October - 2003 issue > Cover Feature

By Mohan Babu

After spending nearly six years in the U.S., most of it in pristine Colorado, I recently packed my bags and decided to head back to Bangalore. As is to be expected, the move was wrought with trepidation and involved some bit of soul-searching. I was giving up a “nice” job with Compuware, a mid-sized S&P 500 company, where I had spent over five years working with some great people, and was heading back to Bangalore where I had begun my whirlwind career in IT nearly a decade ago.

It’s been a little over four months since I moved back and things are finally getting into a groove. I am enjoying working with some of the brightest and driven people at Infosys’ SETLabs. Along the way, I started receiving my paycheck in rupees. Looking at my paycheck, intuitively converting it into dollars, I was not surprised at why all the multinationals are flocking to India: the paycheck is indeed a “fraction” of what I would have received in the U.S. for a similar job. Once settled, I started fielding calls and mails from friends in the U.S., most of them of a similar genre and questions about my move and life now in India. Here are some of the most common questions and a few of my thoughts.

How are you coping with the crowd, traffic and pollution?
It hits you the moment you step out of the international airport (maybe even during the immigration queue) that things are different in India. The level of pollution and the amount of traffic are definitely more than one would see in most cities in the U.S. However, for those of us who were born in India and spent the majority of our youth here, it takes just a few days to regain one’s bearing. Even after spending years cruising along interstates and driving on the right side of the road, it took me just a couple of days to hit the road in our Maruti, and I realized that the “Indian road sense” hadn’t really left me.

Bangalore is unquestionably polluted. However it might surprise you that the level of pollution has reduced in the past few years thanks to the new ring-roads and flyovers. I don’t want to give you the impression that things have turned utopian overnight, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. I hear from friends that the same is the case with other metros including Hyderabad, the other major silicon hub.

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