What to keep versus what to dispose ?

If you have talked to your family and friends back at home, you might have definitely heard that 'everything is available now in India' - definitely true to most extent but there are catches. For ex, your favorite shampoo, specific brand of moisturizer etc may not be available. However, in-general, it is true that all of the items are available, now even at a higher price for some of the items.
 

Below is the scanned copy of items that are available at the 'Home Depot' equivalent in India, the @Home. (scanned copy of @Home items)
 

Electronics items
If you can arrange to bring it along with you, (i.e, smaller items that can be carried along, without getting into the customs hassle), it is definitely cheaper to buy in US. You might get the same item in India at a bit higher price but at any given shop, availability of the latest model that you are looking for is going to be a challenge. They might have few of those or more of lower end models (like TVs) and you may need to order and wait. Plus, you have the option of trying out and returning if you don't like a model (in shops like Costco, Amazon), which you won't find in India. Times have changed a bit in that area as well in India as compared to before - shoppers to accept returns now but only for exchange.

Getting rid of items that you can't sell and that you don't want to ship:

This is one thing we learned - some of the items like furniture that you are not planning to ship, become a real headache at the end. We did plan to get rid of them during the last week but things didn't pan out as we planned. Issue is this - lets say you have an fairly old computer table that you don't want to ship and fairly sure you won't be able to sell. You want to keep it till the end so that you can keep using it. However, it is a real hassle to dispose larger items in US. Fortunately, we were staying in a private party rented home which had a larger garage and we knew some new renter was moving in from out of the country. We could afford to leave some of these items behind for them to use/throw but that may not work always.
 

We did plan to dispose these off but as it turned out Salvation army didn't want to pick up these items since it had few scratches! Other company which deals with this wanted us to drop them off at their place and we didn't have enough time. Best option is - even at the cost of paying them, arrange for some junk hauler to take them away during the last week. You can always manage with minimal stuff during the last week since most of your time will go packing and doing other things.

Appreciate your feedback and comments, please leave a comment if you found this post useful (or not!) ...