Deciding to Move

We had been thinking about the move for a long time before it actually happened. It was never if, but when it would happen. A lot of people who move out of India have plans about moving back. Some of them materialize and some don’t. Everybody has their reasons to move or stay. Ours was to be closer to family for some time, maybe help the kids identify with their own culture a little more than they would while living overseas and also for us to reconnect to India the way it was today and not get a culture shock each time we visited because India had changed so much since we left it.

 

So, after a lot of thinking and deliberating, we decided this was the right time for us when the kids were still young enough to adapt without rebelling and we were not too old to take on the challenge of moving a family across the world. Believe me, it wasn’t an easy decision.  

There were a few things we were thinking about when we talked about making the move. The first one was always education for the kids. We wanted to make sure they got a well-rounded education with a good balance of academics and extra-curricular activities. I didn’t want to subject them to the school system that I remembered from my childhood where academics were the priority and any semblance of a balance between academics and extracurricular activities was a fact of dreams.

We also had easy access to a variety of extra-curricular activities for the kids like soccer, swimming lessons, little gym, vocal lessons, karate etc. My younger son was too young for any of these activities so we weren’t worried about him but the older one had been going to soccer for almost two years and finally getting to like the game when we decided to move. He was very disappointed that he won’t be able to play soccer in India but he quickly came up with his own solution saying, “it’s OK mommy, I will play cricket instead”.

Growing up in India me and my sisters learnt Indian classical dance as well as took Karate lessons but trying to find a swim lesson or sports coaching outside of school was very difficult. As a result we never learnt how to swim until we were adults. Most of our friends from India had the same experiences and like many of our generation we thought India was pretty much the same as we left it 10-15 years back.

I haven’t found any extracurricular activities for the kids yet but based on experiences of friends who had moved to Hyderabad a couple of years back, things have changed a lot. You can easily find lessons for swimming, tennis, roller skates, dance, music and instruments (Indian and western). It may not be as easily accessible as things would be in the USA but there are a lot of options.

The next thing was housing. We lived in Texas where land is cheap and easily available so houses are huge and spacious. We were also blessed with a huge backyard which our kids enjoyed playing in. I wasn’t very happy about leaving the house especially since we built it from scratch. Our house also happens to be on a closed cul-de-sac which gave our kids a lot of room to play outside in the evenings and the kids from our street used that area to its fullest.  So, in my mind housing in India was going to be a step down. I couldn’t bring myself to make the decision to sell our house so we decided to rent it out instead. We eventually put it up for sale because it just didn’t make sense to manage a rental property in the USA from India.

Although housing was one of my biggest concerns I knew that housing in India has changed a lot and along with the old style apartments and independent houses from my childhood there were also the brand new state of the art villas which would give houses anywhere in the world a run for their money. Be prepared to pay skyrocketing prices for that kind of luxury though.

Finally there was the fear of not being able to “fit in” in a new place anymore. We are past the age where we make friends easily. We had a support structure in Dallas, people we had known for as long as we could remember. People who had become our “adopted” family there. How do you replace them? You cannot. It almost felt like when I first went there. I was leaving behind everything that I took for granted, everybody I knew, the streets I knew like the back of my hand, the stores I shopped in regularly, the walls I woke up to everyday in the morning, the car I drove all day, the familiar faces of strangers I saw on my early morning runs and innumerable other things that I didn’t even realized I would miss and moving to a place that was frankly very alien to me. I thought about it a lot and eventually I decided not to think about it too much and just go with the flow. Try to reconnect with old friends in the area and hope to make new ones soon!

And then there are a lot of creature comforts you will miss. Frankly there is nothing that you cannot find here in India but you will be surprised how much more expensive everything is here. You will have to pay a price for “luxury”. If you want to stick to the brands you have known and loved for the last 10 or so years, you are in luck. You can find them all here, for practically as much as you paid there in dollars! My suggestion, try the local brands. They are not bad at all and they have been tested in the local environment!

We did have the experiences of a lot of our friends who had moved back in the last few years to give us hope. They have been living in India for anywhere between 2-5 years and they love it. I have also seen people who came here and decided it wasn’t for them and went back. So, we decide to try it out for ourselves. I have been told that it takes at least a year to get used to living in India.

So, after thinking about it for 5-6 years, planning our careers around it, looking for options for two years we finally decided to make the move last year. And here I am blogging away about the craziness of the last 6 months.