Some Indians Find It Tough to Go Home Again

For my mother, repating to Pakistan was very easy. After the '01 recession, she had been looking for telecom work in the US for years, despite a PhD from MIT. Finally she sent her resume abroad and got immediate responses.

But she did hit issues with the opacity of government, which was even more of a problem with Pakistan than India, because she was there during the rule of a military dictatorship. The unfortunate thing is her program, which was establishing extensions of foreign universities for Pakistanis to get top-notch engineering degrees, was killed with democratic reform. No one would argue it was a bad program, but in Pakistan's cut-throat political environment, all of the opposition's ideas are bad.

It's easy to find articles about the crumbling American Emperium, and the vertical rise of new economies in the East, but that's overlooking how much America (and the West in general) has going for it, and how important some of those components are. The quality of a society is not directly proportional to the growth rate of the economy; government, social welfare and cultural attitudes also play important roles.

As much as we bitch about our government, it's an order of magnitude more established and stable than that of India and Pakistan. Corruption, while an issue, is eclipsed by the sort of problems you'd see in these countries. And from my experience, these two countries see social order in a very hierarchical experience; this is the exact opposite behavior to what is needed if we are to assume that the new economy consists of shrinking organization sizes and flattened management chains. These issues exist in China too, except in many ways they seem all the worse.

India, China et al. have a lot going for them, but this article reminded me that it's not all sunshine and roses, and there are still some significant hurdles to overcome. Based on my mother's experience, I don't think the issues associated with repating are simply because those returning are too Americanized - it is a product of many of these unforeseen positives that are so easy to overlook in an atmosphere of cynicism in the West.

I'm not Indian but have dealt with contracts from India. It really comes down to two things.

1) Work culture - Indian work culture, for the most part is not same as the work culture in the US. From what I've seen, Indian bosses are a lot more assertive and controlling than you would expect from your boss in the US. I can only imagine what it must be like in bureaucratic government agencies in India.

2) Infrastructure and Equality - Its just not there. It might be sprouting or even maturing in certain places but for the most part, there is immense red tape and corruption in India. This is common for most developing countries and until the average minimum wage in India for a low level government official is somewhat closer to something decent, the bribery and favourism will continue and ambitious programs like these will continue to fail. Some of the smartest Indians I met in college told me they have a better shot in the US because there is no widespread favourism here.

I can empathize with Shiva Ayyadurai. Couple of years back I was working for an eGovernance project http://mca.gov.in/

Govt officials in India want you to be subservient.

    "The nail that stands out will be hammered down." -- Japanese Proverb

Edit: After http://mca.gov.in/ became operational, I resigned and ran away to Japan to join GS.

This made me smile. Not in an evil, condescending, I-told-you-so feeling way (after all I am from south-east Asia). Its just one of those things "most ex-pats" could tell you from miles away how this will end up. Going on a vacation to India is one thing, relocating there after spending most of your life in western nation is a totally different ball game, no matter how much money is involved.

To say that "its difficult to adjust there" is an understatement. IMO YMMV.

When an Indian leaves the country to go west, he's made to feel like a traitor for leaving his "motherland". A lot of Indians live with some form of guilt for having a happy and healthy life outside India. The guilt takes some people like the ones mentioned in this article to go back and do some good for the country.

I think Indians at home need to realise that there is a world outside India. It's exciting, it's beautiful and it's worth exploring. It's OK to not live in India. There are a billion people there already. The country can do with losing some.

The closest we can get to a world without borders is for people to take the chance to go and live in another country, when they can.

"But a study by Mr. Wadhwa and other academics found that 34 percent of repats found it difficult to return to India--compared to just 13 percent of Indian immigrants who found it difficult to settle in the United States."

Because Mr. Wadhwa is the one who usually writes articles about how more and more international students who study in the United States will return to their countries of birth, this finding is important. Two things are going on here:

1) The United States, because of its historical pattern of settlement by recent immigrants from a variety of countries, really is easier to blend into for a new immigrant than are many other countries that also have friendly natives, developed economies, and reasonably transparent governance.

2) REVERSE culture shock is usually rougher on a returning expatriate than the original culture shock of leaving the native country. I say this as an American who studied Chinese as an undergraduate, lived abroad in Taiwan (with visits to Hong Kong and China) in the 1980s for three years, and then returned to the United States. Then I went over to Taiwan once more for another three-year stay beginning in 1998. It has always been more unsettling to my established assumptions to return to my "home" country after a stay abroad than to go abroad in the first place. When a person goes abroad, sure there are problems with culture shock, wherever you go, but the psychological inner dialog takes the form of "Of course this is weird; I'm in a foreign country." But upon returning "home," after a long and locally connected stay abroad, the inner dialog becomes "Hey, I thought I was coming back home, but now everything feels weird here too." People aren't always sure where "home" is if they have sunk down enough roots in the foreign culture. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." A long enough foreign stay will do that to one's mind.

Background - spent 23 yrs in the US (Stanford undergrad, built start-up from zero, through dot com bust, with F500 customers and revenue and sold it 9 years later) ; moved to India about 12 months back to build businesses here.

While many of the comments can be accurate based on the individual's context, the take-aways/conclusions (both in the article and for most of the comments) are mostly WRONG.

There is tremendous opportunity in India, and most of the issues mentioned actually make it easier to exploit that opportunity. The article and the comments should not cause any trepidation about coming to India, but re-double your resolve. It's like "shooting fish in a barrel" if you figure it out!

Sort of hard to explain to people who are not in the thick of this battle. And, talking is not how you figure this out. But, if you are a startup type* - tenacity of a bulldog, super hard-working, high integrity, passion driven - I would be happy to offer you work opportunities that will enable you to figure out the formula of how to take advantage of all of this. Note: 1) only way to figure it out is to jump into the war (say 6 months) 2) for these 6 months you'll have to work on my projects 3) it will be all about execution, not talk. so it's imperative that you're a get shit done type. 4) in these 6 months, whenever you run into "india issues" being discussed in this thread, I will work with you (show you) how to overcome them with relative ease.

*most Indians educated in ivy-league-type schools and then having worked for blue chip corps like msft, P&G, etc are NOT start-up types imho

If interested, email me udai00(at)gmail.com

What's all this about wanting more money?

http://www.livemint.com/2009/11/04000017/Scientist-fired-fro...

http://news.rediff.com/report/2009/nov/06/scientist-vs-estab...

As someone who grew up in India, studied and worked and the US and who spent 6 months attempting to help my previous employer set up an off site development centre at a third party vendor, before returning to the US, here is my perspective.

Management culture is not controlling or assertive in a manner any different than that practised at my US employer. The differences are mostly in response to such assertiveness, Indians tend to typically approach such assertiveness by authority with mere acceptance without necessarily understanding the reason underlying the decision. Such management assertiveness I have found to be misguided with the same rate at both locations.

Management response to highlighting inefficiencies in work culture or ineffectiveness with regards to output is specific to the organization, and in my experience I found the response to be similar, hide inefficiencies rather than work towards improvements.

I do not think I would find it difficult to go "home" (I consider US to be my home now), I would only need to find an organization that has the same first principles of continuous (personal and profession) improvement as I do.

Finding such an organization in either nation would be similarly difficult or easy.

America did not become the country it is because smart, entrepreneurial people from abroad emigrated to America to join its government. It became the country it is because smart, entrepreneurial people emigrated here to shine as entrepreneurs, and then, often to serve their selfish interests, and some times out of social consciousness, worked to create a government, a system and an environment that is very conducive to progress.

If you emigrate back to India, please, please start a startup. Don't join the government, especially if it is going to be under some long time bureaucrat.

I am sure there will be exceptions to this rule, but in most cases, you will help India (and yourself) more by being an entrepreneur who works to make government more efficient than by being a government official who works to make entrepreneurship (or something else) easier.

There is more here than meets the eye. A blog post here http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/11/csir-bitten-by-one... sheds some more light on it. In general, I have little sympathy for either side - one comes across as an imperious bureaucrat who does not know what accountability is and the other someone who assumes that India should be willing to roll over merely because he's returned from the US to fix it. Governments are hard to deal with across the globe.

All is far from wine and roses in India, but I'm not sure I'd use this incident as a litmus test.

A good data point but very limited.

Indian Government bureaucracy is not the same as private enterprises. The inefficiency and feudalism of Government bureaucracy is very well known and does not bear repeating.

Private enterprises,( not the outsourced variety ), do not work this way. There are other cultural issues but such blatantly incompetent and bureaucratic behavior you will not find.

None of these articles even attempt to mention culture and upbringing, which plays an immense role. For example, the person in the article came to the US when he was 7. He is most likely very much Americanized and would feel a foreigner in India, whereas 20-something Indians that come to the US to do their masters/PhD probably can't wait to get back, where they can feel at right at home.