Words come floating to my heart whenever I am in transition. The unrest of travel, powers up the familiar grounds of your thought process. You dare to think, because you are deprived of a lot of other things you can do in your normal non-travel atmosphere.
Travelling alone takes you to uncharted territory of loneliness, hence for company, you dig up memories, build dreams, decide the steps to approach your future.
If you took all the above feelings and the momentum and extend it to your non travelling life, you would actually do something like “live your dream life”.
We, Nandan and I, moved back to live in the Unites States after trying out to live our dream and build a life in India for ourselves. We stayed in India for a little less than a year, and decided to undo our decision. But life is not Word document.
In our hearts we still love India, we still wish that it had worked for us. So, were we weak in our decision making or were there mistakes we could have avoided? I think it is a combination effect, which played itself out with time:
- both of us are on H1B visas. If you stay outside US for more than 1 year, you have to reapply for H1B, which is now through lottery, i.e. 50% chance for me and 50% for him, total of 33.33% chance for both of us to get fresh H1Bs. This made us return within our time-period of 1year. Maybe we do not need to come back, but when your options are taken away, the need becomes necessity.
- I hated my job in India. I still think about it, and do not re-think for a second that I should have or could have tried to make my job work. I ran a one man show doing business development, sales, applications, service, managing people for my company. On top of that we did not have direct business rights in India, which meant working with Indian representative company with absolute zero work ethics. I was dealing with Indian governmental organizations / universities as my clients, who have more red tape and bureaucracy than I was ready to fight for. Then I had to travel to customer sites, so enjoy the amazing transportation and obnoxious hotel industry, who can rip you clean for a safe room and still it won’t be clean. I had to move before I killed myself.
- One of our major mistakes was to move to Bangalore, instead of Calcutta (my place) or Hyderabad (Nandan’s place). Before we moved to India, my job gave me the flexibility to move to any place, and Nandan had to look for a job anyway. His job chances were better in Bangalore, but now we understand our survival chances would have been 75% higher in Calcutta.
We moved to India to find ourselves at home, to be part of our parent’s family, to bond with our culture, then we made the biggest error in judgment that if you are anywhere in India is not the same as living where you are from. We skipped Hyderabad, as all of Nandan’s family (far and near) was there, weather was bad and I did not think I could have survived peacefully; I admit now that it would have been a better try and choice for us than Bangalore. We skipped Calcutta, as we wanted to make this our home later and hence did not want to hate the city immediately. It is a difficult city to start our lives back in India, as this is one of the cities which is frozen in time.
- With our city choice came loneliness and disconnect. We lived in Indiranagar in Bangalore, which even Bangaloreans say does not resemble old Bangalore at all. We had all the expensive restaurants and brands right at our fingertips. But that was not the reason for our return to India, we wanted family, where were they? My parents were in Port Blair, Andaman and his parents in Hyderabad. They could not come to give us company; my parents were working and still cannot justify flying for a 2-3 day trip from Port Blair to Bangalore, spending more than 25k.
Given all the above issues, still, if we really wanted we could have made it work...all of you reading this may respond in the same way. True and maynot be true also, living it is way different from seeing it through someone else's experience. When we read blogs and diaries before, we reacted in the same way....but now "We are back in US".
Did I ever tackle the root question " Why did we move from US to India"
For me, I think we were moving too fast, we were working, we had OK jobs, we had bought our house, both of our parents already came and visited us.
Idle mind is devil's workshop: so in perfect conditions, we wanted some chaos.
So, "let's do it..lets move to India".
