A bizarre story

We were having brunch with some friends last weekend and started talking about real estate prices in Bangalore. Everybody had examples of how real estate prices have gone through the roof in Bangalore. After a few oohs and aahs and stories about lost opportunities for investment, our host told us of a house whose market price was about 5 crores but it was on sale for 70 lakhs!!!

Of course our interest was piqued. So while everybody listened in rapt attention, he regaled us with the story of the house. The house is in a prime location and there is nothing wrong with it. Except an entire family of five committed suicide in the house 5-6 years back. The owner worked at one of the big names in the IT industry but lost all his fortune during the downturn. So one day the family of five- husband,wife and three kids decided to end it all. The story goes that since that day, nothing that enters the compound wall of that house has ever come out alive!!!! And of course nobody wants to buy the property.

It sounds like something out of a horror movie and I don’t know if I want to believe it but listening to the story on a Sunday afternoon in the company of friends took me back to a time when exchanging “ghost” stories was a favorite way to while away time. Our group of friends would huddle together in the evenings during summer vacation and regale each other with so called ghost stories whose origin was questionable at best. Nonetheless we all enjoyed listening to them, even getting scared by the chilling details. The moment power went out in the area, we would come out of our houses and gather up on the terrace or the park and invariably somebody would start telling us about this one time that they were visiting their village and saw a ghost. That would be the beginning of an entire session of ghost stories told with such conviction that any listener would believe them.

My sister was probably the best ghost story teller and the most notorious. She would not only tell the scariest, most bizarre stories, she would even get a couple of pranksters in the group to sneak up to the person who was easily scared and startle them when she was narrating the scariest part of the story. Of course it would lighten the moment and everybody would go from being scared to laughing out loud.

At our hostel, there was always a new ghost rumor doing the rounds every year. One year it would be a tree in the compound that was haunted, another year, somebody would spread the rumor that you could hear the sound of anklets in one of the rooms all night long. Of course somebody would invariably come back from summer vacation to tell us that they had seen a ghost on the freeway or heard an interesting ghost story at home. It was all an attempt to capture the attention of listeners and of course to terrify some newcomers and then laugh about it with friends.

I even remember our parents exchanging ghost stories with family and friends. At social functions when most guests have left and only close family and friends are present or late at night while sleeping on the terrace, the adults would indulge in a session of ghost stories. Of course at the end of it they would all dismiss them as a bunch of stories but that didn’t stop them from enjoying the session in all its scary detail.

I think exchanging ghost stories is a favorite entertainer for Indians of all ages J. Boys even use them as ice-breaker when trying to talk to a girl. Sometimes even to impress them with their bravado in the face of chilling danger. Oh, by the way, none of these stories have any copyrights on them. Once you narrate a story, the listener is free to use it as their own. The intent is not to plagiarize, only to entertain more people.

And I am happy to notice that the current generation of teenagers in India is no different from us. They still come outside and play in the evenings, huddle together at parties and yes, exchange ghost stories. Here’s to more generations of ghost story tellers J

Pani Pani re...

Water- essential for life on earth. It is ironic that with 70% of the earth filled with water people in some parts of the world are still struggling to get adequate water supply. And the water that does get supplied is contaminated beyond belief.

We live in a nice suburb of Bangalore which is one of the IT hubs in the city. The who’s who of IT has set up shop in this area and as a result the real estate developers have built innumerable apartment complexes around the IT parks. If you look at the properties, they are all world class. Professionally managed services, housekeeping that keeps the premises clean, plenty of room for kids to play,amenities that include very well equipped gymnasiums, club houses,yoga halls and most even have their own swimming pool! The only problem is that more often than not in the summers there is such a shortage of water that filling up that pool is not only impossible, it feels criminal! We live in one such community. It is a small one with 44 units of which about 30 are occupied.

So, first things first- even though the IT industry came to this area and the residential properties were not far behind, the government is taking its own sweet time to provide infrastructure to support this development. This includes a water pipeline to supply water to this area. I don’t have words to describe how I felt when I found out that we don’t have a water pipeline in this area AND there are some companies and communities which have actually paid the cost of laying the government’s pipeline themselves to get water supply. Yup! That’s right and I am not talking about a bribe- the developers actually found out how much it would cost the government to lay the pipeline and then paid the cost to get it. Of course they collected the funds from the home buyers but at least they had the vision to get the pipeline.

Now houses in this area are by no means cheap. In fact you pay more per square foot than you would pay for a house in Coppell ISD. Even for that price tag, you still have to endure bad infrastructure. Most builders put in ground water pumps which are advertised as being “sufficient” for the community. They claim that they all have rain water harvesting and water treatment plants on site which essentially means that not a drop of water is wasted and it is all recycled. In theory it all sounds great. It almost sounds like the entire community is an eco-friendly haven but then I realized that they also have diesel generators running to work the bore wells, water treatment plants and provide backup electricity so the good they do by recycling water and trash is more than negated by using the diesel to run all these pumps.

Back to water- With all the bore wells in the area, Bangalore which was once a city of a thousand lakes has only about 200 left. The city which always had pleasant weather is now seeing temperatures in the high 30s during the summer. Rainfall has reduced, ground water has depleted and as a result- surprise- water shortage! BTW this summer is supposed to be the worst in a long time. We weren’t expecting it to hit us very hard though. Being a small community we had smaller needs, two working bore wells, rainwater harvesting and a regular water supplier. We had our bases covered or so we thought. All hell broke loose when the bore well pumps stopped working and the tanker supplier decided not to show up. We were going to get used to having the water shut off for a few hours a day.

There are worse things than being without running water. I know. But with both kids home all day for summer vacation and only a few small buckets in the house for storing water, three hours of water shut off seemed draconian. The first day we didn’t even have enough time to fill buckets. Some neighbors were running to the store to buy buckets! The kids of course didn’t realize that there will not be any water in the taps. They wanted to go swimming! I had to bribe them with TV time to get them to stay indoors. The icing on the cake- Nakul had an “accident” in his underpants and needed a bath! We had one last bucket of water for the next two hours! I managed to give him a bath with half a bucket of water but had to wait for an hour to wash my face!  He of course was mad at me for not letting him play with the rest of the water J

They even started to shut off water at night. So, there would be no water to flush the toilets at night or to wash your hands if you woke up in the middle of the night. So much for personal hygiene. There were days when the overhead tank would run out of water at 7:00 PM only to be refilled the next morning. Imagine my plight when I got an email saying we were having a shortage and we should expect to flush bathrooms with buckets of water instead of using the flush! Yes!!!! We had to do that too!

So the root cause of all this- water shortage, no municipal water in the area, a little mismanagement by the community property manager and the water mafia. You read that right. The water mafia. There is a veritable mafia in these parts for water. Every supplier has to pay off local officials to ply their tankers in an area. The areas are marked for all suppliers. No new suppliers can enter the market unless they have the right connections. There is no standard pricing for a tanker of water which means the suppliers can quote any number they like. Sometimes they quote you a price and by the time they bring the tanker to you they increase it. You cannot question them. Sometimes they will boycott your community altogether. You have to maintain a relationship with them. Unless you give them regular business regardless of whether you need the water every week, they will refuse to supply water to you when you really need it.

A combination of this madness along with mismanagement by the property managers meant we went through a summer from hell. Oh, by the way what we had was a bed of roses compared to some of the bigger communities. When the size of the community increases, the demand for water also increases. Which means they can’t find enough water to satisfy their needs. Most communities resorted to supplying water only for 2-3 hours every day. They sent out notices to the residents asking them to buy drinking water because the quality of the tanker water was questionable even if they used reverse osmosis filters to clean the water. The tanker water we had for over a month was so bad everybody in our community got sick. When we sent the water for testing we found out that the water had e-coli contamination! We had to use filtered water for washing vegetables, dishes and even our teeth for over a month!

So much for having running water! What is the point of having running water when you have to resort to use bottled water for everything? All I could think was-this too shall pass! You live, you learn and you go on with the perpetual-“chalta hai” attitude!!!

Road Trip!!!

So we bought a new car! The experience was surprisingly very smooth unlike some friends of ours who have been waiting for their car for the last 3 months. The decision took a long time but once we decided on the car, it took about 10 days for them to clear the loan and deliver the car with registration. I picked a nice red one with a spoiler( we are all fans of lightning mc queen ) and of course the boys were very happy with it.

The car is beautiful but unfortunately the roads don’t do justice to it. The potholed overcrowded roads are not fit for nice cars. The surprising thing is that regardless of the status of the roads people are still buying expensive new cars. We bought something that is on middle ground between basic models and luxury ones and even this one I think is overkill for the roads in Bangalore. The drive is smooth, acceleration great but the sad part is that by the time you pick up speed you would either hit a speed bump or get stuck in traffic. My advice, when buying a car in India pick the one with nice interiors and a very good air conditioner because you will be spending a lot of time inside the car J

So one week after we bought the car DH has the brilliant idea of taking a road trip to Hyderabad. He and the kids had been there a couple of times by overnight bus so he knew that the roads were nice. So, on a whim we decided to drive down there with the kids and the nanny in tow.

We wanted to start at 4:00 pm but it was closer to 6:00pm by the time we started and we got stuck in the office rush of the infamous outer ring road in Bangalore. If you are ever in Bangalore, pray that you NEVER have to be on the ring road or for that matter any road during office rush hour which stretches over a period of 2-3 hours in the morning and the evening.  We fought through the nastiness in Bangalore to hit the “freeway” around 7:00 and from there the traffic thinned and we could actually accelerate. That’s when we started enjoying the car for the first time J

Now night driving on Indian freeways is practically torture but we were determined to go to Hyderabad so on we went. The kids were really excited to be in the new car and thankfully tired enough to sleep through most of the drive there so we didn’t have to endure “are we there yet” every 5 minutes.

The road itself was very nice. And once we crossed into Andhra Pradesh there were no speed bumps either! Karnataka is infamous for “unauthorized” speed breakers on all roads. It doesn’t matter if it’s a national highway or an illegal road going through an illegal village. The local population invariable gets together and donates towards speed bumps which are actually multipurpose. One, they make sure any vehicle trying to speed (even within the speed limit) breaks an axle (That’s right! Actually break the axle). The speed bumps are so high it’s a miracle there aren’t accidents because of them.

The other “purpose” they serve is that of making drivers trying to speed by on a freeway slow down and notice the roadside eateries. How else are they going to survive if everybody just speeds by! So in an effort to support local businesses, the local businesses get together and pay for illegal speed bumps on national freeways.

Thankfully we were in Karnataka for only about an hour of the drive and then crossed over into Andhra Pradesh. Now AP also has “check points” which serve the same purpose of slowing down drivers on the freeway. Especially when the highway is going through a town. Of course they are also strategically placed close to eateries which would otherwise go unnoticed but who am I to judge?

Once in AP the drive was smooth until you saw headlights coming directly in front of you! Yes, you read it right. It is completely normal for vehicles, even the heavy kind, to drive on the wrong side of the freeway to avoid driving a few extra kilometers to make a U-Turn. It’s just easier to go in the wrong direction in the fastest lane, freak out some poor uninitiated driver driving happily in his/her lane!

But I think I was the only one worried about this. Everybody else just took it in their stride and changed lanes for oncoming traffic on a divided highway. It seemed very normal for people who have been driving here for some time! I actually screamed a couple of times and was sitting on the edge of my seat expecting some huge truck to come onto to our lane until we reached Hyderabad. Oh BTW some of the trucks driving on the highway at night have only one working headlight. So when there is something coming at you on a divided highway and it appears like it’s a two wheeler with only one headlight, DON’T be fooled. Just change your lane and maintain as much distance as you possibly can. You won’t find out what it is until it is almost upon you!

And tail lights are apparently only a suggestion. Imagine driving on a highway with the infamous Indian trucks and not knowing they are there until you are within 10 feet of them. Yeah, NOT fun! I almost thought tail lights were not required in India and asked DH as much. Of course they are required! On the other extreme, some truck drivers like to decorate their entire truck with flashing lights so you would think you are driving towards a wedding procession and not a truck!

So, night time driving was a little stressful and we decided to drive back early in the morning so most of the journey would be in daylight. Well at the end of it we decided night driving was way better! Daytime driving is a different beast altogether. I started the drive back from Hyderabad. Yes, that’s right! I not only drove the car, I drove it on a highway no less. For three out of the 8 hours that it took to get back to Bangalore. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be because it was early in the morning and traffic was light-er. I wanted to emphasize on the ‘er’ because I have decided that there is no such thing as light traffic in India. Everything is subjective.

During the day you can expect to see fewer trucks and you don’t have to really worry about missing tail lights because you can see traffic from a mile away. But there is a lot of foot traffic. That’s right foot traffic on the highway. Especially when you are passing through a town or village. The townsfolk are not the issue. The government built the highway through their village and their main street suddenly became a national highway. They just continued to do what they were used to. Open stores on the side of the street, walk their cattle on the road to get from one field to another, run across the street to get to the school or bus stop. Nevertheless it was scary to see a town come up and somebody suddenly crossing the street when you are going at 75 MPH.  I was thankful for the makeshift speed breakers/barricades they had installed right outside the village which forced us to slow down even though the posted speed limit said we could go faster. I finally understood the purpose of the speed breakers J

So on we went with some more traffic coming in the wrong direction, people dashing across the freeway, cattle crossing the street when you are going at 75 MPH. DH almost hit a cow that ran onto the highway suddenly and swerved just in time to avoid hitting it. As per him, he hoped the animal wouldn’t decide to turn back midway! It didn’t seem to bother anybody else but I was scared when I saw a woman on a two wheeler with her 7-9 year old son coming the wrong way on the freeway. Some things are just wrong.

One thing is for sure, you will NEVER be bored while driving on Indian roads. There is always something to keep you on your toes. The highway was actually very well paved so it was very easy to go into the US mode and relax only to receive a jolt when you suddenly saw somebody crossing the freeway. Sometimes with 100 cows in tow. Or even 150 goats. You take your pick.

As for city driving, I drove in Hyderabad city! Believe it or not, the traffic in Hyderabad seemed better than Bangalore or maybe I just got lucky! I drove the extended phamilee to Lumbini park from home in Padmarao Nagar. Yes! On Tank bund on a weekend and didn’t flinch once J. I LOVE automatic cars. I have been driving a little bit in Bangalore city but the traffic is horrible and I haven’t dared to venture on main streets here yet.

Other than the few people coming the wrong way on the highway, the drive was pretty good. I was amazed at the quality of the road but also appalled at the lack of public conveniences. DON’T DRINK WATER! I guess Indian highways are not set up to cater to families on road trips yet. Most places were truck stops with a few “family” restaurants here and there. Some even had decent bathrooms but you have to know which ones are the good ones J The food of course was as always AMAZING.  We even had street hawkers selling fresh fruit at tollbooths! I ate “Tati Munjulu” after almost 20 years and LOVED them J. In all, the trip was pretty exciting even if it was for reasons we hadn’t originally planned for J

Planes,Trains and Automobiles

No, this is not about the movie. And it is not about the “desi” remake of the original either but I will shamelessly plagiarize the title because it is very apt for this post. It is an account of my “first” experience travelling in India. Travel in the US is either by plane or by car so I had pretty much forgotten how train travel feels like. I spent a lifetime travelling in trains, a lot of it without a reservation but it is strange how quickly you forget things and places you thought you knew like the back of your hand. As for buses, I had only travelled by an inter-city bus one time back in 1998 so obviously my experience was outdated and I didn’t know what to expect.

I went to visit family in Delhi and this one was by air. The journey was fairly predictable but the one thing I noticed is that the airports in Delhi and Bangalore are very nice. The ride to the Bangalore airport is a different story. With real estate within established cities sky rocketing and the need for bigger better airports rising, the cities had no choice but to build new airports outside city limits. Much like our very own DFW a few years back. It takes me an over an hour to reach the Bangalore airport when there is no traffic which is only at about 2:00 in the morning. At all other times, it takes close to 2 hours to get there. So, air travel is only for places that are not accessible via road or train. Other than the time it took to get to the airport (god forbid you forget something at home) travel via an airplane is pretty much the same as the US although I think the service is a little better in India.

The next trip was to Chennai to visit a friend which was close enough for a train. I could only get a reservation while going there so I decided to take a bus on my way back.  It was a 4 hour trip so I thought how bad can it really be? DH was a little worried but I put up my brave face and even though I was freaking out inside, I kept saying I would be fine. The train station is less than 12KM from home but as expected it takes about two hours to get there in traffic. At 5:00 in the morning with barely any traffic it took me all of 20 minutes!!!! Seemed like a good start…

As soon as I got off the taxi, I was hounded by coolies even though all I had with me was a small carry on! I ignored them and moved on. I even got some catcalls saying “Madam, shatabdi?”and some other things which thankfully were in Kannada and I didn’t quite understand. I started to get a little scared but I wasn’t going to chicken out and go back so into the station I went. Imagine my horror when all the boards showed up in Kannada only!!!! I felt like an illiterate person trying to find their way. After the cat calls I was also unwilling to ask anybody for directions. Thankfully the display changed to English within a few minutes and I was able to figure out the platform.

The “angrez” in me kept looking for escalators. I wasn’t trying to be snooty or anything but I guess my brain is conditioned to look for escalators every time I am lugging around a suitcaseJ. Finding the platform number was an adventure in itself. I was expecting something like Nagpur, Hyderabad and New Delhi stations but sadly the signs at Bangalore station were not very easy to find. The cat calls earlier and stares from everybody who passed weren’t helping boost my confidence either.

Now if you are a woman who grew up in India, you develop a sort of defense mechanism which lets you ignore all the cat calls, stares, comments that you encounter while walking on the street, travelling by public transport or at any other public place. You sort of become immune to it unless it is extremely bad. I found that my defense mechanism was still in place and it finally kicked in J.

As I neared my platform, I suddenly heard something about the shatabdi express over the public address system and surprise, they had changed the platform! It felt like I was living in one of those comedy sequences in a movie where anything that could go wrong does go wrong but ‘all is well’ in the end. At least I heard the announcement at the right time so I didn’t go to the wrong platform and get into the wrong train. That would have been a disaster!

I got to the platform and into my seat without any more adventures. The compartment was a pleasant surprise. I think Indian railways got a makeover since the last time I travelled in a train. The train had nice seats, neat aisles and even a television in the compartment! I hadn’t been in a train for over three years so I was not expecting any of this. The fare wasn’t very high but it included bottled water and breakfast. That’s better than air travel in the US!

I kept looking for a seat belt even though I knew I was on a train. Muscle memory I guess J. Things were fine until the entertainment started. They had music blaring out of the TV at 6:00 in the morning! I don’t think anybody got to take a nap after that point. The worst part was the bathrooms. The less said the better! If you have been to India and had the misfortune of experiencing a bathroom on a train, you know what I am talking about!

I also had a very talkative middle aged person sitting next to me who insisted on trying to engage me in a conversation in spite of the fact that I was reading a book. He even told me that the bread was stale and advised me not to eat it!! All I could say was thanks. I was sorely tempted to taste the bread just to see how bad it was but this person stared at my food until he was sure I was not going to eat the stale bread! It was funny to see some stranger take such deep interest in my food. Other than the over zealous breakfast snob and the loud entertainment forced on the entire compartment, the journey was fairly comfortable!

The journey back was in a bus no less. DH’s friends at work had suggested a state transport AC bus. Very good they said, very comfortable they said. Liars! Even my friend’s driver was surprised I was travelling via state transport bus and not a private bus! My experience with intercity buses was very limited and the one time I did travel, the guy sitting in the seat behind me tried “something” so I actually stood up in my seat and beat him up. Not kidding, true story, I actually hit him very hard. I am proud of that but in retrospect that probably was not a very smart thing to do on an overnight bus when I was travelling alone.

I got to the bus station without any problems but once inside I couldn’t figure out which platform the Bangalore bus left from. The signs were in tamil, kannada and telugu. Some were in English but as luck would have it the one I needed to read didn’t have an English translation! (Kicked myself mentally for never learning to read and write in Telugu!)It was broad daylight so I wasn’t afraid to ask for directions and after making a few wrong turns arrived at my bus. The good part, I had an e-ticket that the conductor verified on my mobile phone. Technology has touched every part of life in India! The bad part, the seats were old and the bus not very comfortable. I wanted to kick the person who recommended it. Especially after I saw one of the private buses! They were so good, it was like watching somebody eat chocolate ice-cream while you were stuck with a popsicle! I called DH and told him NEVER to book a ticket on a state transport bus again and to follow travel advice with caution! The worst part was that there was barely any fare difference between the two! Lesson learnt- when in doubt; go with a private bus service.

The saving grace was that there weren’t too many people on the bus so the seat next to me was empty. The ride itself was another story. I don’t understand why entertainment during public transport has to consist of bad movies played at a deafening volume but that is what I was subjected to for the 4 hours on the bus. I had my iPad but I had to set it at a deafening level to hear it over the din of the movie. That movie affected me so much I still remember it in painful detail! It was quite possibly the worst movie I EVER saw. I do have to say that the freeway was very well maintained and the ride was pretty smooth. I think next time I will take a private bus though. One word of caution if you are travelling by bus in India- DO NOT drink any water. Enough said.

Even with all the craziness involved with travelling by bus or train, I would say the journey is far more interesting that getting on a plane. There is a lot more to see and it makes for very good writing material :P

Planning...

A lot went into planning the move to India and like everybody else we had very limited time. It doesn’t matter how long you have known that you will go, when the time comes you will be scampering around trying to figure out what to do. To top it all there will be a struggle going on in your head about the sanity of the decision you just made. Even after you move, you will still keep thinking about it for a very long time. My suggestion would be to keep thinking about it. Let it out of your system, talk about it with friends, do whatever it takes to get your head around it! At the end of the day you made the decision based on what was right for you at the moment and you shouldn’t have to defend it for the rest of your life.

Now, comes the planning part. You will thank god for the internet every single day of your life until the move is said and done and for a long time after that. It is the best resource to find out about schools, accommodation, travel options, moving companies and everything else under the sun. The Indian counterparts may not have as many options as the USA but if like me you are trying to manage things from there, then you will thank your stars for it. Even after you have moved it is a good resource to find out about local restaurants, activities for kids, transportation and anything else you can think of. You will be surprised how much you can find out by doing a web search in India these days J. This is very different from when I grew up where word of mouth was how you found out about everything.

We moved though my husband’s company and although they provided monetary help with the move, they didn’t have the experience to provide us with any practical help. They didn’t have resources to help us find schools, accommodation, temporary travel arrangements etc so we were on our own there. Fortunately we had a few friends in Bangalore and the Internet on our side J

So, I set about trying to find the basics while I was still in Dallas. I went to work during the day and scanned Bangalore city websites by the night to research schools, temporary accommodation and permanent accommodation. We had never lived in Bangalore and didn’t know that distances shown on online maps could be deceptive because of the traffic conditions in the city and we couldn’t make up our mind about the livability of the so called serviced apartments advertised on the web.

After getting overwhelmed for two days, I decided that a school was the first thing on the list so I set about trying to find a school for Vivek first. We decided on a general area we wanted to be in based on DH’s office and as luck would have it our friends lived in the same vicinity so we were able to get some idea of the area. I then scouted the web for a few weeks trying to find out information about schools and after a few rounds of research, talking to schools over the phone, discussions with family and finally a tour of the school by my in-laws, we finalized the school. It wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined but I was glad it was over. I will put more details in a separate blog entry which you can read if you are interested in the specifics.

The next was trying to find accommodation. DH’s company would pay us for the first three months of accommodation in addition to the move so we decided to stay in a serviced apartment while I came back to the US to take care of things in Dallas. DH’s friend was very helpful in identifying service apartments ad well as rental properties for us while we were still in Dallas but we wanted to look at them before we signed up for it. That was a very good decision! The service apartments were nothing like the pictures put up on the website and after looking at a few we decided to rent an apartment for a year and furniture for 3 months while we waited for our stuff to arrive from Dallas. Again, more details about finding an apartment in a separate blog J

So with the big things taken care of we started talking about what we need to take with us. The last time I moved across the world, I was younger and travelled light. My entire “move” happened with two suitcases that weighed about 70 pounds each. This time around it took ¾ of a container which ended up weighing close to 9000 pounds. What can I say, it is difficult to travel light when you have two kids :P.

We had read a lot of R2I blogs and forums so I set about making lists and more lists to keep track of those lists and then I went around town frantically buying everything on my list and finding more stuff that I “thought” I would need and adding them to my shopping cart and when I was finally “done”, I remembered there were some other things I “needed”. The planning and shopping for the move was going on till the last minute. So much so that when the packers came and packed half my stuff on a Saturday, I went shopping again on Sunday so I could add more boxes when they came to finish the packing on Monday. Wait, I actually went again on Monday afternoon as well. The list is never ending. Even after you get here, you will remember a hundred other things that you should have bought when you had a chance. My thought was that everything else will be a big adjustment anyway so if we had the same or similar comforts at home, the transition might be easier. I am glad I made that decision.

Although there is nothing that you cannot find in India, from toilet paper to kitchen towels, EVERYTHING is expensive and the quality is nowhere close to what you are used to. It is strange that a lot of things you find in the USA including clothes have a made in India/Pakistan/china tag but you will not find the same quality over here although you pay the same amount of money. I wonder what the logic behind that is. I bought everything I could think of for 2 years including clothes for kids, myself, Kishen, shoes for all of us( multiple sizes for the kids because they grow like weeds!), kitchen essentials like non-stick cookware, kitchen rags, towels, furniture, you name it, I bought it. I raided Bed bath and Beyond and Target like I was planning to go into hibernation for the next 2 years!  I had the experience of quite a few friends to fall back on and after talking to a few of them and looking at the R2I Blogs, I decided it was better to have too much stuff than get here and get frustrated about the small things.

Believe me, if you take care of the small things and are not frustrated by them, it will be a much easier transition than if you just pack 8 suitcases and try to set up everything from scratch!  So, the shopping  was done, the movers hired, the packing done and the container finally shipped. At which point I remembered 30 more things I should have bought and packed J. So much for planning and keeping track of things. Oh well, I was still in the US so I had an option to ship more boxes when I moved J which by the way I did…

 

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.

 

What the kids feel

I thought it would be difficult for the kids to adjust to a different lifestyle in India. They have visited every year for extended periods of time but have never lived here. To them, India was a place they visited every so often, met their grandparents, got pampered while mommy shopped till she dropped and then came back home. Most kids don’t travel very well but we have been blessed with kids who love to travel as much as we do so although the journey was long, it never bothered them or us.

When we first decided to move, my 7 year old was distraught. He just didn’t have any means to express his feelings. We didn’t figure it out until our friends threw a farewell party for us that he was really upset about moving and would miss his friends as much as we would miss ours. We had a circle of friends whose kids routinely had sleepovers at each other’s houses and played endlessly while the adults had their own parties and I never realized that my kids were forming bonds and friendships of their own.

The day of the farewell, we went over to a friend’s house for an after party with those folks and when we left, my son asked me if we would have a birthday party for him in India? When we said, of course we would, he asked if all his friends from Dallas would be there. We stopped a minute before answering and told him, they probably won’t be there but he would make new friends. Poor kid burst out crying and said he wanted his old friends to be there, not new friends. At that moment, I was pretty much feeling the same and there was nothing I could think of to say to him that would console him!

My kids are troopers, they let us move them across the world, stayed without me for months while I tried to sell the house in Dallas and didn’t complain once. They missed me more than anything but they didn’t give my in-laws or DH a hard time. They just waited for me to ship our stuff and take care of the house. Vivek went to an entirely new education system, with new subjects, teaching methodology, not to mention new attitudes from teachers and classmates but he figured out his own ways of dealing with it. When kids teased him about his “British” accent, he put on a fake “Indian” accent which sounds like something out of Madagascar. No amount of pep talk would make him revert back to his original accent! He wasn’t upset about the teasing, he just hated the fact that they didn’t know it was an “American” accent, not a “British” one! More on the school later…

When we first decided to sell the house, it broke my son’s heart. We had told him that we were only moving temporarily (which is true although temporary is about 4 years long) so when we told him that we had decided to sell the house and not rent it out, he was very upset. The first thing he said was, but if you sell the house, where will we live when we go back??? We told him we would buy a new house but he didn’t like the idea. After a while he decided he better get used to it but he still doesn’t like it. Even my 3 year old recognizes the house in pictures and tells me, that is his house. He keeps asking me when we will go back to Dallas.

I realized today that with me being away, they thought this was all temporary and when mommy returns things will go back to normal and they would go back to Dallas and their regular life. This morning my 3 year old asked me when we were going back! I told him we weren’t going any time soon. I asked him why he wanted to go back, he said because his house was in Dallas. I told him, well this was our house now and since all of our stuff from Dallas was already here, there really was no need to go back. He immediately said, but we can always get new stuff in Dallas or ship our stuff back! That is when I realized that even my 3 year old misses Dallas and his life over there.

Vivek would call my friends’ kids and talk to them on the phone, want them to play with him on the phone, all because he missed them. Nakul talks about his old babysitter and some of the friends he does remember. He saw pictures of the house and immediately pointed out the front door, his room, the garden and the garage! He even remembered that he used to play on the cul-de-sac with the neighbors.

Until yesterday, I was getting adjusted very well but after having this conversation with Nakul, I realized how stressful this has been for them as well. Moving across the world is not easy but we assumed that since the kids were young, they would adjust easily. I realized today that it is as difficult for them as anybody. In fact, it is probably worse because they can’t really express themselves very clearly except in the little ways that mine are trying.

It has been almost a month since I came here and until today I was only seeing the positive side of things. Somehow today the last one month feels like ages and I wish I could take all the stress we put the kids through back. I was talking to a friend today and mentioned how the kids were reacting. I couldn’t help but want to scream out that today it feels like ages even though it’s barely been a month and I practically wished I could go back if it would erase all the stress my poor babies had to go through.

They are adjusting pretty well, Vivek loves his school now, has made new friends, his teachers have great things to say about him and he is feeling more like himself now that I am back. Nakul is having a blast watching a lot of Diego on TV every day and not having to go to daycare during the day. They do remember that mommy used to work and they had to be at day care and I think they like this better but in their own way, they miss their old life and when they express that in their own little ways, it breaks my heart!