Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
63
I am moving back to India. I had never seriously considered settling down in the USA, however, moving back to India is not easy, even if one wants to. Setting goals like having a kid here, getting the green card, reaching a certain level in the career or saving certain amount of money before moving seem logical as well as attractive and serve well to keep pushing the moving plans further and further into the future.
Why do I want to go back to India? To be close to our families. To be surrounded by the unique Indian-ness - street vendors, festivals, food, movies, train journeys, chaiwallas, street cricket. If you are like me, despite all the awesomeness USA offers, you do not feel the same sense of belonging here that you feel in India.
USA is unrivaled in the quality of education, quality of work, work-culture, abundance of resources, natural as well as man made beauty, plethora of choices, cleanliness, transparency of processes and the infrastructure. Its easy to get used to these and hard to let them go. Plus, there is inertia - why change something that is going well. One factor that made the decision of moving back easy is that the salary gap between India and USA is not what it used to be. Desires and emotions would have meant nothing if I saw myself earning ten times lesser salary in India than in USA. The other factor that made the decision easy is that moving back and forth between India and USA does not seem that big a deal anymore.
As the move is getting closer, we are feeling a mixture of emotions - excited to go back and start a new phase in our life, sad to leave this comfortable life behind, nervous about how things will turn out in India. I had come to this country full of big dreams and aspirations. I do feel contented with the way last 9 years have panned out - with the experiences I have had. Now, I go back to India, still with big dreams and aspirations, but also with a strong desire to build deep and strong roots in my home country.
Why do I want to go back to India? To be close to our families. To be surrounded by the unique Indian-ness - street vendors, festivals, food, movies, train journeys, chaiwallas, street cricket. If you are like me, despite all the awesomeness USA offers, you do not feel the same sense of belonging here that you feel in India.
USA is unrivaled in the quality of education, quality of work, work-culture, abundance of resources, natural as well as man made beauty, plethora of choices, cleanliness, transparency of processes and the infrastructure. Its easy to get used to these and hard to let them go. Plus, there is inertia - why change something that is going well. One factor that made the decision of moving back easy is that the salary gap between India and USA is not what it used to be. Desires and emotions would have meant nothing if I saw myself earning ten times lesser salary in India than in USA. The other factor that made the decision easy is that moving back and forth between India and USA does not seem that big a deal anymore.
As the move is getting closer, we are feeling a mixture of emotions - excited to go back and start a new phase in our life, sad to leave this comfortable life behind, nervous about how things will turn out in India. I had come to this country full of big dreams and aspirations. I do feel contented with the way last 9 years have panned out - with the experiences I have had. Now, I go back to India, still with big dreams and aspirations, but also with a strong desire to build deep and strong roots in my home country.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
10
This is based on an actual conversation I had with a friend almost a decade ago. During my graduate school years, my roommate Lovekesh Vig and I used the phrase हम ही स्टड हैं (we are studs) all the time to laugh away research ideas gone wrong or paper submissions that got turned down.
Monday, April 18, 2011
5
This, ofcourse, is not inspired by real life incidents. The credit for this idea is shared with my friend Deepak Bote. We had set up a recurring calendar event 4 years back to work together on a comic. We met once and came up with a couple of joke ideas, this being one of them. We are still looking for an opportunity to get together to work on this for the second time - you know, real studs wouldn't do it any other way! We still continue to get the calendar reminders every week.
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Studs Comics by Ashish Gupta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.