It’s been about a month since we returned back. Over the course of the past 3 weeks or so, we have met several friends and I have met some ex-colleagues, in person and on phone/IM/FB chat.

The conversation typically goes like this: “Oh, you are back? Wow, welcome back. What happened? What didn’t work?”

Given that we learned a lot, my instant reaction is to go over the details on how things were just not working out for any of us. With some friends whom we meet over drinks and dinner (where we have time to discuss), I in fact do go into the details. With others, I have to resort to a generic “lots of stuff, we should meet up and talk about it”. My concern is that I don’t want to convey that it was a snap decision; there was a lot of thought given to the various options we had and it was not an easy decision to move back.

For some of the folks asking the question, there is a deeper thought process – they want to move to India at some point. If I know that, I feel like I should give them a list of tips and tricks and do’s and don’t’s. I feel like giving them some heads up to the stuff that we didn’t know of, and also convey that despite knowing what’s going to come one simply cannot fathom what’s coming until they go through the experience themselves.

I suspect this will continue for some time, until we meet up with most of our first-level contacts, and until then, we will re-live all our pain points over and over again :-)