Building a Career Across India, the United States, and Canada

The first time I moved countries, I was 22, arriving in Texas for graduate school with two suitcases and a reasonably good idea of what I wanted my career to look like. The version of that plan I had in my head bore almost no resemblance to how the next fifteen years actually went — and I've come to think that's less a failure of planning and more just what happens when you keep choosing to move.

The first move: learning to be a beginner on purpose

Leaving India for a master's program in the U.S. was the first time I really understood the difference between being competent and being unknown. I'd built a track record at ICICI Bank — people knew what I could do. In Texas, none of that context existed yet. I had to rebuild credibility from nothing, in a system with different norms about how you're supposed to communicate, network, and prove yourself. It was uncomfortable in a specific way: not because the work was hard, but because I couldn't yet rely on my reputation to do any of the talking for me.

The second move: realizing "home" was going to keep changing

Years later, when a role took me from the U.S. to Canada, I expected the adjustment to be smaller — different country, sure, but a similar language, similar business culture, an easier transition than the first one had been. In some ways it was. In other ways, I underestimated it. Professional norms I'd taken for granted — how directly people give feedback, how decisions get made, how relationships get built before business gets discussed — were different enough that I spent the first several months quietly recalibrating things I hadn't realized were assumptions rather than universal facts.

That's probably the biggest thing this move taught me: a lot of what feels like "how things are done" is actually just "how things were done where I was standing before." Once you've relocated a couple of times, you stop mistaking your prior context for the only correct one, which turns out to be a genuinely useful habit at work too — especially when you're trying to align stakeholders who are all equally convinced their version of "normal" is the obvious one.

The third move: choosing to start over again, deliberately

Most recently, I moved back to the U.S., to the Bay Area, at a point in my career where I had plenty of reasons not to — an established role, a strong track record, a comfortable trajectory. I moved anyway, partly for the opportunity the region represents in strategy and technology, and partly because by now I trust my own ability to rebuild a network and a reputation somewhere new, because I've done it twice already and both times it worked out.

That trust took a while to earn. The first move, I wasn't sure it would work. By the third, I understood that the discomfort of being newly unknown somewhere is temporary, and that it's a fair trade for the range of experience you get in return — which, professionally, has meant an unusually broad view of how business problems get solved differently across industries, regulatory environments, and cultures.

What this actually built, professionally

It's tempting to file all of this under "soft skills," but I think that undersells it. Working across India, the U.S., and Canada forced me to get good at a specific, practical thing: figuring out quickly which of my assumptions are portable and which ones aren't, and building trust with people who have no obligation yet to extend it to me. That's most of what stakeholder alignment actually is, whether the stakeholders are separated by a border or just by department.