Moving Back to India

We are often asked as to what were our reasons to move back to India in 2005 after having stayed in the US for six years. While more than a trickle of Indian expatriates have moved back to their home country these past few years, this phenomenon still raises quite a few eyebrows and quizzical expressions.

Till 2005, I was cozily working myself up the corporate ladder at Sun Microsystems in the Bay Area while Liza was the darling of her workplace at Lifescan in Milpitas - we both were doing well in our professions and had a great social milieu around us.

However, just beneath the surface we were ready for change.

It may not be incorrect to trace the precipitation of my (part of the) decision to move back to India to Jan 1st 2005, when I met an entrepreneur whose work for hydropower development in a small hamlet in Himachal Pradesh in India, led to electrification of 12 remote, inaccessible villages connected to the mainland with no more than a fair-weather pony track. Inspired by his journey, a lingering though enraptured me - was this something repeatable ? Could this be something I could explore ? The past few weeks before that I had struggled to gain a better understanding of what there may be which would align my head, heart and hands in unified action. Where the fountainhead of motivation relied not on everchanging external situations and degrees of success achieved, but rather came forth from a deeper source inside. Where one's action would contribute to something more than deepening one's already deep pockets and affirming a sense of material self. Where action would contribute directly, meaningfully and tangibly to the community and the world we live in.

Increasingly, I had started feeling of my work at Sun Microsystems analogous to something like solving a Rubik Cube – it is thrilling while you work at it, but at the end of the day that’s all there is to it. It satiated my need to be occupied, to feel “utilized”, to challenge myself with an adventure. Not to mention, to bring a fat paycheck home and live a cozy life of mainstream affirmation. But what’s the value add once the Rubik Cube is solved ? Is the world a better place of it ? Did working to provide the solution help me become a better person ? Did it meet a real, existential need of the social environment around ? Or was it solved merely because it was there to be ? Could there exist other relevant challenges that may benefit with my application ?

So in Jan 2005, sitting at The Prolific Oven Bakery in the Rivermark Plaza close to our home in Santa Clara, over a cup of coffee, Liza & I discuss this. We talk about the Himachali entrepreneur and the cheer his work has spread in the remote hills. Until then, our interest in renewable energy had been limited to reading the few sporadic articles decrying it’s dire need in a fast depleting fossil-fuel based economy. We had no real-world experience for it. What we had though, were the rights to develop and commission a small hydropower site in the remote hills of Barot, Himachal - something we had got about 10 years back when the sector was privatized in 1996. So, was this a silent knock of serendipity to work in the remote beautiful Himalayan hills amongst simple hill-folks, for something that may socially contribute to their better living while providing a livelihood for us (successfully commissioned projects would be profitable) . Was this “The Exit Point" that we often talked off - a ramp that would lead us back to our roots ?

As we chatted more, our hearts lit up.

Liza had, by this time made her mind to do a three month sabbatical later in the year to pursue volunteer opportunities in India . I was still non-committal to the idea, given increasing engagements at work. But now, it all was possible. We’d could travel and volunteer a few months with the many non-profits doing inspiring work in India to live a better understanding of service and then devote ourselves to the path that comes our way. We could visit the efforts we had only read about, meet the people who carried with them a force of inspiration that’s borne of action and throw ourselves in the deep end of the uncertainity pool, in the hope that we learn to embrace better the magical universe that surrounds us.

The time had come for us “to go find, our new cheese”.

A Journal Journey Begins

I have always been a voracious talker - impassioned about many-a-things which engage me. However, I haven't written much before, even though I've been toying with the idea of writing a blog for some time now.

The medium of writing seems so much more tedious and exacting - requiring of one a clear distilled understanding of what one wishes to share. It's not the same with talk - one could go on-and-on and around-and-around (also eulogized as 'brainstorming') before one landed someplace definitive. Writing requires a definitiveness of content to start with. But it's rewards lie in the same rigour that it imposes - a possibility of greater cohesiveness across the many thoughts and feelings that otherwise remain fragmented in us.

So, let the journal begin.