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.