R2I - Work life, a sneak peek!

Please Note

1. The following points cannot be generalized; they are just based on my discussions with my husband + a few interactions with some of his friends who have also R2Ied.
   
2. All of them work for American tech companies in Bangalore. So, most of the points mentioned here only cover such a typical set-up.

Age: One of the aspects that stands out is the average age of the employees - much younger when compared to the average in a typical US office. Hard to say if this is good or bad, but certainly different! The slightly experienced (3-5 years) software professionals are still aiming for opportunities abroad. In an MNC, it is quite common to find the bulk of the middle management to be an R2I crowd, i.e. a crowd that has spent a significant portion of its work life outside of India.

Work Hours: The good thing is that there are really no "working hours". Most of the employees typically start coming in at around 10.00 AM and end up staying late, whether it is required or not. However, based on what I hear, sticking to your preferred work hours is doable if you are disciplined.
In general, if you are particular about spending quality time with your family, you can communicate with your team about your preferred timings, so that they can plan for meetings etc during the hours that work for you. Typically, it is up to you to convey that you will not be able to attend meetings or discussions that are outside of your preferred work hours.
Sticking to your time is more doable if you are an independent contributor than a manager working in tandem with a team. The good thing is a lot more companies are opening up to the value of individual contributors.
Late night or early morning conference calls that you can attend to from home are a given; a majority of the work at middle-senior level will almost always involve working very closely with partners, colleagues, or clients in other countries.

Commute: On commute, less said the better! You have the choice of living close to your work place, which will work well. And if you cannot do that, you can choose to commute during off-peak hours - before 8.00 AM or after 10.30 AM and before 5.00 PM or after 9.30 PM. My husband leaves home at around 7.30 AM and starts from work at around 5.00 PM and it seems to definitely be working for him, since we cannot live close to his work for other reasons.

Work Culture: Apparently, things are more "casual" at work in general than in the US. People seem to chat and “hang out" more than in a typical office in the US, where people are a lot more focused. This may be relaxing or distracting, whichever way you choose to look at it.
For people who have not worked in India before: Typically people do not address their seniors as ‘Sir / Madam’ in this industry.
In general, there seems to be an eagerness to want the title of a 'manager'. It looks to predominantly be a cultural issue; it is kind of considered that you have “arrived” if you are a manager and have people reporting to you. However, this is slowly changing - where some of them seem to be opting for the role of individual contributors and are also more comfortable with the responsibilities that come with it.
And if there's a cricket match going on (especially an interesting one), things are a lot more flexible. You know how it is with cricket!!

Travel - Overseas/India: Travel of some sort is always a given. And if you are back with work experience from abroad, you are very likely going to be traveling overseas to meet your teams, clients almost on a regular basis. This cannot be avoided too much, and is part of the deal!

Interiors & Facilities: On the whole, very nice office spaces and interiors. In most of the offices, the cubicles are designed to seat 2, 3, or 4 people. Some companies do provide individual cubicles, however these are few and far between. Many companies provide gyms, pool tables, ping-pong tables, carrom boards, fooz ball tables, etc.

Cafeteria: There is good food for lunch in the cafeteria. Usually, you get really good Indian food. Some offices apparently have 3 different counters - one for North Indian, one for South Indian and the another serving "diet" food! (My husband wishes that they serve desi Chinese at his place of work! I am quite sure there are companies where they do this too.) In certain campuses that house multiple companies, there are food courts where different cuisines are served. In general the peak lunch hour is between 1.00 and 2.00 PM.

Please add your own experiences/thoughts in the comments section.

Going forth, I will be writing about work opportunities for R2Iers and also taking a general look at the market salaries for the returning Indians. Watch the R2Blore space!

R2I - Together time

Since R2Iing, my husband and I have been able to get some time to ourselves, here in Bangalore. In the US, after the arrival of our second one, we hardly got any time for ourselves. It was one chore after another. I had my hands way too full. And I didn't feel comfortable hiring baby sitters for the kids just so that hub and I could step out. That meant that we had to take the kids along wherever we went, and can you imagine the torment that was for the two of us and the kids! Sigh! It was alright when it was just one child, we did manage to get away on road trips, and even on a cruise once. But, with the second one coming into the household, it was almost impossible for the two of us to actually have time for ourselves. If the kids were older, I am sure any of our wonderful bay area neighbors would have been glad to keep the kids for a while when we stepped out. But, the kids were young and we were really not sure if they would have been on their own with anybody else. But here, things are quite different. Since we have my parents near by, and since they are ever so willing to watch the kids, it is so easy to get a little 'together time'. A dinner or a drive or even a movie together! Especially a dinner, it was such a joke trying to step out with the 2 young'uns. It was so much of work to get the kids fed, that we would hardly even be left with an appetite.

Yesterday, for instance, I decided to go, meet my husband at the end of his work day. His office is half way across town. Given that we have a driver now, (I had mentioned here about hiring one) I did not have to worry about getting to the place in peak traffic. Mid-way, it began to rain. And boy, what a downpour that was!? Nothing was even visible and the roads were almost flooded. See pic below to get an idea.
But, I had no worry in the world. The kids were home with my parents and the wheel was in the driver's hands. All I had to do was sit back and enjoy the rains! Such carefree joy! And then, when I met my hub, we went out to this nice Italian place that my husband has been insisting on taking me to. This restaurant, 'Little Italy', was really nice. And through the entire dinner, I was neither worried nor feeling obligated about the kids being with my parents! Here's a pic of the dessert, only because it was lovely!

Brownie, Vanilla ice cream, with sizzling hot chocolate sauce. Who knew brownie was available in India?!

It is also this same 'together time' that we enjoyed in the initial years of our marriage in Calif .... that which I will always cherish. Those were some of the best years of our lives, with travels, on-the-spur-of-the-moment road trips, drives, movies, dinners etc., and to get some of that back is wonderful! Yes, the traffic is crazy, the place ... noisy, and yes the roads have tons of potholes, but if you do get a little time to yourselves with a dash of romance, the rest shouldn't matter too much. ;) What say?

PS: To my readers who are looking for core R2I info, those posts are coming as well! :)

Life, death, and everything in between

Being a fairly young Indian couple in the US, hub and I were friends with people in similar age groups. In fact, I think the oldest person we were friends with in the US was in his late 30s! I doubt if we socialised with anybody in their 40s or older! This was not by design, but just the way things ended up being. Now, obviously death is not a very 'in the face' thing for people in that age group. All we spoke about was the opportunities in the tech world, start-ups, stock market, kids, schools, day-cares, weekend getaways, and the like. Not really vain, but definitely not covering the gamut of life. The only older people we got to mingle with were the older parents of our friends and relatives who were there on a vacation. And even then the topics spoken with them were fairly limited. It would typically be about their tickets, airlines, air travel experiences, immigration, comparisons between India and the US, their failing health, etc.

When it was just the two of us, all this was quite perfect for us. And, because we spoke often to our own parents back home, we would hear of other happenings in our extended families, and neighborhoods. But, after my daughter was about 2 years old, and when she started grasping things around her, I was quite sure that the limited social exposure was just not going to be enough in the long run. Yes, she was going to grow up and meet her own friends and get involved in their lives, but still I really wanted the kids to get involved in the myriad of life's experiences that a place like India offers, more so because we have our family in India. One of the very important events that made this a certainty for me was when one of my uncles in India died. Typically, there are multitudes of ceremonies and rituals that happen after somebody passes away. And if you are in the immediate family circle, you take part in most of these rituals. Now, why are these ceremonies important? I am not sure I am aware of the significance of the exercises themselves; however I know that these events make strong impressions in our minds, and such impressions are very important to our own growing self. When I was a young child, I lost my grandfathers, both in a period of 2 years. I was at an impressionable phase, and I was part and parcel of the happenings around me. When my paternal grandfather died, we had to rush to our native place, because my dad was the eldest son, and hence he had a lot of responsibilities back home. This happened in March, just before my 6th standard exams were to start. Now, I was one of those school toppers, and academics was the most important thing in my life or that is the way it had been laid out for me. But, when my grandfather passed away, we dropped everything, took permission from school and just went. Somehow, that helped put certain things into perspective then, and continues to even now. The entire family had gotten together under one roof and we all went through the motions for those 13 days. I was just a child, but a very observant one. Death is anything but scary even to this day because of those few days in my life. And personally for me, I did not want my kids to miss out on such of life's experiences. There is more to life than what meets the eye! Death is definitely one of the vital aspects of life. I definitely didn't want 'death' to be just a concept; something that happened to distant relatives in a faraway land called India, or what happened to innocent victims of random crazy acts in the US.

Another big factor is, in India, not everybody we know is in the tech industry. We know different kinds of people having different kinds of successes and struggles in life. Again, in the US, within our own immediate tech circle, it was going to be very difficult to bring in a variety for our kids. There were probably 2 kinds of people we knew amongst our bay area Indian friends - the fairly well off and the very well off. But here, I am glad that we know people in all strata/classes of society. My kids get to see my maid and her family at close quarters, and then some relatives who continue to live in our native places and leading very different lives than ours, and yet some that are right here in the city and still leading a very different (read non-tech) life. I cannot be anything but thankful for this exposure that they are able to get without any added effort. I really wanted the kids to grow up with empathy. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to provide the required environment there.

In the bay area, almost all of us threw wonderful birthday parties for the kids. The kids, like butterflies, could flutter from one party to another. Each one giving and receiving tons of wonderful gifts. Every kid’s parents being able to afford it all. That was limiting, very limiting. Also, one of the reasons to return back when the kids were really young; before they start missing out on the "good" things after we returned to India.

The uniformity of every Indian family we knew in the US was very good in its own way. We didn't have to think twice about what was appropriate and what was not. We could talk the same kinds of things with everybody, and have "intellectual" conversations with everybody we knew. That had its own charm. But when it comes to raising the kids, we do have the responsibility of exposing them to varieties of things. Also, the reason why I am not ticked off at the lack of infrastructure here. I really think it is alright to grow up with some short-comings in our immediate surroundings. Nothing wrong with that! We grew up with many, many more, and turned out fairly balanced, IMHO! To not have a little electricity from time to time, to use water wisely, and to not have everything great around you in general, can only add value to their little lives.

All that said, there's really no easy formula to raise kids. Here or there, as parents, we have to go through our own battles to raise our kids, and to raise them well. Hopefully, this decision of moving back will be one of those factors that helps us. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Would love to hear your thoughts.

R2I - No ocean to keep families apart

The proximity of our near and dear ones is a big plus on returning home. Typically parents are getting old and their dependencies, increasing. It is very easy on the nerves to not have the oceans and mountains keeping you apart, especially when there is a health crisis.

Both hub and I are only kids to our respective parents and we wanted to be here for emergencies that might arise. I would have hated to receive a really tragic news in the middle of the night and not be able to come home right away. What with 2 young'uns and all. Though both sets of parents have visited us before, I didn't see it happening again cause of different health complications. And that wasn't comforting at all.

It is an absolute joy to watch the children interact and play with their grandparents. And it seems to be doing a whole lot of good to the grandparents as well. Something to keep them young and spirited .... company of the very young. The nearness and proximity is easy on their nerves as well. For them, the huge geographical divide and the tiring and long international air travels are things of the past. :)