Hello friends ...
Welcome to the R2I Diaries blog.
When I was looking for information about returning back to India, first thing I came across was the term R2I - it took me by surprise that everybody was using this term so frequently and I figured out it is 'Return 2 India' ! Such a nice short form once I got used to it. I was used to 'going back for good', 'going back' but R2I made much more sense.
Here I am, after 2 months of R2I and decided to jot down my experiences with R2I to larger audience. Of course, this is not a small move and there are thousand things to take care (not to discourage you :-) but that is a fact). I collected lots of information about relocation from different places but wanted to build a consolidated list here and share all of the experience in one place.
Let me say this first, writing a blog is not easy as it seems. It might be easier to write down daily notes on the blog but when you pick up a specific topic like the one I am trying to cover, it feels like you are writing a book.
It was a brain drain from India to US several years ago but I think the time now has come for the brain gain in India - many of the American trained brains are deciding to head home and what is better than that for India? These people are bringing wealth of experience - professional and personal, kids who have good basic education and seen a working system run by educated people. Having gone thru' the experience of relocating, saw a strong need for a single place where most of the information is available - of course, relocating is a very personal experience and one person's story would be completely applicable for another person/family but still the theme is same and basic set of questions and issues to deal with are very similar. When we started with relocation, didn't realize there could be so much information that can be shared (otherwise, this blog would have been a 'daily' blog) but as we progressed and made the move, realized there is so much steps to go thru' and so much information to deal with. Also, as our friends got to know about the relocation, we got so many questions and friends looking for details, felt it is well worth sharing that experience for common use. Hence, this blog ...
I welcome constructive comments and feedback - please feel free to sound off them here. I am sure I will not have answers to all the queries but I will do my best to respond to queries (and going by experience, we had plenty questions from others during the move!). Hope you find this blog early on and not a month before the move - most of the items listed here need early prep and can't be done in a month's advance. Having said that, if I have to do these all the second time, I am sure I can do even better than what I was able to do this time around.
See you in the next post and I will describe about myself a bit ..
Appreciate your feedback and comments, please leave a comment if you found this post useful (or not!) ...
