Considering Moving Back to India After 20 Years in the US - A Personal Reckoning

Today I share the unexpected reckoning that emerged after being laid off from a tech career I’d held for years — a moment that gently unraveled my relationship to work, identity, feminism, and home. What began as job loss became something more paradoxical: a growing pull toward India, the very place I once worked so hard to escape. Drawing from philosophy, lived experience, and the tension between the personal and the political, I sit with what it means to consider moving back to India after 20 years in the US — without certainty, without resolution, and without forcing clarity. This episode is also for anyone considering moving back to their home country after years abroad — navigating reverse migration, expat return, and the strange identity shifts that come with it. 

UPDATE: My friend Brian listened to this episode and told me about the FIRE Movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). I've never heard of it but clearly its what I've been doing. I think its worth checking out!

Here’s what I explore in this episode:

1. Philosophical reflections on paradox, reckoning, homecoming, and why the personal is always political
2. Fear, safety, feminism, and the embodied realities of considering life in India as a woman
3. The weight that comes from moral proximity or the witness burden. Living without insulation (or gentrification), where the suffering isn’t abstract anymore. It’s right in front of you

"(A transplant is) .....a person who moves to a place, and then they try to make that place just like the place they left" - Yellowstone, Kaycee Dutton defines a transplant to his son Tate

This episode is part of the In the Mystery series, where I speak from the messy middle of becoming, trusting intuition, spiritual discernment, and dignity when the path forward doesn’t yet make sense.

Reference Episodes:

• Episode 22 (the prequel to this episode) - Losing a Job After 8 Years: Day One After a Tech Layoff
• Episode 4: Waking Up From Hustle Culture. From Grateful Immigrant to Getting Fired
• Episode 5: Hustle to Heart. The Feel Good Era Begins + Feel Good Rituals

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Transcript

Dilshad 0:03

This is delicious dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, beautiful people. This is me, Dilshad, speaking from the messy middle. The messiest of middles there are. This is me speaking to you as I'm actively becoming someone or something. And that's why it's part of the In the Mystery series within this podcast. Because I don't have all the answers, and I am just showing you the becoming, not the arrival. And if you ever wondered what trusting the process looks like, especially with big fat decisions, this episode is it. This is what it looks like. And I have to tell you, no other thought or decision or consideration in my life has taken me more by surprise than this one. Nothing could have prepared me for this consideration in my mind to move back to India after spending my life force, my energy, my effort, my money for 20 years in the United States. Nothing could have prepared me for this. And I want to briefly touch upon the themes that you'll feel more than we will intellectualize in this episode. And the reason why I want to name them is because these are big, powerful themes that not a lot of people talk about and not a lot of people name as they're actively going through it. And so the first theme is, or rather, the first energy is one of reckoning, which traditionally that the definition of that word is the action of accounting something or calculating something or estimating something. It could also mean somebody's opinion or judgment. It could also sometimes have this really negative meaning, which means the punishing of mistakes or sins or misdeeds. And it has all these energies tied in. But for me, when I say the word reckoning with this decision, it feels more like a balancing of the scales. If it is a tarot card, it would feel like the justice card. If it was a zodiac sign, this would feel like Aquarius. And then there's this energy of paradox that something can be both this and that. There's no clear one or the other. It's both and. And this idea of paradox, which is funny enough, similar to the imagery of the scales balancing or the Aquarius scales balancing. Then there's this energy of the scales balancing or the Aquarius scales balancing. Oh, actually, before I go forward, the energy of paradox is a difficult one because we so often want to have one clean, clear-cut identity. And decisions like these, and when we're in the messy middle, there isn't a clear identity. There is only a reckoning of multiple polarities and extremes that we have to swim through. Then there's the third energy of homecoming. First of all, what is home? And secondly, what is homecoming? And there are these, there's a stoic belief. I think it's Heraclitus, is the person this people attribute this quote to, where he says, No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. And so that idea of coming home is an interesting one because I am definitely not the same person I was when I once lived in India, and I absolutely hated living there. And I and India is not the same place that it is now. And so, what is this idea of homecoming? It's also being the place of ancestry, that home is where my blood has lived. Is that home? Or is it not? I don't really know. And part of T. S. Eliot's poem is this quote, it's this line that says, We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring, we will arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. That to me also is this aspect of homecoming. To at the end of the entire journey and all this effort and all this struggle, I'm just going right back to where I started, and it's a brand new place. Then there's this fourth energy of the personal is political. This is a quote that's commonly attributed to Carol Hanish. She was a second-wave feminist around the 1960s or 70s. And this idea that all my personal decisions are not actually just personal ones, that there are there is political stuff tied into it. And ignoring that is not really an option, especially for a decision like this. But this decision, more than any other in my life, shows you how the personal is, in fact, very much political. So that's how I want to start this episode by just naming those four energies. And like I said, I'm in the becoming, not the arrival. So if you're expecting me to wrap this episode up in a nice bowl for you, it's not going to happen. It's, however, going to show you, if you're also thinking of something similar, or you also have a big decision, that you're likely going to contend with these energies in some form or the other. So let me tell you first of all why this is such a big uh decision. Because I was born and raised in Dubai for the first nine years of my life. And then my parents moved us to India. Now, my parents were born and raised in India, but I was born and raised for the first nine years of my life in Dubai. And I absolutely hated it. I lived in India for eight years or nine years after that. So from nine years old to when I was 17 years old, I lived in India. It was one of the biggest depressive periods of my life. I just couldn't wait to escape that place. I fluttered from one extreme to the other of couldn't wait to escape and you know had this willpower to just leave it all behind. And then the other extreme was just feeling melancholic and malaise and just depressed about being stuck there. And when I did have the opportunity finally to leave, I left. And I came to the US at 17 years old, and I just pedaled to the metal, just hit the accelerator full steam ahead. I went full throttle. I did everything I could to situate myself really well in the United States. And I go over all of that in episode four. It's called From Grateful Immigrant to Getting Fired. But everything I did was about not coming back to India. Whether it was trying to get as many jobs as I could to make my money, whether it was graduating with an insane number of, shall we say, check marks on my graduation form, two majors, two minors, certificate program, honors distinction, along with a bunch of other small little jobs. It was just, it was all about trying to be as hardworking as I possibly could to never ever have to go back to India. Fast forward to October 7th, 2025, which was only a few months ago from the day I'm recording this episode. October 7th, 2025, I was let go as part of the massive amount of tech layoffs that were happening all over the world. And this is the job I've had for eight years. I was very comfortable in it. I was just chugging along. And I was really happy to have this job. Because while I also have a business, I never wanted to put pressure on my business to make me money. I felt like it corrupted my work when I did do that. I did that. There was a year in between me taking a break between jobs where I did just focus on my business. And it just became this for me personally, it just did not work to only have income through a business. I love having this job that gives me a safety net and a business that gives me the money when it needs to, and when it doesn't, I'm not stressed about it. So October 7th, when I got this email saying that I was let go, there was a very interesting sense of peace that came over me. And that is obviously not the type of feeling you expect to feel when you've been laid off your job. And I talk more about this in depth in episode 22, about it's also an in the mystery series episode. And it's called Day One of Losing My Job that I've had for eight years. So I talk more about that day in that episode and what I did to have a fantastic day and set myself up for success, which actually ended up working out for me because I ended up getting rehired in December 2025. But all that aside, when I got that email, it something snapped in me, but also something regulated in me. I didn't, I no longer had an interest in having or keeping a job. It just didn't feel like something I wanted to put effort into anymore. And so there was this odd sense of peace that I had, and about a week or two later, I can't remember when it was, but about a week or two later, I was watching Yellowstone, which is a brilliant TV show. I absolutely enjoyed Yellowstone. And there was an episode, I think it was episode one, if I'm not mistaken, but the character, Casey Dutton, he's defining, he says that these people that they were watching in Montana are all transplants, or most of them are transplants. And he and his kid asks him, his kid's name is Tate, and his kid asks him, Dad, what's a transplant? And Casey says, a transplant is someone who moves to a place, and then they try to make that place just like the place they left. And that quote just hit me really hard. Because it was as if somebody was calling me out. And I realized that the whole time I have been in the United States, I found myself wanting Indian things all the time. I set up my home to be very Indian-Persian-esque. I love Indian food, I love Indian architecture, I love Indian clothing, Indian jewelry. I never really liked or had an appreciation for or even wanted American culture, so to speak, if if you could even say that America has like a distinct culture. Of course it does, but I just never had this pull or draw towards it. And everything I ever wanted was related to India. Everything I found beautiful, everything I found nourishing, everything I found that was that felt like me was Indian. Anytime I wanted to gas myself up or get pumped for something, I would either play really old school Hindi music because I left India in the early 2000s. So most of my music was stuck in that era. So all this old Hindi rap music or Hindi rock music, or I would listen to, I would listen to English rock music from the 80s or 90s. That is what I would use to pump myself up. Suddenly this idea was in my head that, wait a minute, has my time in the US come to an end? Is it time now for the reckoning? Is it time for me to now take account of what I've built, of what I've done, and go back home? Because the two decades I've spent in the US, I haven't really found a solid community. I haven't really found success the way I would define it. I've had success the way normal people would define it, but it hasn't been successful for me. There are pieces of my life that have not been fulfilled in the United States that in a large part have been fulfilled in India. And I'll get to that in a minute, but this is why this decision is such a mindfuckery. I'm sorry to say, it's just a mindfuck. There's no other way I can describe that. And I'm just sitting with the discomfort of what I see as an illogical decision. And primarily I see it as a decision against my feminist nature. Because if I really prioritized my feminism, or so this is how my brain thinks, I would stay in the US where it's safe for me. I have more opportunities, I have more, I just have more than I would in India. And that's the mindset that I had. And I'm thinking this decision goes against my feminist nature and everything I believe in. And it involves a complete change in identity, too. And then, and on the other hand, the paradox being that so much is happening in this country right now, in the United States, and there's so much I want to do to help, and there's so much that I want to do to give back. Yet I feel like it's time. Something has just changed, and I can't quite figure out how that happened or when that happened. But it's been it's obviously been happening slowly over many years, but it took me being let go from this job for me to be able to let go of this country. And let me be clear, the reason why India is looking very attractive to me is because I wouldn't have to work if I went back to India. I did all the calculations and I realized I wouldn't have to have a job if I went back to India. I would just take all my savings that I've been meticulously saving for years and years, and I can invest that in India and live off the interest. Will it be a lot of money? No, but it will be enough money. I'm really excited for this decision because just to have the ability to not have to have a job, to not have to constantly be in that position of employee. I'm really excited to have a good life without having to be in that position. I'm excited to eat better food, honestly. I'm excited for a variety of fruits. I'm so tired of apples and grapes and oranges and pears. I want more variety of fruits. And I'm excited to be surrounded by things that feel familiar and natural and normal. That Indianness is not the exception or the unusual part of what I'm seeing. It's the normal. And when I say India, by the way, I'm also specifically talking about Bombay or as it's now called, Mumbai. And I'm making a huge estimation by saying all of India, but Bombay is like the New York of India, is how I would describe it. And so please know I'm also speaking from that place. And a lot of places in Bombay are just beautiful, especially the insides of places, the way people decorate their restaurants, the way they decorate their cafes, everything is just there's a lot of beauty there as the norm, which is ironic because there's a lot of not beauty too. But I love that people at least try to be well designed and beautiful. I'm of course very excited to have things be more affordable, especially healthcare. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited for healthcare. And I really am excited to have a whole new life and start all over again. I have no problems starting all over again because I've done it so many times, even in the US. I've stayed in maybe five different cities now in the United States, and I've started my life over each time. So these are the things I am excited about, but there is a lot I'm really worried about. I'm worried about the pollution. It's a really polluted place. I'm worried about my lungs and my sinuses getting impacted and affected. I did not appreciate the amount of noise that Bombay has. It's just so much honking and noise in general. I'm not excited for the corruption, for that for the government corruption, for just corruption in general, for the culture of bribes. I'm not excited for the by the way, this is not to say that the United States doesn't have corruption, but I'm talking about levels and scales. I'm talking about things in context, I'm not talking about them in absolutes. I'm I'm not excited for the traffic. And the number one thing I'm not excited for is how deeply unsafe I feel as a woman in India. That's just a reality that even when I was living there, I was terribly unsafe. A lot of things happened to me there. And now to go back there and to experience this all over again is just not something I'm looking forward to. And there's also this culture of casually putting down women. The patriarchy is very alive and well, shall we say. There is a culture of rape, and there's just no other way to say it. I'm worried. I'm a I'm very worried about my safety. And I've already been looking up what it will take for me to legally carry a weapon while I'm in India. And the truth is, I'm really proud of myself also for taking so much responsibility for my safety. So there's that. I love that I'm actually thinking about that and not completely ignoring it or spiritually bypassing it. By the way, if you can hear snoring in the background, that's my dog. He's keeping us company in this episode. I'm worried about the infrastructure and just how much time and effort and running around it takes to get anything done. Let me try to explain this the best way I can. There are a lot of horrific things in India that I see on a daily basis that a lot of people are just protected from in the US. They're not in your face the way they are in India. Starving children on the street, little babies being sick in the middle of the street, animals being treated cruelly, being whipped or being used for financial gain in the middle of the street, cows, donkeys, dogs. And this happened just recently when I visited India. Me and my mom were going to this restaurant to have a quick bite for lunch. And right outside the restaurant, there were these two men who were extremely aggressive and pushy, and they each had a cow. And both the cows were skinny and malnourished, and just in general did not look happy or healthy. And they were trying to take money from us before like almost blocking the entrance to the restaurant. And they were trying to take money from us as a way to say, these are cows, you should worship them because cows are worshipped in India. And we should pay them money because they're looking after the cows. And when I didn't pay him money, he cursed at me. And this is the kind of everyday horrors that I haven't had to deal with living in America. And I hated it. I hated seeing it when I was in India. But now, having lived in a different culture and going back, every time I go back, it seems worse on my heart. It seems more and more weighing down than it ever did before. I hate to say it this way, but when I was younger, I could, I guess I lived there long enough or I was just used to it to such an extent that I could ignore it. But now I just cannot ignore it. I cannot ignore every little thing that I am seeing. It it breaks my heart. And the last time I went to India, which was only a few months ago, I just found my heart breaking over and over again. And it was not a pleasant feeling. And there's a part of me that's really worried about that. I would love to continue this ignorance's bliss that I have been living in the United States, but I've always known that it's I wouldn't use the word fake, but it's not completely representing of humanity and the way the world is right now. You can call it gentrification or you can call it whatever you want, but there is an aspect of it that feels like it's not completely real. But I have enjoyed that not realness for the last 20 years. And I am afraid of my own heart breaking over and over again. There's a fear there that is very real, and I haven't really admitted it to myself this whole time, but I was able to admit it to myself this time around. And I am worried about moving my dog, Azhar, to India. I don't know how he's gonna react to all the noise and the pollution. I don't know how I'm gonna bring him to India or how he's gonna manage in the luggage compartment, or can I bring him in the cabin on the flight? Because he's an extremely well trained dog. He is an ESA. So I don't know how that's going to happen, but I'm worried about the impact it will have on my dog. And I know a lot of people would say, Dilshah, just give him up for adoption. It's not worth it bringing him to India. And I would say that is just not something that I can do. I committed to being his companion for the rest of my life and the rest of his. And it just does not seem right to me. No matter how many times I try to think about it, it does not seem right to me to give him up for adoption. I don't know if you'd call it a sense of duty or the sense of like a promise I have made to my dog somehow, but it's definitely beyond that. It feels like I have bonded with him and he has bonded with me, and I know very well that he's a dog and he can totally bond with other people. However, he just feels like family, and I cannot even think of leaving him behind. There's that as well. And a lot of these questions, especially what it means to live as a woman in India, I feel like only can be answered once I'm actually living there. I don't think I can answer these questions now. Because when I first lived there, I was so disempowered. I didn't have agency, I didn't have autonomy, I didn't have will the way I do now. So do I still will I still feel as unsafe as I did back then? I don't really know. And like I said, I'm already taking measures to protect myself. So there's just a lot here. And I know the older version of me, maybe even five years ago, would have seen this as a failure. You're leaving behind everything you've built, and you're leaving behind the United States, and you're going back to India. She would have seen this as a failure. And I know, and I'm very sorry in advance, but I'm sorry for saying this, and I'm sorry to the people I thought this of. A lot of people I knew went back to India after being in the US just for a very short amount of time. And I would always see them and think, did you even give the United States a chance? Did you even like how could you do this? How could you go back to that country? I could never understand. And now, after 20 years, I understand. I really truly understand. So I just don't see it as a failure anymore, which is surprising to me because I would have seen that, seen it that way just only a few years ago. I am mitigating this decision by treating it as something temporary. I'm not trying to make it into a permanent move, although it is very permanent because I'm packing up my whole life, I'm selling off everything, and I'm taking my dog and going there. There is a permanentness feel to it, but I'm allowing myself enough time to really sink into it and decide where do I want to go from here. So I'm not making it a final move. And just in general, I'm just sitting and sitting and sitting with the paradox, with the discomfort, with the uncertainty, with this reckoning feeling, with this idea of home, what is home, who is home. These are all feelings that I'm just sitting with. And there's nothing else to do other than sit with it. In the meantime, I'm already making sure that I have all the documents for Azar, my dog, ready to go. I have all the permits or all of the documents that I need to move ready to go. So that's all done. I'm being very practical about this. So I've already looked into what it takes, what the numbers are for how much my monthly allowance, if you will, is going to be from the interest, how I'm going to live, what options I have to live there. So the practical nature of this has already been figured out. Which is funny because it's only been, what, less than four months since I was let go and I already have another job again. So it's just a lot has happened in four months. And it's, yeah, it's like I don't have a firm identity right now. And a part of me hates that, and another part of me is enjoying the living daylights out of it. Can I tell you? Even if I don't end up moving, even if this doesn't happen and somehow I make it work in the United States, even if retiring at 36 is just a pipe dream and I can't actually do that. And at the end of the day, I stay in the US and I keep working a job, the fact that I'm even considering moving back to India, that is what is blowing my mind more than anything. The consideration alone teaches me more than I could have ever imagined. And by the way, if you would like me to do an episode on how I can even consider retiring at 36 years old and all the financial habits that got me here to the point of this retirement, I'm happy to do so. And again, the caveat being I'm retiring in another country where the dollar is stronger than the country's currency. So there is that caveat because I could definitely not retire at 36 years old in the United States, given the savings I have. But if you'd like me to do an episode on the financial ways I've accomplished this, I'm happy to do so. Just let me know. And also, now more than ever, I would love your support. Even if I'm retiring from a full-time job, I would love to make money from this podcast. I because the sponsors I'm thinking of having sponsor this podcast are just excellent. They are products that I have used for over, in one case, I have used the product for 15 years, and my mother has used the product for herself for 30 or 40 years. So those are the kinds of products and sponsors I want to bring on the show. And for that, I need people to engage with the show or at least leave a review if you enjoyed this episode, or subscribe to the show if you'd like. I don't imagine that it would ever replace my corporate income, but it would be nice to at the very least recover the money I spend on hosting and editing the podcast. And so, yeah, please consider subscribing to the show. Please consider leaving a five-star review. And for those who have you've already subscribed, thank you very much. I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you want to see more from this show, there's something new that I've done. I don't know if you've noticed, but if you look in the episode description, I have enabled for you a way to text me with your questions or just to say hi or topic requests. I have put a text link in every episode description. I'm so excited for this new feature I've enabled. It was always there, but I was always skeptical of enabling it because I didn't know what it meant. But as it turns out, you can text me and I won't even see your number. So it's completely private. And I can respond to you in the next episode that I do based on what you send me. Isn't that cool? So before I would say you can Instagram message me on Delicious Dignity or you can email me at Dilsha the Dilsha Medha.com. But at the same time, you can now also text me. I'm just so excited for this. So this is a third way you can get into contact with me. If you just click on the link, it'll open a text message and it will send me a text. Isn't that awesome? So yeah, text me. Say hi. Let me know what you learned from this show or what you like on this show and what more you'd like to hear about. That would be so awesome. Okay, my lovelies. For this episode's blessing, I really love this blessing. It's one of my favorites. My lovelies, may your radical decisions lead to radical dignity. That's all I can say. Until next time. Bye.