Moving Back To India

A touchy subject, an important topic and very relevant these days! Recently I have known a few people who decided to move back and quite a few who are considering moving back to India. Opportunities are limitless... is what I hear. I also happened to read this interesting blog post. In this specific post he talks about money, but if you scroll down and read the comments you'll see tons of other issues discussed; everything from privacy (or lack of it) from nosy relatives to unreliable help and traffic and corruption and what not. In all these comments, I did not see anyone discuss work culture!!! I believe in "To each his own".... I am definitely not saying that any of the reasons discussed in those comments are less important, but as I read, I realized that people complained about traffic problems and long commutes and long work hours. So, if you are going to spend majority of your time at work (which makes the domestic help issue VERY relevant), then how can you not consider the changes in work culture? At the risk of sounding racist (or unIndian or unpatriotic or whatever), I will confess that having heard numerous horror stories from grad students about desi professors (Oh lord!! what a coincidence :-)), I stayed away from them all my academic life in US. I should also probably mention that I almost had a brush with one and thankfully avoided it. So this is not just some urban legend that I am discussing here.

I don't know what the future holds for me. But if I were to consider moving back, my first criteria would be work culture. When it comes to anything else, I know we can all manage... Come on!! We are Indians, we know how to survive. But spending majority of time working at a place where I don't like the work culture?? Not something that I would compromise on. The domestic help.... I can deal with (or so I think :-)).... Well, "to each his own"!!!