Indian Emigrants & Aspiring Emigrants - Trade-Offs Of Leaving India

Is leaving your home country really a “better life,” or simply a different set of trade-offs? Note: I’m writing about India and the Indian diaspora, but these patterns are likely recognizable in many countries, so I’d love to hear your take if you can relate. What I want to discuss is why leaving India (or a home country) - particularly for Western Europe or North America - is so often treated as the default model of success among Asians, and how much that narrative is shaped by colonialism and internalized racism. A bit about me: I grew up in India in a privileged educational environment. My family could afford expensive private tuition during my final school years. I received a government scholarship and attended a selective science institute, which opened doors professionally. At 23, I moved to Western Europe for a fully funded PhD and have since worked in several European countries. At the time,going abroad had always been presented to me as the natural next step, the thing ambitious and academically successful people were supposed to do. I absorbed the idea of leaving India long before I could evaluate what it really meant. Life abroad has given me real opportunities. But it has also involved immigration insecurity, repeated moves, isolation from family, career precarity and building a life without a social safety net. Leaving India did not make life easy; it exchanged one set of advantages and difficulties for another.I now plan to stay in Western Europe but largely because I have spent my entire professional life here and so it makes practical sense to stay in professional environments that are familiar to me (and not because I believe staying out of India is inherently better). Part of the reason I’m writing this because I sense the desperation among young Indians to leave has increased enormously in the last couple of years. Families spend small fortunes on a foreign education for their increasingly younger kids; some people even risk dangerous, shady or illegal immigration routes into sought-after countries. I’ve met Indians whose lives improved enormously after migration. I’ve also heard from people who landed in exploitative environments, faced isolation or systemic discrimination, and returned to India after painful years abroad. Some might have been better off never leaving. Even among more fortunate and successful Indians abroad, permanent residency, citizenship and home ownership seem to become more than practical milestones: they are evidence of having successfully left India behind. At a large Indian event, a woman I had met literally three seconds (!) earlier proudly announced that she and her husband had bought a house. Announcing status symbols is almost a form of greeting in these circles. It’s as if the desperation to leave India remains long after one has left. There is also real internalized racism among Indians within India. Growing up, I noticed the lazy habit of attributing every banal inconvenience to the failure of “India.”My father would return from work after an argument with a colleague and begin his rant with the actual disagreement, and end it with a declaration that “India” was a toxic place to work. A crowded or cancelled train became proof of "India’s" poor standard of living. Researchers doing brilliant science might describe India as lacking research infrastructure or academic freedom because they did not personally have complete freedom to choose a research question. After hearing this from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, I do feel that some India-bashing can sometimes be lazy and uncritical, a story we parrot until it becomes an accepted truth. On the other hand,western Europeans (many of whom may have never travelled to or worked in India) happily agree and propagate the colonial narrative, legitimized by Indians' own internalized racism. The problems themselves may be real. But toxic workplaces, bureaucracy, bad public transport, housing crises, unemployment, limited research funding and restricted academic freedom also exist - especially for immigrants - in rich Western countries. Having lived in Germany, I can personally attest to the hell of Deutsche Bahn, German paperwork and incompetent bureaurcrats. So I would like to hear from people who have left their home countries in pursuit of a “better life abroad” and those who currently want to. If you have already left: What genuinely improved, and what became more difficult? Knowing what you know now, would you still make the same decision? If you currently want to leave: What particular conditions are you trying to leave behind? Which of those would genuinely be solved by moving to another country? And for everyone: How do we acknowledge India’s - or any country’s - genuine problems without reinforcing a colonial hierarchy in which moving West is automatically understood as moving upward?