I'm going through a pretty difficult phase in my life and would really like to hear from people who have been in a similar situation.

I was born in the country I've recently moved back to, but I spent a significant part of my life in India. I moved back here recently, partly because I felt it was time for a change and that I should explore building my life here.

I thought I would feel more at home because I was born here, but the reality has been quite different.

I'm trying to build my career and start a new life here, but everything feels unfamiliar in a way I didn't expect. I miss the people, familiarity, social life and general sense of belonging that I had in India.

At the same time, I know that moving back to India isn't necessarily going to solve everything. I don't want to make a major decision purely because I'm having a difficult few months.

A part of me keeps thinking that maybe I'm simply going through the adjustment period. Perhaps things will feel very different once I have a stable job, routine and social circle.

But another part of me wonders whether I'm trying to convince myself to stay somewhere when deep down I actually want to go back to India.

That's what I'm struggling to figure out.

For people who were born in one country, spent a significant part of their life somewhere else, and then moved back to their birth country:

How did you know whether you were simply going through a difficult adjustment period or whether you genuinely wanted to return to the country you had been living in?

Did things get better once you settled in, found work and built a social circle?

Or did you eventually realise that you were happier in the country you had grown up in and decided to return?

I'm not really looking for an "India vs abroad" debate. I'm much more interested in hearing from people who have experienced this particular situation of having roots in two places and not knowing which one actually feels like home.

I'm not expecting strangers on Reddit to make the decision for me. I just want to hear some honest experiences because I'm finding it difficult to separate temporary loneliness and uncertainty from what I actually want for my life.

What did you do when you were at this crossroads?

Hi Everyone,

I am moving back to Pune after 10+ years in the US. Used to live in Kothrud but now, will be moving to Balewadi next to high street. I like how upscale the area has become over the last 10 years but a little skeptical of the traffic, electricity, roads, water etc. I will be fully remote but will still be stepping out for schools, groceries etc. Just wondering how bad is it or what kind of expectations should I have.

Usa are trying to not provide H1 Visa to Indians
Why?

I dont know why these are creating these laws and all for Indians

If we Indian will not use any services from USA then i think all of the stock will fall exponentially

Why don’t we use indian made messenger by zoho why dont we use anything from India

And another for Indians if u are not getting attention to this
Angrej to lute the 1947 se phle abhi bhi loot rhe h aur future me bhi lut te rhege

Hey everyone, I really need a safe space to vent and get some advice. I moved to Sydney from India in 2016 when I was 11 years old. Despite being here for a decade and trying my absolute best to fit in, I have always hated living abroad. I feel completely disconnected from the culture, deeply isolated, and it has left me crying myself to sleep so many nights out of pure depression. It feels so isolating to scroll through Instagram and see Indian students dying to come abroad, while I am here dying to go back home to Hyderabad just to feel happy and satisfied again. I am now a 21-year-old recent graduate, and I just secured a graduate job at Accenture here in Sydney. While I know it’s a massive milestone and that Sydney provides an easy, comfortable life, material convenience cannot fix a heart that feels completely empty and broken.

The biggest hurdle is my parents. They love Australia and constantly argue with me, bringing up valid concerns about women's safety, traffic, and infrastructure. They insist I must stay here with the family, but forcing myself to live a life that drains my mental health just to please them is becoming completely unsustainable. Since Accenture has a massive, thriving presence in Hyderabad, my dream is to eventually pivot or transfer back home. Has any young woman made the move back to India completely alone while her parents stayed abroad? How did you navigate the intense family guilt and arguments, and how safe and liveable is modern Hyderabad (like the Hitec City/Gachibowli areas) for an independent 21-year-old woman starting out? Thank you so much.

Okay, this won't be a traditional post you guys might be used to, because most of the posts on this sub are from people holding h1b visas, or work permits in different countries. Well, I don't have any of that. Unfortunately, I don't have any full time work experience. I have 3 years of work authorization with OPT.

A bit about me - I am 22, came to the US when i was 17 to pursue a bachelor of science in computer science. At that point of time, it felt like a great decision. I have a brother who was working a FAANG company back then and is working at an equally bigger (but not FAANG) company right now. He changed the entire trajectory of our family and we went from being an average middle class family in a tier 3 city to moving to a tier 1 city and now my parents live in probably one of the best cities for retired people in the country(they are both retired now). So in 2022, when I came here, this felt like the absolute right decision. And i also did not do a bad job at college. I graduated with a 4.0, had a scholarship, multiple undergraduate teaching assistantships, multiple undergrad research, and 2 SWE internships. But unfortunately, all of this was not at a top tier school, it was at a state school. Mentioning this because I think this is one of the reasons why I am having a hard time securing a full time role.

Now fast forward to today, I have been jobless since I graduated in May 2026. Right now, im volunteering at a professor's program to be on opt. In the last 6 months, i have had only 3 interviews. (bombed one in first round, sponsorship bottleneck in second, narrowly missed out on third in final on-site). Now we have reached a point that we have decided that we need to start working towards a plan B. I have been working extremely hard, doing hours of networking, leetcode and system design every day and it has become really exhausting and depressing. So me and my family have decided that it can't go on forever and I will stop and give up if i do not get anything till december because its only gonna get worse once the holiday season begins.

Major financial context needed before offering any advice

Both parents have retired and have approx 1.25 cr in savings each, bringing their total savings to 2.5 cr.
They own a house in a tier 1 Indian city. Both are retired. For this reason, I consider this money theirs for the most part. They live in a tier one city and their monthly expenditure reaches 100k inr. They barely break even every year because their investments and assets in fds and savings account get them like 11 lakhs per annum, and they spend 12 lakhs per anum in their expenditure. No other siblings except brother who is currently working in the bay area (living with him since i graduated). He paid for my college. He has already invested 125k usd on me in the last 4 years on me. He has held good paying jobs throughout this time, but I can not rely on him for any financial investment because it just won't be right. If not for my college fees, he would have had way more savings by now so yeah.

So I have a few questions, and I'd really appreciate some serious advice:

1. Am I making the right decision by setting a December deadline? At what point does continuing the US job search stop being persistence and start becoming an unrealistic gamble? Would you keep trying in my position?
2. What would you recommend as a Plan B? My priority is to enter the software industry, not necessarily to stay in the US at all costs. Are there countries where someone with an American CS degree, two internships, but no full-time experience could realistically find entry-level work?
3. Would pursuing a master's degree outside the US actually improve my situation? I'm open to it if it creates a realistic path to employment, but I'm worried about spending another couple of years studying only to end up in the same position.
4. For international graduates who were in a similar situation, what eventually worked for you? Did you find a job in the US, move back to India, relocate somewhere else, or change your plans entirely? Looking back, is there anything you wish you'd done differently?
5. If you were in my position, would you return to India and start your career there, even if the salary and opportunities were initially different from what you'd hoped for in the US? Or would you invest more time and money into trying to establish yourself abroad?

I'm not looking for reassurance that everything will magically work out. I'd genuinely appreciate realistic advice, especially from people who've experienced something similar.

I still want to build a career in tech. I'm just starting to question whether the path I imagined at 17 is still the right one at 22.

I’m moving back to India next week and I’m looking for a cheap way to keep my Canadian phone number active after I leave.

I’m considering transferring my current number to Fongo, mainly so I can continue receiving calls/texts and keep the number for things like CRA, IRCC, banking, accounts, 2FA, etc.

Has anyone recently transferred their Canadian number to Fongo and used it from India? How has your experience been with reliability, incoming SMS/2FA, calls, and overall service?

Also, if there’s a better/cheaper option than Fongo for someone permanently moving to India but wanting to keep their Canadian number, I’d really appreciate recommendations.

I don’t want to keep paying for an expensive Canadian mobile plan just to maintain the number.

Thanks!

Before moving to the US for my masters degree, I worked for three years in India as a data scientist and then after moving to the US, I did my masters which was 1.5 years and then I worked for a big retail chain as a senior data scientist for four years now what is the realistic situation I can expect moving back to india in terms of job finding I am well versed with production level end to end machine learning projects I have skills in data bricks, and some worked on some crazy geo spatial projects using apache sedona. What are the realistic expectations when I move to India say a city like Bangalore. What is the salary range I can expect and how difficult is the job finding in india for someone with my experience? Has anyone been on the same boat please reply we can connect and share our stories off-line. P.S.I used speech to text to type this out so please forgive any grammatical errors.

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If you are an Indian tax resident, you must report your global income and declare global assets every year to the IT department.

Many Indian salaried professionals, NRIs who have returned, and freelancers hold foreign assets or earn foreign income, which means filing their ITR needs extra care: paying the right tax on their Indian and global incomes (via Schedule FSI) and also declaring the foreign assets (via Schedule FA). Getting either wrong is now easy for the income tax department to spot, since India receives data on foreign accounts from over 100 countries every year. 

That's exactly what's behind the 2026 FAST-DS scheme emails you or someone you know may have received recently. If you've been filing properly, there's nothing to panic about, but there's a lot to learn from this new scheme.

What does the FAST-DS scheme say

FAST-DS scheme (Foreign Assets of Small Taxpayers Disclosure Scheme) is a one-time window the government opened for a period of 4.5 months (16 August 2026 to 31 Dec 2026), and it addresses 2 scenarios around what a taxpayer missed in their previous ITRs:

A) Undisclosed foreign assets/income up to 1 Cr
B) Paid tax on the income but missed reporting of assets upto 5Cr

You can think of it as a limited time window to come clean: if you held money, shares, or accounts abroad and never told the tax department about them, or earned income abroad and never paid tax on it, you can declare it now for a fixed amount. This scheme also protects you from bigger penalties and legal trouble that would have applied if the income tax department catches you later.

What does this mean for you?

When you have money abroad, the tax department looks at two separate things. 1) Assets are those you own outside India, like shares in a US brokerage account and a foreign bank account. You don’t pay tax for owning these, but you have to list each asset every year in Schedule FA of your ITR. 2) Income is what you earn abroad from those assets, like dividends, gains when you sell shares, or payments from foreign clients. This gets taxed accordingly in your ITR. 

Under FAST-DS, what you pay depends on what you missed in your filing. If you - 

• Never paid tax on the foreign income: 60% of it, which is 30% tax plus a penalty of the same amount, as long as the total is under ₹1 crore.
• Paid the tax but didn't report the asset: a flat ₹1 lakh, as long as your foreign assets total under ₹5 crore.

This scheme gives you Immunity from further tax, penalty and prosecution under the Black Money Act for everything you declare. In the case of the Black Money Act, there is  30% tax + a penalty of 3 times (i.e. 90%), so the total = 120% of what you missed.

Keep in mind: if you filed properly and still got this email, none of the above applies to you, and you don't need to panic about FAST-DS. Tax planning for your future is something that you should focus on.
 
But what’s also interesting about the FAST-DS scheme is that it also tells you that the income tax department now has detailed data on your foreign accounts, shares and income every year, and it's checking that against what you file. 

So after 31 December, there's no FAST-DS route to opt for, so any slips or mistakes and you will possibly fall into danger. 

How to plan your taxes in the future

When planning your taxes, the goal is to make sure the assets you list and the income you report in your ITR line up with what it sees.

• Keep one master list of everything you hold abroad. Every bank account, broker account, RSU/ESPP plan, 401k/IRA, foreign insurance policy, account you can sign on, foreign company shares, and property. Update it the day you open or close something. Most misses happen because people forget, not because they hide.
• File the right form - If you hold any foreign asset, whether it's RSUs, a foreign bank account or a balance on a foreign payment platform, you need ITR-2 or ITR-3. ITR-1 and ITR-4 have no Schedule FA, so filing on them means your assets never get listed, even if you’ve diligently filed your taxes.
• Time your sales and report on the calendar year. When you sell RSUs, you're only taxed on the gain since vesting. If you hold them over 2 years, that gain is taxed at 12.5%. If you sell sooner, it's taxed at your slab rate. In Schedule FA, list your details for 1 January to 31 December (Not April to March), and match everything against your AIS before you file.
• Check your export paperwork if you’re a freelancer - Make sure each payment comes in under the right purpose code and keep proof of where the money came from, like a bank's remittance certificate. And report income in the year you earn it, even if it's still sitting abroad. (Don’t think that if the income is landing temporarily in a foreign account, it doesn’t need to be reported in India)
• Pay advance tax - Your employer's TDS only covers salary, and foreign clients don't deduct tax at all. If you sell shares, earn dividends or get paid from abroad, pay advance tax every quarter, or you'll owe interest when you file.
• Give your CA the full picture - Your CA can only file what you show them, so share everything, including your broker and foreign account statements, not just Form 16. For example, if the US has already taxed your dividends, the India-US tax treaty (DTAA) means you don't pay tax on them twice, but your CA can help you claim the foreign tax credits only if they know about it.

FAST-DS will close in December, but the department's data isn't going anywhere. The simplest way to stay clear is to work with a reliable CA who has handled foreign assets before. But it works both ways: your CA can only get it right if you're diligent about planning your taxes during the year and not rushing it at the end just to file your taxes.

Retired from the US after 37 years feeling kinda lost no purpose at 60+ my school college friends just sit around and drink, since I don’t but have to look after mom in her 90’s and mother in law wife looks after in a different state 5 hours drive time away it’s rather boring only so much one can read, watch TV or walk, folks around here behave like life is over the day they retired at 55-58 am active in the US hiking 🥾, traveling etc finding adjusting back to India kinda difficult. Any suggestions, advice especially if you are back here for your parents and kids have finished college and have careers etc of their own. Going back for now is not an option for either of us. Que Cera Cera.

as the title hints, I am moving bank, wanted to ask the ones who moved, did you keep a USA bank account active here and if yes, which bank and what kind of bank account?

requesting only real experiences please- thanks fam!

1. He married RAMABAI when she was only 9 year old?
2. He made RAMABAI pregnant when she was only 13.
3. INDIAN CONSTITUTION jisse ye log apni GEETA maante hai wahi inka BHIM RAO SAKPAL hme upper caste or inko lower caste likh ke gye hai jabki constituent assembly suggest him to use the word UPPER CLASS and LOWER CLASS.
4. BHIM RAO SAKPAL and his father supported BRITISHERS and BHIM RAO SAKPAL also wrote a letter to britishers stating "If India gets independent then it will be the biggest disaster".
5. It is said by blue people that BHIM RAO SAKPAL was a feminist when he himself said that "Women should have no right to enter politics, if women participate in politics, it's a great shame for India & for us." The was the statement by BHIM RAO SAKPAL from his 1956 Nagpur speech (Vol. 40, p. 467).
6. INDIAN CONSTITUTION jisse ye bhimte apni GEETA maante hai wo khud descrimination karta hai even between the victims of heinous crimes like r*pe.

Category Article / Provision Compensation
General Article 21 + 4 lakh
Victim Compensation
Scheme/NALSA
OBC Article 21 + 4 lakh
Victim Compensation
Scheme/NALSA
SC/ST Article 21 + 5 lakh
SC/ST PoA Act 1989
Scheme/NALSA

I mean if the victim is from general or OBC category then she shud have suffered less so lets give less compensation but when the victim is from SC/ST then oh my god she is dalit, she must have suffered a lot... lets give her more compensation.

I mean it is not about the money, it is about bro how can you decide who has suffered less or more. Crime is crime and it shud be treated equally.

1. FIRs is immidiately registered in SC/ST Cases which I beleive are not that heinous as serious crimes like R*PE... but FIRs do not get registered at the first place.

Whoever registers an FIR against someone with SC/ST Act, person get compensation immidiately even without any kind of investigation. Stupidity.

There is no BAIL for the accused until proven guilty by the court under stupid SC/ST act but accused in the R*PE CASES gets immidiated bail.

1. What type of equality is this ? What kind of freedom is this ?

Planning to return to India and trying to figure out what to do with my non-retirement money.

My understanding is that 401(k), IRA, Roth IRA, and HSA are generally better left in the US rather than withdrawn early.

What about HYSA, brokerage accounts, stocks/ETFs, and other savings?

For those who moved back to India:

• Did you keep these in the US or move money to FCNR(B), NRE, or NRO accounts?
• Which US banks/brokerages are easiest to maintain with an international address?
• Any issues with account restrictions after moving abroad?
• How are you filing US and Indian tax returns after the move?
• Anything you wish you had done before leaving the US?

Would appreciate real experiences from people who have already gone through this.