Why I Came Back, and Why I Built This
When I was fourteen, I got on a plane alone and went halfway across the world to live with my aunt and uncle and build a life I could not yet imagine.
My parents let me do it because they believed in what I could become. For the next twenty-one years, I tried to honour that belief the only way I knew how. I skipped a grade, started college at sixteen, went to Stanford, earned a law degree, worked at Google, and built a career at a top intellectual property firm.
From the outside, it looked exactly like what success is supposed to look like.
On the inside, something was always a little off.
I tell you this so you can see the particular kind of person I was when the question first found me. Not the credentials. The shape of the person underneath them. The kind who does not know how to do anything halfway. The kind who mistakes momentum for direction. The kind who can build an entire life that is real and impressive and competent, and still, somehow, not quite his own.
If you are reading this, I suspect you might know that feeling too.
It is the feeling that arrives quietly, usually late at night, after the achievements are safely in hand.
Is this actually what I want?
For me, the question eventually became a place.
The place was India.
The place was home.
What this is notBefore I go further, I want to say something plainly, because it would change everything you read after it.
This is not a piece arguing that you should move back.
I do not know your life. I do not know your work or your love or your obligations. I do not know the people who depend on you, the things you have built, or what it would cost to leave them behind. I would not trust anyone who claimed to know that for you.
What I have come to believe, after a great many of these conversations, is that change of this size is rarely a problem of information.
It is almost always a problem of clarity, courage, and company.
The internet will give you all the information you can stomach. What it cannot give you is the right question, asked in the right order, at the moment you are ready to hear it.
That is what I have tried to offer here.
Not a verdict on what you should do. Not a sales pitch dressed up as guidance.
An honest set of questions, and the company of someone who has walked the road, so that whatever you decide, you decide with your eyes open.
The decision nobody warns you is a dozen decisionsIn 2017, after more than two decades abroad, my wife Janvi and I did the thing we had been circling for years. We moved back to Mumbai.
To the people around us, the decision did not entirely make sense. From the outside, the life we were leaving looked settled, thriving, even enviable. The careers were working. The home was working. The friendships were deep. The financial picture was the picture you are supposed to want.
People who loved us asked, gently and not so gently: why now, why this, why leave when everything is going so well?
I wrote a long letter to our friends and family before we left, in part because I could feel the question in the room every time we explained our plans. I wanted to honour it with a real answer rather than a polite one.
The honest answer was that a life looking right from the outside is a different thing from a life feeling right on the inside.
And I had spent too long confusing the two.
We told ourselves and everyone else that the move was a one-year experiment. After a year or so, we would take a call on whether to stay or hit the play button on our American lives again.
That framing was a kindness we did for ourselves. It made the leap survivable.
What I did not understand then, because no one had told me, is that moving back to India is not one decision.
It is a dozen smaller ones wearing a single name.
It is a decision about money, and what your worth feels like once it is denominated in rupees.
It is a decision about work, and who you are when the title and context that defined you no longer translate neatly.
It is a decision about the people you love. Whether the dream is genuinely shared. Whether it belongs to one of you more than the other. Whether you are making the move with someone, for someone, or entirely on your own.
It is a decision about parents who have aged in the years you were away.
It is a decision about a family system that has gone on evolving without you, and will not simply rearrange itself around your arrival.
For some, it is a decision about children: what you want India to give them, and what the move might cost them.
For others, it is a decision about whether to have children, and where.
For others still, it is a decision made on entirely personal ground: a single life choosing where it wants to be planted.
And underneath all of it is the one almost nobody says out loud.
It is a decision about grief.
About what you will lose.
About who you will have to become.
I made all of those decisions the hard way. Which is to say, I made most of them by getting them wrong first, in a first year that was messier than I will ever fully admit at a dinner party.
I held the conviction through it.
Janvi held me through it, even on the days she was less sure of the conviction than I was.
That mattered more than I knew at the time.
What actually turned the keyI have thought about this for years, and the honest turning point was not in India at all. It was in Mexico City, on a short trip for my thirty-fifth birthday, with two of my closest friends.
They worked for the U.S. embassy and had uprooted their lives every two years. New country, new schools, two young children in tow. Delhi to Bogota to Mexico City, and then another posting waiting somewhere ahead.
What stayed with me was not the logistics of it. It was the lightness.
They spoke about change as if it was part of the life they had chosen, not an interruption to it. Their children were being raised inside movement, but not inside fear. Their home was not one fixed address. It was something they carried with them.
I could not stop watching that.
They were not anxious people clinging to certainty. They were happy. Happy in the specific way of people who had stopped asking permission to live the life they actually wanted.
It had not occurred to me to grant myself the same permission.
I flew home from that trip and, within a few weeks, found myself persistently dissatisfied with mine.
The work no longer held me because I had finally let myself notice what my heart actually wanted.
For me, it wanted family, time, and a particular kind of belonging I had been trying to do without.
Whatever yours wants may be entirely different. The shape of the why is not what matters.
What matters is whether you have let yourself hear it.
We went. Apprehensive, as anyone would be making a decision that large, but mostly optimistic and excited, and ready to fail.
I told myself that plainly before we left.
I am ready for failure, because if I am afraid to fail, I will never take the risks this requires.
That permission turned out to be the most important thing I packed.
Why this is arriving nowI have wanted to write this for years. I am writing it now because the question I wrestled with privately in 2017 has become, suddenly, a question thousands of people are being forced to ask more urgently.
The ground under the old assumptions has shifted.
The H-1B route that an entire generation of Indian professionals treated as a stable bridge to a permanent American life feels far less stable than it once did.
The pull in the other direction, meanwhile, has grown stronger than I have ever seen it. The economic gap that once made the choice obvious has narrowed. And something subtler has changed in how people talk about coming home.
For decades, returning carried a faint scent of retreat, the thing you did if you could not make it work there.
That story is changing.
The returnees I meet now are not coming back because they failed abroad. Many of them are coming back because, after years of building capable and successful lives elsewhere, they have started asking a different question.
Where does the life I have built belong now?
There is also a larger frame here, and I want to name it without turning this into something grander than it is.
We are living in a strange and fragmented hour. The maps we grew up with are being redrawn in real time: geopolitical, economic, ecological, even professional. Artificial intelligence is changing what it means to work and create. The climate is no longer a distant problem. Borders feel harder; certainty feels thinner.
And underneath all of it sits an older fact. The lottery of where a person happens to be born, and what that accident of geography will hand them or take from them across a single lifetime.
Even to have this as an open question is a form of luck. Some of you are being brought back by circumstance, without much choice in it. The questions here are still for you.
In that kind of world, I do not believe the answer is always a grand one.
Sometimes the answer is smaller and more personal.
It is each of us figuring out what life we actually want to live, and where it can do the most good.
For some of us, that place is wherever we already are.
For some of us, it may be somewhere else entirely.
And for some of us, the place may be home.
Not because we failed elsewhere or because nostalgia pulled us back, and not as patriotism performed for anyone else.
The reason is smaller. It is an honest accounting of where the life you have built can be most fully lived, and where it can be of most use.
If that place turns out, when weighed properly, to be the soil you first stood on, that is one more reason among many to consider the journey back.
And if it does not, that is a clear and worthy answer too.
Either way, the question is worth asking honestly.
What I have tried to buildMy coaching practice is built around five transitions I have personally lived.
The one this series is about, Way Back Home, is the one that taught me the most.
What came out of those years is The India Life Blueprint.
It is a practical companion for people trying to think this decision through honestly. Not people looking to be sold a destination. Not people looking for a romantic version of India. People who are willing to look at the move clearly, fully, and with some respect for how much it asks of a life.
The Blueprint is structured around nine domains where the move actually tests you.
What is your international experience actually worth in India today? What translates? What does not? And who are you when the old title no longer does all the explaining for you?
Money & Financial Life
On the surface, this is about restructuring your financial life. Underneath, it is about separating your sense of worth from a number that may be about to change.
Family & Relationships
You are not returning to the family that said goodbye to you years ago. You are returning to a living system that has changed in your absence, and will continue changing after you arrive.
Parenting & Education
If children are part of your story, this decision reaches into schooling, identity, admissions culture, grandparents, language, safety, freedom, and what India can give them that nowhere else can.
Social Life & Community
Making friends as a returning adult is its own work. A social life may take a year or two to feel real, and then full. Nobody tells you that clearly enough.
Home & People Management
Life in India runs on systems. Help, repairs, drivers, bills, deliveries, domestic rhythms, informal arrangements. The operational machinery of an Indian household can defeat you for the first six months unless someone tells you the truth about how it works.
Health & Fitness
This is about hospitals, insurance, the two-tier system, and practical access. It is also about how you intend to live in a body for the next thirty years.
Legal, Immigration & Bureaucracy
OCI status, green cards, tax residency, US filing obligations if they apply to you, banking compliance, the small print of moving capital across borders. These are not side details. They are doors that either stay open or close while you are looking elsewhere.
Lifestyle & Culture
The texture of daily life: food, festivals, the language you do or do not still speak, the weather you will live inside, the social rhythms you will slowly absorb. The big questions get the attention. The small ones decide whether a place actually feels like home.
After all of that, after the romance and the spreadsheets and the family conversations and the fear, the question remains: is the answer still yes?
The Blueprint will give you maps where I had none. It will name the harder questions where I learned them. What it cannot do, and is not trying to do, is take the thinking off your hands.
There is no document in the world that can do that.
There is real work that has to happen between the questions and the answers.
That work is yours.
Alongside the written modules, I am releasing this as a ten-week series. One piece of writing each week, paired with an interactive tool. Something concrete you can actually do with the question that week raises, so the thinking does not stay trapped in your head at two in the morning, which is where most of these decisions go to die unresolved.
Why I am writing any of thisI should say one last thing, plainly. The people who know me well know I am an open book. With everyone else, I keep more to myself.
I spent almost twenty years in a profession where the work speaks and you stay behind it. That suited me. The idea of opening up my own story to a wider audience was something I resisted for a long time: the early chaos, the wrong turns, the years I spent optimising for the wrong things.
What changed my mind was a pattern I started noticing in the conversations I have with the people I now work with.
The parts of my story I was most reluctant to share turned out to be the parts doing the most work.
The mistakes, the missed signals, the years before I was honest with myself.
Those were the moments that gave another person permission to look at their own life clearly, and to bring more courage to it than they had managed before.
Once I understood that, the calculation shifted.
My discomfort at being seen was a small price for someone else's clarity.
So here we are.
If you are reading this, whether you have just begun to wonder, whether you have been wondering for years, whether circumstance is forcing the question on you, or whether you have already landed and are working out what to do with the messy first year, I am glad you are here.
There is room in this conversation for all of it.
Where to startYou do not have to read everything before you begin.
I built a short instrument, The Readiness Compass, which takes about five minutes. You will come away with a sense of which parts of the decision you have already moved through, and which are still asking something of you.
It does not tell you what to do.
It does, I hope, give you the shape of your own thinking, which is sometimes the hardest thing to see when you are inside it.
Take it.
Then come back, week by week, and we will think this through together.
I made this move at thirty-five, after more than two decades away. I had the conviction, and Janvi had me, and even with both of those, the first year asked more of us than I had imagined.
Whatever you are carrying as you read this, whoever you are carrying it with or without, I hope what follows is useful company along the way.
These are the questions I wish I had been asked.
— Rumit