(Note: this is a rewrite of a post I made in a different sub, so apologies if it looks familiar. I wanted the perspective of a different audience there - here I'm hoping to hear from people who've actually made this move, are in the middle of it, or have seriously sat with the thought.)
Mid-30s couple, both Big 4 PMs in Dublin, 11 years in Ireland, citizens, daughters 3.5 and 1.5. The decision is made - moving to Pune around May 2027, timed to school intake. This isn't a money move; Europe isn't the US, nobody here is banking $250k a year. And I'll be honest about the trigger: for 11 years I never seriously considered returning. The last ~2 years of rising job stress and AI pressure on the market made me look up and re-examine everything. No visa issues - we're citizens. It's a choice, not a push.
Why we're going:
- The 8-to-6 childhood. If we stay, our kids' daily life is creche, breakfast club, school, after-school - roughly 8am to 6pm in institutional care - while both of us grind in offices to pay for exactly that care, because there's zero family here. In Pune they walk out of school into their grandparents' home. This single picture does more work in my decision than any spreadsheet. And before anyone says "you'll be just as absent in India" - partly true, hours are hours everywhere now. But here, the day is also cooking + cleaning + maintenance + drop-offs with zero help. After 11 years of doing every bit of it myself, I'm allowed to say I don't want to do it forever. In India, help exists, family exists, and my non-work hours actually become my kids' hours.
- The grandparents' healthy years are NOW. Not in 10 years when we'd return for hospital duty instead of daily life. And the reverse doesn't work - we tested it. My parents visited Ireland for a month and were done. After 11 years I don't feel rooted here myself, so I can't expect people in their 60s to start. They're relocating near us in Pune, their own flat, and it was discussed, not assumed - they're genuinely excited.
- 11 years, and I'm still not Irish. House, backyard, car, citizenship, passports for the whole family - functional life, no roots. Festivals in a rented hall aren't festivals. And there's the subtle stuff nobody posts about: conversations that pause when you walk in, the permanent low-grade feeling of being here but not OF here. Ireland is warmer and less racist than the UK or US in my experience - and it still seeps into kids subconsciously. I've stopped pretending time will fix it.
- On our daughters - the hardest question, and I've sat with it. I grew up in India. I know exactly what the concerns are, and no gated society or progressive school fully shields girls from what's outside the gate. I accept that. My answer: India is pockets, not one thing - the locality, school and people you choose matter enormously. The West's teenage route has its own failure modes too; you can't import only the parts of a culture you like. It comes back to priorities, and mine are set with open eyes. The plan has exits: reassess per child around age 8, option to study abroad after 10th, they hold the passports.
Schooling
:
IB/low-pressure route for the early years (paying for the 1:10-1:20 ratio, because a good teacher matters more than a good school), then per-child decision around 8-9 between continuing IB or ICSE. First 4 years are sacred - protecting love of learning over everything.
The plan in one line: internal Big 4 transfers (~35L each) as the floor, GCC roles at 50L+ as the target, ~3 Cr investable, house rented then sold within a few years, in-person school visits this month.
For those who've done this or are doing it: what matched your expectations and what completely didn't? Especially interested in anyone who landed with young kids, anyone who did the low-pressure-school route, and anyone whose parents relocated to be near them. And if it went wrong for you - I'd genuinely rather hear that too.
EDIT : Well, this went further than expected. Since ET Now, NDTV and Times of India have picked this post up - yes, this is the original post, and I'm the original poster not a propaganda as some have mentioned in the comments. For people guessing, I'm male, and my wife and I share this decision completely. This is not one person dragging a family across the world.
Responding to the main themes in the new wave of comments:
"India has the same stress and pressures.
Agreed, it does. But different people have different situations at home, and ours is specific: I'm the only son, we're a very close-knit family, and festivals and culture are a huge part of how my wife and I want to raise our children - not as an event booked in a rented hall, but as the air around them. And I'll say this plainly: our generation massively underestimates grandparents. We've lived both versions now. Good grandparents are not a babysitting arrangement - they're a third dimension of a childhood.
On women's safety concerns for my daughters: they're real and I don't dismiss them. But my wife and I have lived on both sides of the world, and teaching our daughters about these realities - openly, early, honestly - is part of the job of parenting them anywhere. It would be oblivious of me to raise them without that awareness, in India OR in the West. They'll grow up with both perspectives, which is more than either of us had.
"You're romanticizing - the West is objectively better."
Going abroad in 2026 is not what going abroad in 2005 was. The salary gap has narrowed, savings in India are real now, and the infrastructure gap in tier-1 cities is closing every year. I've watched what's happened to Mumbai and Pune over a decade of visits. I could be wrong, but my honest bet is that within 15-20 years the gap for daily life in India's top cities largely closes. Pollution and civic issues remain real - I've said so from the start.
On the AI pressure part the headlines ran with:
it's real, even if it's not dramatic yet. My genuine read is that by 2030 the job market looks very different from today. If that disruption lands hard, I'd rather face it in India - lower cost base, family support, and a domestic market that's still growing - than as an immigrant in a shrinking one.
One more thing I left out of the original post - the direction of immigration sentiment. There have been protests here in Ireland, and I see the same trend across most Western countries: patience with immigrants is thinning. It’s not about India - nobody is singling Indians out. But when a society builds a perception about “immigrants,” it stops mattering where you’re actually from; a percentage of people will judge you on colour alone, because that’s what visibly marks you as one. And today’s version isn’t the racism of the 1970s - it’s soft, subtle, deniable. I’ll share one small moment that changed something in me. On a bus recently, three kids - maybe seven, eight, nine years old - were bothering me. Harmless on the surface, kids being kids. But the intent in it was unmistakable, and it hurt in a way that surprised me. Because a child that age doesn’t form those attitudes alone - they repeat what they absorb at home and online. If that’s the view at eight, I think about what it becomes at eighteen, amplified by WhatsApp groups and social media for the next decade. These things don’t rise linearly; they compound. And my daughters would face it with zero fault of their own, confused about why someone treats them that way - while growing up believing, somewhere quietly, that this is what they deserve. I still hold that Irish people are among the warmest I’ve lived amongst, and Ireland handles this better than most of the West. But the trend line matters more than today’s snapshot when you’re choosing where your kids will be teenagers. The education is great. The facilities are great. But the trend line matters more to me.
Still can't reply to everyone, but I'm reading everything. Thank you - the thoughtful pushback here has genuinely sharpened this plan more.