On this day 3 years back I moved to India for business and it’s been quite an adventure ever since. Working in India has a whole set of challenges that sometimes make you wonder WTF!!! There is yoga and exercise to manage the stress but what I usually do is fire up my iPod and listen to one of my favorite lines from Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech:
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something  your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
As I type my 276th blog post, I’m still connecting the dots but I’ve always told people it will make for a great story in Fortune/Forbes in 5 years.
Here is my advice for people looking to come to India considering the recent economic clusterfu$%#%:
– Most people don’t give a damn if you are from NYC (for business) or LA (for entertainment), they want to know where your parents were born and make a cultural connection
– The quantity of quality people is lacking
– Real estate is dead, PE, SPV’s…RIP
– If your business involves gov’t oversight, that requires a skill set most ABCD’s don’t have
So did I make the right decision to move to India? Here is what I track EVERYDAY:
Oct 1, 2005. Rs. 44; Sensex @ 8,634; DJIA @ 10,658; NASDAQ @ 2,151
Sept 30, 2008. Rs 47; Sensex @ 12,860; DJIA @ 10,850; NASDAQ @ 2,082
Compounded Performance: Rupee +2.22%; Sensex +14.20%; DJIA +0.60%; NASDAQ -1.08%
BREAKING NEWS: Ford reports 34.6% drop in sales for Sept. Sales of the Explorer SUV, once a top seller, plunged 67.3 percent to 3,498 and sales of the F-Series pickup fell 41.6 percent to 32,727.
celestri - virtual home of manish jain 