My Father Said Don't Come Back. He Moved to His Village Anyway.

The question that ruled out the metros

When Sreedharan and his wife were deciding where in India to land, they did consider the obvious options. Coimbatore. Chennai. Bengaluru. The conversation ended quickly, and the reason is the sharpest line in the whole interview.

If the answer was a metro, they could simply have stayed in the US. The life would have been the same shape: a good job, a commute, a school run, a house that was not the one he grew up in. Moving eight thousand miles to reproduce the same life somewhere warmer made no sense to either of them.

So the village was not a fallback. It was the whole point. His home and his wife's home sit about half a kilometre apart in neighbouring villages in Kanyakumari. His mornings now include walking the ancestral farmland, which he describes with a kind of plainness that is hard to argue with: when he walks there, he thinks about the fact that his ancestors walked there too.

What the US years actually bought

He is the eldest son of a driver. His two younger brothers are farmers. The family is agricultural, and when he left for the US on an H-1B, the money he sent home had a specific job to do.

Over the years in Virginia, Georgia, Arizona and finally Keene, New Hampshire, on a salary he puts at over $200,000 a year, that money built a house for his father. It paid for three weddings in the family. It built two more homes for his brothers. It secured the ancestral land, which in farming families is usually the first thing sold when something goes wrong, and then it bought more land instead.

He calls New Hampshire heaven, and he means it. A pleasant place to raise children, a house they owned, a life that was working. This is the detail worth holding on to: nothing was going wrong.

The second thing the US gave him was less obvious. He picked up a reading habit from his children, reading outside his own subject, and he credits it with changing how he saw the world. That habit is what eventually produced the idea he wrote down in a notebook.

The funeral he was told not to attend

His father-in-law died during COVID. They were in Keene, flights were a risk, and a distant relative he had only met after moving to New Hampshire, a man named Arjun who had become an informal older brother to a dozen or so families there, came to the house.

The ticket was booked. Arjun told him not to go. His argument was one sentence long: he is already gone, so are you now putting your family at risk?

His wife made the call herself. He is clear that it was not his to make. They attended by video. She could not cry properly because the children were in the room. He says he cannot describe that situation and that nobody should have to go through it.

Every returning family knows a smaller version of this. You visit each summer, and each time you leave there is a particular ache on the way back. That ache had been accumulating for years. The funeral just made it impossible to keep filing away.

An idea in a notebook, and one spontaneous yes

He had been carrying the idea for a while: a technology company based in a village, giving rural talent professional work without requiring anyone to move to a metro. He had written it down. It had stayed written down.

The year after his father-in-law's death, standing upstairs at home, he asked his wife whether they should actually start the company. He is candid about how thin the moment was. If she had said no, it would have remained an idea, and the family would probably still be in New Hampshire.

She said yes immediately. The next night he was on the phone with a friend in Bengaluru. Because he was on an H-1B he could not hold a company in his own name, so it was registered in his father's and his brother's names. That is the practical wrinkle a lot of would-be founders on work visas hit, and it is worth reading the guide to starting a business in India after returning before assuming you can incorporate from abroad.

His wife and children moved back in November 2022, timed close to the second anniversary of her father's death. He followed later, and more abruptly than planned.

The part they got wrong: the children

Ask him what they misjudged and he does not hedge. The children.

His son was around twelve and in seventh grade, his daughter in fourth. Both had spent most of their lives in the US. The parents assumed they would adapt, because children adapt. What the parents had not modelled was how much smaller the tolerances are in an Indian classroom.

At the first school his daughter addressed a teacher by name, exactly as she would have in the US. It caused real offence. She said she was not going back, and they moved her. They were lucky with the second choice: a school founded by another US returnee, a scientist who had come back from Texas and built something closer to an American setup.

Then came the languages, which is the part that takes years rather than weeks. Tamil, Hindi and Sanskrit, on top of a curriculum. Online tutors for Hindi and Tamil, and his wife holding the rest together. His son is in tenth grade now and handwriting is still the hardest part. One household rule helped more than any tutor: no television Monday to Friday. The children go out, play, come back and pick up their books, because there is nothing else competing for the evening.

There were also the smaller cultural collisions that nobody writes into a relocation plan. His children called him "hey daddy", which his father disliked. His mother corrected his daughter for sitting cross-legged. None of it is dramatic on its own. All of it adds up, and his daughter told him more than once that she wanted to go back.

If school choice is the piece you are still working through, the CBSE, ICSE, IB and IGCSE guide for NRI children is the right place to start, because the board decides far more about the daily experience than the brochure suggests.

Why his own father was against it

The resistance did not come from the US side. It came from the village.

His father opposed the move, and questioned his wife about it, and at one point asked her to talk him out of returning. The reason is more human than obstructive. For a driver in a Kanyakumari village, the sentence "my son is in America, my grandchildren are in America" was worth something every time he said it. The return took that sentence away from him.

What changed his mind was not an argument. It was a bag. For the company's fifth anniversary they printed bags reading "V2W, Village to World, empowering rural talent" alongside the Zoho partner logo, and his father started carrying his water bottle in one. Someone in Kanyakumari recognised the Zoho logo and asked him about it. He said it was his son's company. They took a photograph of him.

He still is not entirely sure what his son does. But he understands that it is something, and that is enough.

The money: a house, a 401(k) and eighteen acres

The financial mechanics here are unusual, and they should be read as one founder's choice rather than a template.

He sold the US house roughly six months before his own move, at a good profit. He also took his 401(k) out, deliberately, because he needed capital to put into the company. He invested in eighteen acres of land. And he was building two houses in India at the same time as running the company and executing his own relocation.

He is honest that the timing was not ideal. He had planned two more years in the US to strengthen the financial position, on a salary he could save hard from while living alone. That did not happen, and he moved before he was ready.

Cashing out a 401(k) is the part most readers should pause on. He did it to fund a business, with land underneath him as security. For most families the arithmetic points the other way, and the decision belongs inside a tax plan rather than a moving plan. Our 401(k) guide for people moving back to India works through the options with numbers, and the broader financial checklist for NRIs moving back covers the sequence the rest of the accounts should follow.

Asked to define financial stability, he refuses to give a figure, and his reasoning is the most useful part. His own security was never cash. It was ancestral land worth several million rupees that he could sell if everything failed, and a father who would sell it for him. That was what made the risk survivable. His test for anyone else: if you cannot live in peace without a fallback, make sure the fallback is real before you decide.

Building a software company from a village

The hardest problem was not talent. It was credibility.

Customers did not want to trust a software company operating out of a village. Nobody believes you, he says, and nobody wants to take the risk. The first break came from a former boss who was setting up a food delivery company after COVID and gave them a chance to prove they could deliver.

Three people carried the early phase: two former Wipro colleagues, and a mentor, a former army officer and ex-global executive at Ramco Systems, who joined because the mission appealed to him. Everyone else was local village talent.

His view on that talent is worth quoting in substance. If the attitude to learn is there, the skill can be embedded. He describes someone who came in with manual store accounting experience, had tried and failed to make Chennai work, and is now running Zoho Books and Zoho ERP well, with decent English on top. Given opportunity without micromanagement, he says, people thrive.

Six years in, the company is a Zoho partner serving customers in the US, the Middle East and India, has taken no external funding, and crossed a couple of crores in revenue last year. There were stretches where his wife's paycheck kept the household running while the company found its feet.

For anyone weighing whether their own skills transfer, the career options in India for returning NRIs piece covers the more conventional routes back into work.

What village life costs, honestly

The upside he describes is not abstract. His son knocks cashew fruit off the tree behind the house. There is fresh milk, gooseberries, produce off their own land, and air you cannot buy in a city. He is right that money does not purchase that.

The costs are equally concrete, and he lists them without softening.

• Extended family opinion. Nobody thinks along your line. Decisions that were yours alone in the US are now discussed.
• No local network. He left the village after twelfth grade and returned roughly twenty-five years later. His circle is his two brothers and their families. The friends were never rebuilt.
• Being read differently. The way he speaks is perceived differently now. His son's Tamil sometimes lands wrong. The family is still adapting culturally.
• Civic sense. His phrasing is gentle but the point is clear, and it is the same complaint returnees raise everywhere.
• It recurs. The doubt does not resolve once. Roughly every three months, usually when his daughter has a hard week, someone in the family asks why they did this.

His advice to anyone planning a return

• Secure your finances first. Not a number, a fallback you could actually use.
• Bring your spouse and children into the decision. He is explicit that if the family is not with you, that becomes the pain.
• Move children before fifth grade if you can. This is the one he would redo.
• Expect it to be slower. Most of what you had in the US is available in India now. The pace at which things happen is not the same, and you should treat the adjustment as real work.
• Do not burn every bridge at once. Plan the move, test it, and let the family adapt before you make everything irreversible.
• Look past the metros. His view is that villages hold genuine opportunity, especially in agriculture, and that people now pay for quality and good service in a way they did not before.

The thing that makes his story unusual is the same thing that makes it useful. He did not leave America because America failed him. He left a $200,000 salary, a house he owned and a town he calls heaven, and he moved to a village where customers did not initially believe his company was real, where his children struggled at school, and where his own father wished he had stayed away.

He is still there. The company is growing. And his father carries the bag.

Related guides

• Starting a business in India after returning as an NRI
• Best schools in India for NRI kids: CBSE, IB and IGCSE
• Financial checklist for NRIs moving back to India
• Career opportunities in India for returning NRIs
• Is investing in a 401(k) worth it if you are moving back to India?

Personal experience shared in interview format. Not financial, legal, immigration or tax advice. Withdrawing retirement accounts, selling property and funding a business across two tax systems all carry consequences that depend on your own residency and circumstances. Confirm your position with a qualified professional in both countries.