Sidharth built a life in the Netherlands and turned down a job in Bengaluru. A week in the city, a conversation with his wife and an expat contract later, he has spent three years there. He explains the work, the money and the question of home.
A stable career, a house and a close community in the Netherlands. Then a coffee at Schiphol, a week in Bengaluru and an expat contract that turned two years into three.
Sidharth had no reason to leave. He worked in the Netherlands for three companies, owned a house, belonged to a close community and had a job with a start time and an end time. Everything was predictable, and he describes that as a plus. Moving back to India was nowhere in his plans.
When his employer, SBM Offshore, offered him a role in Bengaluru, he declined. Two things changed that answer: a conversation with his wife about where they would grow old, and a week in the city. What began in September 2023 as a two-year expat assignment has now run past three years.
After his undergraduate degree in Delhi, Sidharth considered an MBA or a job. He did find a job in Delhi. At the same time, his mother was posted to the Netherlands by the Government of India to promote the Incredible India campaign. On a Skype call she suggested a master's degree there. He applied to a couple of universities and joined TU Delft.
He liked the system, built a small community and looked for work in the Netherlands after the degree. Over the next years he worked at three companies and enjoyed the boundary between work and life. After the end of the working day, his time went to hobbies, and he saw work as the thing that paid his bills and funded a good life.
In his first six or seven years of work, his friends began to talk about returning. Most of them had married during that period, often to partners who had been lifted out of a life in India. After games, over a drink, the question came up: what next?
At a dinner at home, a close friend said he was thinking of moving to Canada. His wife used the moment to say something Sidharth had never examined: she could not imagine growing old in the Netherlands. He had never looked that far ahead. The sentence made him realise the Dutch chapter might have an end date.
His reasoning from there is simple. If one partner wants to go back, someone has to make a compromise. Around the same time, his employer opened a door.
SBM Offshore runs a global competency centre in Bangalore. In 2022 a senior leader, his manager's manager, visited it and liked the technical skill and the way work was run. She wanted to set up a digital capability centre there. On her way home she had a few hours at Schiphol airport and messaged Sidharth to meet for a coffee.
She described him as a good mix: Indian roots and a working knowledge of the Western way of doing things, a bridge between the two. He asked for time to think and, a day or two later, declined. He liked his small team and his life in the Netherlands.
His wife pushed back. An opportunity had come to him, and she asked him to at least hear the offer. A few weeks later the same leader planned another trip to Bangalore and invited him along to look at another company office. He went for a week. He was introduced as part of her team doing a scan of what could be done. By the end of the trip, after meetings with vendors and local leaders, she introduced him as the new digital manager for India. Neither he nor his wife had been told.
That evening he asked where it had come from. She said she was convinced he should take the opportunity. He took it back to his wife. Because the opening arrived unprompted, he decided it was worth considering.
The leader had assumed he held an Indian passport and planned an India-only contract. When he told HR he holds a Dutch passport, the situation changed. For specific roles it creates, the company uses a long-term assignment. It carries extra benefits and a fixed duration, and his began at two years.
His setup had many layers: an OCI card, a Dutch passport, an expatriate contract and an entity in Switzerland. The company provided an adviser who took care of tax filing support, which he calls a major headache removed. If you hold a foreign passport and an OCI card, see our explainer on the difference between NRI, PIO and OCI before you sign anything.
He treated the move as a social experiment: finite, a time-limited trial of what India would offer. His wife had a job in the Netherlands and left it to come with him. She was happy to return in any form.
They moved to Bengaluru in September 2023. He calls the first stretch challenging in several ways. Colleagues in the Bangalore organisation had far more experience in the business than he did and tested his seniority. He felt imposter syndrome for the first months and asked himself why he had been chosen.
He also worked two shifts. First came his India working hours with the local team, and after that calls with European counterparts in the Netherlands and Monaco. For at least the first six to nine months he asked whether double shifts could last.
In December 2023, three months after he arrived, a reorganisation moved him into another department, and the leader who had brought him to India left the company. He had to find his place again. He says he did think about whether the choice was right and probably said so to his wife. Two things steadied him: his habit of going with the flow, and seeing how happy his wife was to be in India.
His wife cares about small experiences and about keeping her relationship with both sets of parents strong. Sidharth's sister lives in the Netherlands with two children. His wife's brother lives in the US with two children. Children tie people to a place. Sidharth and his wife have none, so they are more mobile, and they decided to be the ones near both sets of parents. As parents age, he says, they need their children more than the children need them.
In three years in India they have spent more time with their parents than before. When you live abroad, you see a rosy picture of their life and they see a rosy picture of yours. Being in India gives both sides a better sense of daily life. Bengaluru to Delhi is still about eight hours door to door, with two hours to the airport, a three-and-a-half-hour flight and two hours home. The shared time zone closes some of the gap. If you are weighing the same question, read bringing parents abroad or moving them home.
Around the 18-month mark, the company offered to extend the assignment by a year, and that took it to September 2026. After two years, the stay turned into the norm.
A friend of his describes life in the Netherlands as a straight line. In India, he says, you can have great days and bad days depending on traffic, weather and mood. The compensation is convenience, especially for people with a lot of privilege, which he says he and his wife have. In his words, it is like living in a golden cage: you make life convenient for yourself and find the right people around you.
A group of friends to play cricket with in Bangalore helped. He can play all year, against about four months in the Netherlands. No single milestone told them they had settled. They took it one day and one week at a time.
The couple bought a house in the Netherlands six years before this conversation and still own it. It is rented out, and the rental income is taxed in the Netherlands with an adviser there. His Dutch pension stays in the Netherlands and will be paid when he reaches pension age.
On Indian tax, he says that for his first couple of years on the assignment he was treated as not ordinarily resident, and that he is now treated as a resident because he passed a day-count threshold of about 720 days. He has also moved from the expat contract to an Indian payroll, so his salary is now taxed in India. Your own status depends on the days you spent in India in earlier years, so check it with the RNOR status tool and read how the 182-day rule and RNOR work before you pick a date.
If your finances span two countries, cross-border tax planning is worth doing before the move.
| Area | Netherlands | India (Bengaluru) |
|---|---|---|
| Work hours | Fixed start and end time | No hard stop; a break at 5 PM, then later calls |
| Predictability | A straight line with few surprises | Great days and bad days |
| Meetings | A 4 PM meeting starts at 4 PM | People are often late and traffic is the reason |
| Convenience | Calendars followed to the minute | Almost anything gets done for a fee |
| Reaching a specialist | General practitioner first; a specialist can take weeks or months | Many visitors come for dental and other checks |
| Cricket | About four months a year | All year |
Two items surprised him. Despite two years of Bangalore traffic, he still arrives when he says he will, and he sees others use traffic as an excuse to run late. In the Netherlands, calendars are followed to the minute. The other surprise was the convenience: he had heard about it, but living it is a different thing, and you do become dependent on those services.
On work-life balance, he says it matters that he has no children. With a child or a parent to look after, he would reconsider how much he works. For now he manages with a break around 5 PM, coffee with his wife and calls later in the evening, and he has made peace with the lack of a hard stop.
Healthcare was the hardest part for his wife. In the Dutch system the general practitioner is the first step, and in his experience you must describe your symptoms strongly to be taken seriously, because the system assumes people come from overly medicated countries. After a proper diagnosis, emergency care and specialists are good, though getting to a specialist can take weeks or months. India is where many visitors come for dental and other checks, because those can be costly or uncovered abroad. For returning families, our guide to health insurance cost for a returning NRI family covers what cover looks like in India.
The couple's answer is still open. In the last two years they have asked whether to have children, whether to sell the Dutch house, whether Bengaluru or another Indian city is home, and whether he is an employee who moves from assignment to assignment, perhaps to Brazil or Porto.
His answer so far: home is where he and his wife are together. He rules out any assignment that leaves him in one part of the world and her in another. For now, India feels good, convenient and nice, and he says they have met their parents far more in three years than in the years before.
If you are choosing a city, our comparison of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai for returning NRIs shows how they differ. A good test comes from Sidharth's story: a trial with a fixed end date lets you learn what India feels like before you decide, and keeping the Dutch house means the choice stays reversible.
If you want help scoping a move like this, see the cross-border transition packages, or start your own sequence with the Return to India planner.
If you hold a foreign passport or an OCI card and your finances sit in two countries, our cross-border transition packages cover the planning side.
Personal experiences vary. Confirm tax, immigration and contract terms with qualified advisers and your employer.
Tax, career, money, schools and shipping scoped against your dates, then quoted as one plan instead of five vendors.
