Why I Moved To India

No matter where you are in the world people often will ask you where you live, it’s often a difficult question to answer. As the child of an expat it’s question that I honestly try to avoid, just simply because its hard to explain that I’m an Australian who up until I started university lived in India.

International migration has been a part of my life for quite literally as long as I can remember. One of my first memories is being on a plane going somewhere I had never been before. Even before the age of 5, I had already lived in 3 countries. However, migration isn’t easy regardless of the frequency and age of the migrant.

The frequent migration is unfortunately a side-effect of being a child of an expat and more specifically, being the child of an engineer in the automotive industry. An industry notorious for it’s volatility due to its relationship with the health of a nation’s economy. Once an economy begins the slope into decline, the work in the industry dries up and ultimately another international move is inevitable. It’s for the very same reason my family and I moved to India.

Following the global economic crisis in 2008, the automotive industry in Australia began its slow death. After years of overpaid employees, high manufacturing costs and powerful trade unions demanding far too much from an economically struggling company, the work inevitably began to dry up. As a result, by early 2011, the fears redundancy spread through the company like wildfire; severance packages were being given out left, right and centre. However, all my father had been given was the paranoia of imminent termination; an arguably worse prize to be won.

The fear of termination and desire to ensure his family’s well-being pushed my father to search for new work. The rapidly growing and emerging markets of India and China were obvious choices for work, alongside the South American automotive powerhouse of Brazil. However, after a stint of expat work in 2009 alone in China, my father was not eager to return the polluted cities. So, he sought for a place suitable for work but also to bring his family with him. Somehow in some peculiar twist of my own fate in early 2012, he managed to secure a job in India in a small university city called Pune and at the end of that year we had packed up the family home, and our individual lives and collectively moved to a city that I had never heard of before, in a country unlike no other.

Unfortunately, in an instant the life I had built in Australia – the only place I had felt at home was gone; along with the dreams, goals and aspirations I had for myself. Luckily for me, fate was kind enough to give me five of the most memorable - yet weird years of my life.