Arunima

I know a 35-year-old married couple in India. No kids by choice. Household income is strong. House almost paid off. Good investments. Foreign trips every year. Comfortable life. Looks sorted from the outside. But in the long run, this choice usually backfires. In India, money without family responsibility mostly turns into consumption. Bigger cars. Better phones. Another vacation to the same three places with different hotel names. At some point, experiences stop feeling new. Kids aren’t just an expense here. They’re continuity. Legacy. A reason to stay sharp, relevant, grounded. Ask older Indians what gave their life meaning. Almost none will talk about gadgets or trips. They talk about their children, the sacrifices, the chaos, the pride. Comfort is addictive in your 30s. Loneliness is brutal in your 60s. Choosing ease over building something bigger feels smart today.

i hate how social media makes us forget that life has stages. it’s normal to be broke, to have broke friends or partners and yes it’s even normal to be unemployed at times. these are phases we all go through. some people are lucky enough to find good jobs at a young age and afford a certain lifestyle. others take longer and that’s perfectly okay. we need to stop comparing ourselves and start accepting our journey. i just want all of us to be at peace with where we are in life while still working and striving for better.

Last night I spoke to a friend who left India years ago. We reconnected recently. She studied at BITS, got a scholarship for her master’s in Germany, and later on the German government funded her research on animal behaviour using computer science. Today, she has a full-time job there with a good package. Cool. Happy for her. But this isn’t a flex. This is a comparison. In countries like Germany, research funding means funding actual research. You show up with a problem, data, methodology and a use case. The government backs you. Because they understand that science doesn’t need nationalism, it needs money and patience. Now cut to India. The Madhya Pradesh government recently spent ₹3.5 crore on “cancer cure research” using cow dung and cow urine. ₹3.5 crore. Tax payer public money. In India, researchers struggle to get basic grants. Fellowships are delayed for months. Professors themselves discourage students from pursuing research because they know the system will not support them. If you want to do serious work, you are often told one thing very clearly: arrange your own funding. Another friend, a classmate till 10th, went to IIT Dhanbad. Did robotics and AI. Got an internship. Finished graduation. Immediately got a job offer from Texas. Moved there. It’s been three years. Never came back. Not because India didn’t need him. Because India didn’t deserve him. This is the pattern • Indian PhDs go abroad because fellowships here get delayed like train schedules. • Top STEM graduates leave because research grants in India are buried under bureaucracy and political interference. • Professors tell students not to pursue research because “government se funding nahi aayega.” • Deep-tech startups register outside India because innovation here dies in paperwork. • Indian-origin scientists lead projects at NASA, Google DeepMind after leaving Indian institutions. And then we do this funny thing on internet. We clap. We tweet “proud Indian 🇮🇳”. After pushing them out. Countries like Germany, the US, and France are aggressively hiring Indian minds. Not out of kindness. Because they know talent + funding = progress of their nation. India, meanwhile, is busy deciding whether science needs evidence or belief. Studying animal behaviour using PyTorch and OpenCV sounds “useless” here. But finding a cancer cure in cow dung sounds “visionary”. That’s not cultural pride. That’s intellectual bankruptcy. The scary part isn’t brain drain. The scary part is that no one in power seems embarrassed by it. We’re not losing talent accidentally. We’re outsourcing our future, ₹3.5 crore at a time. The real concern is not that India is losing talent. The real concern is that there is no serious urgency to stop it & without that urgency, slogans will continue to replace solutions while the future quietly moves elsewhere 🙏🏻