, and even offices, are generally filled with men, and it is uncomfortable. I am not going to lie.” Globally, she notes, ACCA’s membership is fifty-three to fifty-eight percent female. In Pakistan, the women funnel into medicine instead, and accountancy classrooms run eighty percent male, twenty percent female, sometimes ten. The women who do enter often stop halfway, and she has watched it happen.

So the firm she imagines is female-led, not in a flag-waving sense, but in the basic sense of building a safe space where teams are not structurally lopsided. “Normally even audit teams have a lot of men and two women. That is not okay.” Muzamil pushes the idea further. Pakistan’s small and medium businesses, which make up roughly seventy percent of the landscape, have no real accounting function. They use a calculator and a ledger their grandfather used. They cannot afford a Big Four, and the Big Four were not built for them. Zara agrees that the gap is real. She also points out that much of the work, especially bookkeeping, is now done remotely. Friends of hers do the books for firms in Canada and the UK from their homes in Pakistan. Audit needs a body on the ground. The rest does not.

Muzamil connects this to a second problem. Roughly half of Pakistan is female, and a meaningful share of that half is kept out of the workforce by cultural pressure he is careful not to litigate. Within that constraint, remote bookkeeping for a domestic SME market is a respectable, high-value job that can be done from a living room. Zara says it back simply: women in this profession in Pakistan are doing almost nothing right now, and that is very sad to see.

A father who told a sixth-grader to go horseback riding

Toward the end of the conversation Muzamil asks Zara to imagine herself three generations apart from the people she sees most. Her answer is the warmest passage of the episode. She does not feel the generation gap. She credits her father. “My father has been the kind who told me, pursue this, do this. His role in everything I have done is huge.” Her mother prays nafl before every exam. Her father pushed her in the other direction, toward independence.

She offers an example that lands. In fifth and sixth grade, the night before a paper, when other parents would sit a child down to revise, hers would tell her to go horseback riding. “I would say, baba, my paper is tomorrow. He would say, you can spare thirty minutes. Go. This is not the end of the world. So what if you fail.” That trust, she says, made her a different person from peers whose parents could not give that kind of space even when they wanted to.

She also mentions her uncle, Aleem Dar, the international cricket umpire. People worked out the connection from her surname. He has been the best umpire in the world three consecutive years. On a recent tour he had international cricketers record video messages for her. “The recognition and the love and the support that comes from him really pushes me to do better.” She also notes the harder reading of his story. He had wanted to be a cricketer. He played a year, gave it up, became an umpire. “That was not his aim. Allah had more to give him.”

A Pakistan she rates between five and six

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest. Thirty years from now, Zara will be fifty-three. On a scale from minus ten to plus ten, where zero is no change and minus ten is much worse, how does she rate Pakistan in 2050. “Call me highly optimistic,” she says, “but I would say somewhere between five and six.”

The reasoning underneath that number is small and personal, not macro. She does not pretend to forecast a country. “I am one micro part of it. I can only think that way. So it is going to be what I make it for myself.” She is hopeful because she is willing to put in effort, and she believes people need only a start before things bend toward better. The identification of problems, she says, has begun. That, in her reading, is the precondition for everything else. Muzamil signs off the show at the one-hour mark, after a conversation that, for a guest who has called herself a private person on a public account, turned out to be unusually direct.