James Joseph worked for 3M, Informatica and Microsoft across three countries. Then he kept a global role while working from a village in Kerala. He explains the plan, the six-month test and what he would tell NRIs now.
A former Microsoft executive kept a global role while living in a Kerala village. He explains how he planned the move, what his family did, and how a jackfruit tree became a food business.
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James Joseph built a career across India, the United States and the United Kingdom. He worked for 3M, Informatica and Microsoft. In 2009 he moved his family to a village in Kerala and kept working for a global company from there.
His story answers a question many NRIs ask: does moving back mean starting over? He did not start over. He changed the way he worked, and later he built a business from something he grew up with.
In 1995 a newspaper article described what it takes to be a global professional. It said you need an internationally recognised qualification. It also said you need experience in three large markets, ideally inside multinational companies.
James was an engineer working for 3M in India. He saw a path in that list. In 1996, at 26, he left India for a one-year master's in engineering business management in the UK. 3M sponsored his thesis, a real project on 3M's supply chain with Ford.
After the master's, James moved to the US. He worked as a supply chain consultant for an IT company, then moved into product marketing. He lived in Dallas first and later in San Francisco.
His wife is a doctor who trained at the University of Vienna. She moved to the US with him and started preparing for the US medical licensing exam. A few years later, the family moved to the UK. She found a job at her first interview there. James took a European product marketing role at Informatica, based in the UK.
His next target was Microsoft. He bought a house close to its campus in the UK before he had a job there. After about 18 months he got an interview. The role he applied for was too junior. Microsoft offered him a manufacturing-industry marketing role instead, partly because of his automotive background and partly because he lived close to the office.
In that role he built what he calls an executive roundtable. The best customer tells the next ten prospects how the software helped its business. A peer who has been through the same decision is more persuasive than a sales pitch.
The turning point came on a golf course near San Francisco, where James was playing with his brother. The fog was so thick they could hardly see the course. His brother told him he had reached the point of no return. He would live in the US for good.
James saw the same path for his own family. His wife had trained for years. If she stayed in the US system and worked through the exams and the residency, leaving later would be a real loss for her. He asked her whether they could move to Europe, where she could work straight away as a qualified doctor. They moved to the UK. Their first daughter was about one year old.
James describes his first 20 years as a ride on an elephant. A village childhood is slow and safe, and a child can take in everything around them. Family, nature, neighbours and faith shaped him in those years.
His working years were a ride on a cheetah. The pace is fast and the competition is strong. If you slow down, you get left behind.
His worry was his children. They were also on the cheetah. He asked whether parents could keep their professional drive and put the children back on the elephant. His answer was to move back to Kerala.
Most days he felt like a small fish in a small pond. For 8 to 10 days a month, he was with the big fish, travelling for a national Microsoft role. He says that contrast worked for him.
When James asked to work from his village, Microsoft agreed to a test. He would have six months. If his productivity fell, he would have to return to the head office.
The business case rested on travel time. From his home in Bengaluru, the drive to the airport took about 1 hour 45 minutes, and security took about 45 minutes more. From his village, Kochi airport was about 10 minutes away, and security took 5 to 10 minutes.
| Step | Bengaluru base | Kerala village, Kochi airport |
|---|---|---|
| Drive to the airport | About 1 hour 45 minutes | About 10 minutes |
| Airport security | About 45 minutes | 5 to 10 minutes |
At the end of the six months he won Microsoft's Circle of Excellence award, the company's worldwide award for its best employees. Nobody asked him to move back. If you are weighing a remote role, plan the business case the same way, and read our guide to career questions before a move back to India first.
James has three daughters, born in the US, the UK and India. The family moved three times. His aim each time was to disrupt the children as little as possible.
He calls his approach the inchworm principle. If the children have put down roots in one place, the parents must move their own roots. Their eldest daughter was in first standard when the family moved to India. They moved early enough that the children had not yet put down deep roots abroad.
James and his wife chose a local aided school for their daughters. They did not choose an elite school. They wanted the children to study with children from every part of society. In those schools, teachers expect respect, and James says that shaped the children.
Family mattered as much as school. Relatives lived in the village. The children saw weddings and funerals, and they spent weekends with elders. James says that gave them respect for their elders and an understanding of how life moves on. He also names the trade-offs. Villages have fewer people of his age and profession, and many of his close friends still live abroad.
A hairdresser in the UK once gave him a piece of advice he remembers. Children of immigrants often see births and weddings, but rarely deaths, because relatives live far away. Her suggestion was a pet with a short life, such as a goldfish. The family's life in the village changed that for them.
All three daughters completed their first degrees from home. The eldest studied computer science and works in Kochi. The second studied nutrition, then began a master's programme in Germany. The youngest has just started her undergraduate course at home. To make room for them, the family bought the flat below and joined the two homes.
James's wife needed a licence to practise medicine in India. It took her five years to get one, and she needed a residency to gain local experience. James wanted her career to restart without him travelling. So in 2012 he left Microsoft to write a book about working global from a village.
The book became God's Own Office, published by Penguin. It was written for young people who might move back to smaller towns instead of spending 90 minutes each way in traffic in a metro. You can see Penguin's author page for James Joseph.
While he wrote, James watched a jackfruit tree in his backyard. He noticed how much of the fruit went to waste. He says as much as 80% of the jackfruit grown in Kerala is wasted. He started a one-year campaign to rebrand jackfruit as a food, and called the brand Jackfruit365.
Living costs in Kerala were lower. He had no EMIs to pay, and the children went to ordinary schools. That gave him room to take a risk, and his wife encouraged him to try.
Dr APJ Abdul Kalam received the first copy of the book and invited James to meet him. James recalls Kalam asking a simple question. Could unripe jackfruit be added to the food people already eat, so that they eat less rice and wheat?
James recalls Kalam saying that changing eating habits is harder than changing religion. Kalam offered to campaign with him across India if he found a way to make it work.
Kalam passed away before the product was ready. James says he lost his campaigner, and he had to prove the product himself.
Unripe jackfruit tastes bland, a little like potato. Ripe jackfruit is sweet. An unripe mango or apple is sour. That makes unripe jackfruit flexible in cooking. The hard part was the flour.
Wheat flour binds too strongly, so a dosa sticks to the pan. Rice flour binds too little, so a roti breaks. James's flour uses the fruit's own pectin as a binder, plus protein from the seed. It took 18 months and two patents to get the flour right.
The fruit ripens fast, and slowing the process changes its sugar, taste and fragrance. So the team built a machine to control the process. James puts the idea simply:
When you take three rotis, the third roti is a vegetable. It's a salad in powder form.
James describes a 90-day study. The published paper, in Nutrition and Diabetes in 2021, reports a 12-week trial. It was a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study at a government medical college in Andhra Pradesh. It enrolled 40 people with type 2 diabetes, with 20 in each group.
Participants took 15 grams of flour at breakfast and 15 grams at dinner, in place of part of their usual rice or wheat. The other group took placebo flour. The paper reports that HbA1c, a measure of average blood sugar over about three months, fell by -2.73 mmol/mol (-0.25%) in the jackfruit group. It rose by 0.22 mmol/mol (0.02%) in the placebo group, with p = 0.006. Fasting and after-meal glucose also fell more in the jackfruit group.
The authors name the limits themselves: a small sample, a short study and a single centre. They also disclose that James Joseph is a co-author, the inventor and CEO of the company that makes the flour, and that the company funded the study. Read the trial with that in mind.
James also says a glycemic study at the University of Sydney found the flour has a 40% lower glycemic load than two rotis or a cup of rice. We have not checked that study for this article. This is not medical advice.
James says a doctor in Ahmedabad reported that his patients reversed fatty liver. He also describes a liver researcher's study that reached similar results. He explains the mechanism as soluble fibre feeding gut bacteria, which then affect how the liver handles fat. We have not checked those claims against published research for this article, so treat them as James's account.
A TEDx talk in Mumbai, with a jackfruit and a model of the liver on stage, took the message to a wider audience. James says partners in the US began buying the product from India and selling it on Amazon, and that US sales later passed India sales. Jackfruit365 now has lakhs of customers.
James also won India's National Startup Award. He says his global experience helped with that as well. He knew what the best research looked like, so he could meet that standard.
James says a metro life did not appeal to him. A metro is no different from living anywhere else, he says. A village gave his family nature, long-standing relatives, friends and a slower pace.
He also names the trade-off. Fewer people in a village share your age and profession, and weekends can fill up with family visits. He says a village is not for everyone, and a richer life there depends on what you bring to it.
He uses a gardening image for the children. A plant in a pot stays small. Move it to native soil and it sends out new shoots. He saw the children put down deep roots once they were back in the village.
James's first advice is to make the decision as a family, and to make it consciously. He uses a picture of an egg. Break an egg from outside and a life ends. Break it from within and a new life begins.
Plan for setbacks. Keep a buffer. Decide in advance what you will accept if things do not go to plan. He says you do not need a lot of money to live in a village, and his move was planned, not a gamble.
If you are still deciding, try the should I move tool before you pick a date. Then talk it through with your partner and your children. Do not let anyone else make the decision for you.
Global experience taught James to test every idea against the best practice in the world, and to keep going unless the data says he is wrong. That habit served him in the boardroom and in the lab.
If you are working through the practical steps of a move, our cross-border transition packages cover the planning side. See the cross-border transition packages.
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