All aspects of daily life in India are more difficult than daily life in America.   Everything takes longer, is confusing and frustrating.   In short, there is really comparatively nothing endearing about living in India.  The benefits are from the poetic “road less traveled”. 

And what is down that proverbial road?    The feeling of success from surviving or even thriving in difficult circumstances.   The increased awareness and valuable perspective from being a minority.   Coming to terms with typical American wealth and materialism when confronted with horrible poverty.  The satisfaction from solving an endless stream of small challenges.    And finally, seeing a substantial change in the attitudes and opinions of your children when they experience the same challenges.

Now, a few specific points of advice, or, lessons learned from mistakes I made in our transition:

1-      Living in is not the same as visiting.   I had spent months traveling in India and am very comfortable here.   I translated my comfort with travel to an expected comfort in living.   This left us less prepared than I thought in dealing with things such as shopping for food, setting up utilities and hiring household help.

2-      Take the house-hunting trip.  Most companies sending you to India will offer a house hunting trip.  We chose to skip this and jump right in because it allowed up to rent our house to a relative and because we wanted to get our kids in school as quick as possible.   While we found a house pretty quickly, the trip would have allowed us to get a better idea of what supplies to bring with us.  For example, diapers are about the same price as in the US, but Ragu pasta sauce sells for 4 times the price in the US.    The trip would have also eased the culture shock because we could have experienced India then put things into perspective before the final move.

3-      Clearly define your job.    My stated assignment is “Do your same job, just do it from India.”   This sounded good back then, but is causing me plenty of exhaustion.   My job 8 months ago involved attending 6 or more hours of meetings each day.    Now, those meetings are in the middle of the night.    My advice to anyone considering this is to set clear expectations about interactions with your co-workers in the US.   A problem sign would be an expectation to attend meetings via phone or video conference.   That is a logistical challenge and a physical strain.

Despite the challenges, living in India is very rewarding and interesting.   We are having experiences each day that are memorable.   I think that if we had to do it all over again, we would still do it, just do it a bit better.