Three months back in India. Same job. Different rules.

Land Changes Your External Value

Aug 18, 2026

It has only been three months since I moved from the US to India after 7 years of living in the US. On paper, that is nothing — a quarter, a season, barely enough time to finish unpacking. But work and life wise, it already feels like a different planet.

What I left behind

In the US, a few things felt like defaults at job — not perks, just how work was supposed to work:

You are respected more. People listen when you speak.
You are treated better. Your time, your personal boundaries matter.
Your work timings matter. Nine to five is not a fantasy; it is the baseline.

The smaller comforts fade into the background too:

Free barista coffee at the office
Leaves auto-approved
Flexibility that is assumed — “I have a hard stop at 5” accepted without drama

None of this felt special while I was there. It felt normal — almost invisible. You do not wake up grateful for a predictable calendar. You assume that is just how professional life works.

It is only when those things disappear that you realize how much you had taken for granted.

What I found when I landed

Then I started working from India, and all of those defaults disappeared — quietly, without announcement, as if they had never existed.

Meetings are scheduled for US time zones. PST-friendly slots dominate the calendar. Nobody asks whether 8 PM IST works for you; they ask whether the US team is available.

There is no shared concept of 9-to-5. Work hours are not defined. They stretch. They bleed. They follow whoever holds the most power on the call, not whoever is sitting in the most inconvenient time zone.

Manager’s asked me to schedule meetings past 6 PM. Not once as an exception — as a pattern. The implicit message: your evening should be flexible.

Here, even sick leave needs approval. When you are unwell, system still need permission.

That is the part nobody warns you about when you move back. Not one big loss — a hundred small defaults you never named, suddenly missing all at once.

I am not writing this to complain about India or to romanticize the US. I am writing because it is surprising — genuinely surprising — to watch how land changes your external value.

The same person. The same skills. The same employer. The same job title. Mostly the same work.

Different geography, different country, different rules. The respect, the treatment, the regard for your time — it did not travel with person in their suitcase.

A story from a very different world

There is an old story that I can relate — not because my situation is the same, but because the shape of the pressure feels familiar.

Sir Thomas More was King Henry VIII’s powerful Lord Chancellor. When Henry broke from the Catholic Church to declare himself Supreme Head for Church of England, everyone was expected to fall in line, take the oath, and echo the crowd.

Thomas More refused. He did not organize opposition, but chose absolute silence instead. Under Henry’s 1534 Treason Act, however, staying silent was legally treated as a denial of the king’s title. Silence became treason.

He was tried in July 1535 with a foregone conclusion. He was sentenced to the brutal death of being hanged, drawn, and quartered, though the king later commuted it to beheading as a rank-based mercy.

More was executed on July 6, 1535. His crime was not violence, but simply thinking differently and refusing to repeat what everyone else was saying.

Henry’s England tolerated no dissent. The crown used trials as public performances to demonstrate that defying the group carried a devastating cost.

On the scaffold, More’s last words were:

“I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

He had refused to say what everyone else was saying. He paid for it with his life—not because he was loud, but because he would not pretend.

Setting a boundary — and paying the social cost

So I am setting boundaries around my work hours.

At minimum, I am starting with this: no calls between 8 PM and 9 AM.

If you are reading this from a US or European time zone, you might think — what is the big deal? That is just thirteen hours.

See it through my eyes for a week.

If your manager says: Prioritize this meeting over everything. Every colleague shows up in zoom meeting at 10 PM.

You are the only person who does not. Then peer pressure comes into the picture.

It is not a scheduling conflict. That is social isolation inside your own team. You are not just declining a meeting. You are visibly, repeatedly, going against the group. And groups notice.

Previously I declined a 8 PM sync. Maybe everyone else joined. I don’t know. Nobody said anything — which somehow made it feel worse, not better.

We are not in Henry VIII’s England

Here is what I hold onto:

It is not the same world anymore.

At Amazon — my employer — the culture claims to reward people who push back on right things. Disagree and commit. Have backbone. Challenge ideas, not people. Whether that holds at 10 PM IST is a different question — but the principle is there.

The pressure I feel is not state power. Nobody is going to the Tower of London for declining a 10 PM call.

But the human pattern — the discomfort of being the one who goes against the group, the subtle cost of visible difference — that pattern is old. Very old.

Recognizing that does not make the boundary easier to hold. It makes it easier to understand why it is hard, and why holding it anyway matters.

What I am taking forward

I am not moving back to the US tomorrow.

I am building a life here. But I am also building rules for how that life includes work — rules that protect my mornings, my evenings, and my ability to show up as myself, not just as the person who always says yes to the late call.

If you have a similar story, I would genuinely like to hear how you handled it. Not the LinkedIn version. The real one.

Master Mentee

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?