Choosing India Over the US Visa Path

Why I Came Back to India (Even With a Valid US Visa)

When people hear I moved back to India from the US, the first assumption is usually that something went wrong. Visa trouble. Layoffs. Family pressure. Some dramatic fallout.

None of that happened.

I had a valid visa. I had “everything in place.” On paper, I was exactly where you’re supposed to be if you’re playing the standard immigrant success storyline. But the longer I stayed, the more I felt a quiet discomfort that I couldn’t shake. And eventually it became simple: I didn’t want that life.

There were three reasons I came back. They’re not patriotic slogans or romantic nostalgia. They’re practical, personal, and honestly a little angry.

1) It Felt Fundamentally Unfair

One of the biggest reasons I returned was a moral one, even if it sounds inconvenient to admit.

I got a pretty cheap education in India. A huge portion of that is subsidized in one way or another—by public infrastructure, by institutions built over decades, by a society that makes it possible for someone like me to study without being crushed by debt.

Then I left.

I went to the US and started building my career there. That’s the dream, right? “Get out,” “make it,” “settle abroad.” Except after a while I started feeling like I’d taken a lot from India and was giving my output somewhere else. Not in a poetic “serve the nation” way, but in a very literal way: the value I created, the taxes I paid, the work I did, the energy I had—all of it was going into someone else’s system.

At some point that started to feel unfair. Not just to India as an abstract idea, but to the ecosystem that enabled me in the first place. I’m not claiming I’m some national asset that needs to be protected. I’m saying the exchange rate of effort and impact started bothering me.

And no, “remittances” and “global exposure” didn’t fully cancel out that feeling.

2) The US Healthcare Experience Was a Joke (For the Life I Was Living)

The second reason was healthcare, and this one is not theoretical. I lived it.

I had an arthritis problem and needed to see a rheumatologist in the US. If you’ve never navigated the American system, it’s hard to explain how much friction is built into something as basic as “I’m in pain, I need a specialist.”

Here’s what it looked like:

• First, you don’t just find a rheumatologist and go.
• You go to a GP (primary care).
• You explain the entire issue from scratch.
• They do their part and then send records—often through some portal—to the specialist’s office.
• Then you find out whether that rheumatologist is even accepting new patients.
• If they are, maybe you get an appointment in 2–3 weeks.
• Or it can take a month.
• Or longer.

Now add my situation: I was a contractor. I moved frequently. I’d shift every 5–6 months. I lived in different parts of the US. Which meant that every time I moved, I had to rebuild this whole process from zero.

Every new city meant:

• find a new rheumatologist
• re-do the referral pathway
• wait again

And the waiting wasn’t consistent. Sometimes it was two weeks. Sometimes it was three months. For something chronic, that’s not “a minor inconvenience.” It makes continuity of care basically impossible.

What made it worse was how quickly the system seemed to jump to the most extreme, expensive solution. Rheumatologists would almost immediately want to prescribe biologics. If you know what that means, you know it’s not a casual prescription:

• super expensive
• a serious commitment
• not something you jump into lightly

Maybe it’s the right choice in some cases. I’m not arguing medicine with doctors. But the whole experience felt like a machine: slow to access, heavy on gatekeeping, fast to push high-cost treatment.

Then I came back to India.

I found a rheumatologist in about three days.

No obstacle course. No exhausting loop of retelling your story to five different people. It was just… doable. Normal. Human-scale.

People love to make fun of Indian healthcare for being chaotic, but there’s a reason so many Indians feel relieved the moment they’re back home. The accessibility matters. Speed matters. The ability to get a specialist without needing a bureaucratic pilgrimage matters.

When you’re dealing with a real health issue, you don’t want to “navigate a system.” You want care.

3) H1B Life Didn’t Feel Like Freedom. It Felt Like a Leash.

The third reason was freedom—or more accurately, the lack of it.

From the outside, the US is sold as the land of opportunity. Hustle culture. Entrepreneurship. Reinvention. Mobility. Do whatever you want.

On an H1B, that story is basically a marketing brochure meant for someone else.

The reality is simple: H1B is tied to your employer. Your visa status is connected to your job, and the job is defined in a very specific way. That has consequences people don’t fully appreciate until they’re living inside it.

What it felt like:

• I had to stick to the job I had, because the visa depends on it.
• If I wanted to move to a different role, it wasn’t just “apply and switch.” It became a risk calculation.
• Starting a business? Not really.
• Starting a side gig? Not really.
• Trying something experimental or building something on the side the way people romanticize entrepreneurship? Good luck.

So you end up in this strange position where you’re physically in a country associated with “freedom,” but your actual life is extremely constrained. Your upward mobility is capped—not necessarily by talent or ambition, but by a structure that makes your employer the center of your survival.

That dependency changes everything.

It affects the kind of risks you can take, the way you negotiate, how you plan your future, and even how honest you can be at work. You’re not just protecting a job; you’re protecting legal status.

And once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it.

The Cost Isn’t Just Money. It’s Agency.

A lot of people frame immigration decisions as purely economic. Higher salary versus lower salary. Better currency versus worse currency.

But the real cost of living in a system like that isn’t just rent and taxes. It’s agency.

If you can’t move freely between roles, can’t easily build something of your own, can’t make decisions without calculating visa risk, you’re not really “growing.” You’re operating inside a lane someone else controls.

For me, that was suffocating.

In India, I’m not pretending everything is perfect. I’m not rewriting reality. But I can make moves without asking for permission from a visa category. I can explore. I can build. I can take risks. I can grow my wealth and my work on my own terms.

That freedom is worth more than a lot of the perks people associate with living abroad.

Contributing Here Feels More Honest

I wouldn’t dramatically claim I moved back to “serve my country.” That sounds like a speech, not a life decision.

But I did want to contribute here instead of contributing to a foreigner’s dream.

Not out of resentment—out of alignment. If I’m going to work hard, build things, solve problems, and create value, it feels more honest to do it in the place that raised me and made my start possible. That doesn’t mean India owes me anything. It just means I finally admitted what I wanted.

I came back because the US version of stability felt like dependence. Because healthcare there was impractical for the life I was living. And because somewhere along the way, staying started to feel unfair.

So I returned—not because I had to, but because I could.