India at 70: Why I chose to stay in India instead of migrating to the West

Photo credit: Pablo Heimplatz.

As India celebrated its Independence Day a few days ago, I thought of responding to the question I have been asked the most in my life so far: With an Ivy League education and several opportunities in the US, why did I choose to stay in India and not migrate to the West?

Like every typical middle-class Indian in the twentieth century, one thing has been drilled into my subconscious: Education is my only pathway to a good job and a good life. Like all other kids, I studied hard, excelled academically, and made it to some of the top engineering schools in the hopes of getting a decent job and settling down in life. However, nothing I had learned until then prepared me for one of the toughest choices I faced upon graduation: whether to stay back in India or not.

The grim reality

That question wasn’t as innocuous as it sounds now. Half of the engineers who graduated from my institution got the famed F-1 student visa and moved to the US while several others moved to other western countries.

Never the one to choose the routine path, I got a job in the tech industry, which was a red-hot industry in India then. I thought the issue of migrating to the West would die down. Alas, how wrong I was! Nearly one in two tech engineers who worked with me shifted to the US. The most popular words in the tech industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s—and now the most feared—had nothing to do with tech itself: H1-B and L1 (the two visas used by technology organizations to transfer a plane load of people to the US almost every day).

Things were so bad that I found myself befriending a new set of people each year as the old ones moved on to the West.

Within five years of graduating with my engineering degree, almost none of my batchmates or peers in tech were to be seen in India. Things were so bad that I found myself befriending a new set of people each year as the old ones moved on to the West.

The stories people told me about life in the US added to the dilemma. According to them, they were able to afford a car on their first day of landing in the US, had fancy houses, excellent savings, clean surroundings, zero pollution, a comfortable life, cuisines from every nation on earth, work freedom, excellent leadership, social freedom, etc. The list was endless.

And here I was riding my two-wheeler from my small condominium to my office, jostling all along for space on polluted roads that carried every organism on earth besides vehicles. Juxtapose this reality with social media photos of my friends enjoying their time driving flashy cars against a jaw-dropping backdrop and the mental trauma was now unbearable.

The fact that opportunities kept cropping up made it more irresistible. Every day, at least one organization was willing to sponsor my visa and send me to the US. More people seemed to be traveling there than locally in India. My financially-savvy friend in New York added insult to injury when he told me that I was the lowest paid Harvard alumnus in the world.

Yet I overcame the urge of relocating and stayed in India. Madness? Indecisiveness? Patriotism? Perhaps it was all of these things and an extremely unlikely but practical reason: opportunity.

India is the land of opportunity

Poverty, illiteracy, pollution, class division, female infanticide, poor women’s safety—India is a life of a billion problems. Or is it?

As I matured in the tech industry and leveraged my work experience in guiding startups, I found an enterprising bunch of individuals working toward addressing the problems in India. However, they had a different focus. They viewed India’s challenges not as problems to run away from but as opportunities to run toward. They viewed India as a land of a billion opportunities and themselves as the lucky few who have the chance to participate in nation-building.

These people weren’t unenergetic, jobless youth with no opportunities, though. They were the highly-educated, go-getter, Type-A personalities from top-notch universities—precisely the kind of individuals the US would have laid out a red carpet for.

Conclusion