I wrote this in May 2026 and then left it sitting in my drafts for six weeks.
Partly because it feels more personal than what I usually put online. Partly because writing honestly about uncertainty is uncomfortable when most of us are busy performing certainty. And partly because I wasn’t entirely sure I believed all of it yet.
I’m still not sure.
But perhaps that’s the point.
So, here goes.
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May 2026
Two years ago, I moved back to India. I hadn't planned on it. In fact, if you'd told me in 2020, when I packed my bags and left Bangalore for France, that I'd be back in four years, I'd have laughed it off as a failure of imagination. The plan had always been to stay abroad and build a career in Europe. The universe, well, had other plans.
Four years abroad had been, by most measures, a good run. Two years in France at Sciences Po, a well-paid summer internship in Paris, the youngest funded researcher on a research project between Princeton, Columbia, and Sciences Po, a term abroad at King's College London. It was a term abroad that I loved enough to stay on for a master's. During my master’s, one of three in my cohort to win a £10,000 scholarship, besides being elected student representative. Academics and internships were in order. Life was good – I travelled to 10+ countries across 4 continents, met super interesting people and made memories, some of which I shall never dare to write about online. On paper, it read well. In practice, well.
I was staring down a graduate job market that was souring while I was busy enjoying the ride.
Moving to England, I knew what I was getting into. The graduate market, particularly for internationals, has always been competitive. Post Brexit, even worse. Most international students on a graduate visa have 24 months to find a sponsored role before the clock runs out, unless they’re lucky to obtain visa sponsorship from the get go.
However, in anecdotal experience, most with a self-sponsored graduate visa, spend the first 12-18 months, just trying to find a job. Then, if they're lucky, settle for something tangentially related to what they actually wanted to do. And then, they hope that when, in 6 months’ time, when the 24 month timer runs out, they meet the salary threshold, and find an employer willing to sponsor a visa. I had watched this happen to enough people to know I needed a plan.
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| Notting Hill, London, 2023 |
Plan A: Consulting (because 22-year-olds are rarely immune to prestige)
In fairness to my 22-year-old self, this wasn’t entirely vanity. MBB (McKinsey, BCG, Bain) were the gold standard - the kind of roles that open every door thereafter. I did everything you're supposed to do. Top grades, a good CV, coffee chats, case prep, networking sessions, mock interviews. I passed the CV screening round at all 3, which, I later learned, has an acceptance rate of roughly 10%-15%. That felt like something, yet only 10% of those would go on to get offers. I did multiple rounds of interviews across the three firms, and even their competitors.
It went nowhere. Worse, I was running into headwinds I hadn't fully anticipated. The consulting industry, which had boomed post-pandemic, had entered a sharp correction. McKinsey cut 2,000 jobs in 2023 alone under an internal restructuring initiative called Project Magnolia. Firms delayed start dates for new hires, in some cases pushing them to spring 2024. BCG's revenue grew just 5% in 2023 - the lowest in three years - and its new hiring additions were five times fewer than in 2022, when the industry had experienced a post-pandemic boom. Sure, I was losing to better candidates. But I was also losing to a market that had decided it was time to contract, further reducing the likelihood of an offer.
The statistics were not abstract but manifested in the daily rhythm of life. Every week at King's was similar. I was up early, did online recruitment assessments, attended lectures, went for networking/coffee chats, prepped for interviews, and filled out more applications. I kept up with the social life because you have to - weekly drinks at the university bar (which, I should note, was perhaps the only place in central London you could get a drink for £5), weekend dinners, walks in one of London’s many beautiful parks etc. But the undercurrent of all of it was the job search. It dominated everything. I didn't let it show (except the 10kg I lost in parallel) but it was always there – and it was an uphill battle that I was losing.
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| The Blues Kitchen - a jazz bar, a favourite Drinks were not £5 though |
Plan B: Audit (because prestige met reality)
A mentor of mine - an executive banker - suggested a pivot. Build a career in audit at one of the Big Four (KPMG, EY, Deloitte, PwC). The reasoning was sound - many senior executives at leading British companies come from audit backgrounds. It might have been a less glamorous entry point, but it was a legitimate one. I trusted the advice and went for it.
It worked, to a point. I cleared multiple rounds of interviews across the Big Four. I was in the running and received final round invites at two of them.
And then Rishi Sunak called a general election.
In the months leading up to the July 2024 vote, tightening visa sponsorship norms for international graduates became politically useful. The announcements came, and shortly after, I received an email informing me that my application had been rejected because I did not meet the eligibility criteria.
Eligibility screening, as is the norm, happens at the beginning of the recruitment process - not after multiple rounds of interviews. Except now it was happening at the end, retroactively, because the rules had changed. No one said as much in the email, of course. The timing, however, was far from subtle.
Plan B had also failed because the goalposts had moved, mid-game.
There's a particular kind of disorientation that comes from failing in a system you played by the rules. It's different from losing fairly. You can make peace with losing fairly. But when the rules change underneath you, you're left holding a strategy that was perfectly calibrated for conditions that no longer exist. We’ll come back to this later.
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| At Winchester College (Rishi Sunak's school), February 2024 The plot twist came very soon after, for both of us |
I had no Plan C. I didn’t think I needed one. So, I didn’t know what to do.
Moving back to India in May 2024 was not a planned decision. In fact, I had visited home for a week, just the month prior. Two days before flying back to London, I had made up my mind that I would return, for good, soon. Two days after landing in Heathrow, my one-way ticket home was booked for 30 days later. I just decided. The 24-month visa clock was ticking, the market wasn't opening up, and staying on for the sake of it - grinding through applications for roles I had no real interest in - felt like exactly the kind of thing I had been trying to avoid.
Plan C (because the world had stopped consulting me (pun intended))
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| India 4 suitcases, 4 years later |
I flew back to Bangalore.
I joined Social Alpha, a venture development platform that backs deep-tech and science-led startups addressing some of society’s most pressing challenges. The work is diverse, intellectually stimulating, and fast-paced - ranging from identifying capital gaps and building strategic partnerships to designing new fundraising products from the ground up. The role offers a high degree of ownership and autonomy, creating opportunities to take ideas from concept to execution. It has pushed me to build and lead initiatives from scratch, making it a deeply rewarding experience with a steep and exciting learning curve.
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I’m often, especially over the last few months, by friends also thinking of now moving back, asked how things are going.
The honest version is that it's been better than I expected. But I’d be lying if I said it was always like that.
What nobody tells you about moving back - and what I was perhaps wilfully unprepared for - is that returning home is its own form of culture shock. It’s not as dramatic and disorienting as the kind you experience landing somewhere foreign – perhaps because, when you go abroad, you know what you’re getting into. It’s subtler, and in some ways harder to name, precisely because you're supposed to already know how things work at ‘home’. It took time to recalibrate. I am, honestly, still recalibrating.
There is also the stranger, more personal discomfort of being perceived as a returnee - someone who left, acquired certain kinds of habits and perspectives from elsewhere, and came back carrying it. You don't always fit cleanly back into the world you left. You are, in a certain sense, slightly between worlds. Familiar enough to belong, different enough to feel it. And people here will ensure you feel it 😅
What I've realised over time is that this in-between-ness is not purely a disadvantage. There are things I see more clearly for having been away - habits, assumptions, inefficiencies that are invisible to people who never left, and equally invisible to people who only arrived. That particular vantage point has its uses. But it requires making peace with the fact that you don't fully belong to either world, and that this is, more or less, the deal you signed up for - even if you didn't know it at the time.
Two years on, I've had enough distance to think about what the whole thing actually meant. Let me break it down into four broad themes – planning, identity, luck and timing, and dealing with uncertainty.
On planning - I had plans, each thoughtful, reasonable, and eventually defeated by forces largely (but not wholly) outside my control - a contracting market, a shifting political calculus. The plans weren't wrong. They were just incomplete, because no plan fully accounts for the world's indifference to your timeline. What I've come to believe is that the value of a plan isn't that it succeeds - it's that having one forces clarity, which in turn makes pivoting faster. I knew quickly when Plan A and Plan B were failing because I had been specific about what success looked like. Vague ambition is much harder to abandon. You’ve got to cut your losses and pivot – a valuable life lesson, which I stand by.
On identity - for four years, "abroad" had quietly become part of how I understood myself. London, Paris, the passport stamps, the lifestyle - it had accumulated into a sense of self that was harder to let go of than I expected. Coming back to Bangalore meant surrendering some of that, or at least renegotiating it. What I found, slowly, was that the things I'd actually built - the languages, the networks, the ways of thinking, the capacity to navigate unfamiliar places - none of that went away. It came with me.
On luck and timing - and how much weight we give to both. There's a version of the last two years in which the consulting market hadn't contracted, or the visa rules hadn't changed, or the Big Four final-round invite had arrived in my inbox. In that version, I'd be in London right now, writing a very different blog post about a very different life. I don't know that it would have been better. I know it would have been different. The lesson I've taken from this is not that things work out for a reason. They don't, necessarily - but that the range of viable outcomes is wider than you think. The thing you didn't plan for can turn out to be fine.
Maybe more than fine.
On uncertainty - the fourth thing, and perhaps the most important, and learning to stop fighting it.
I was, for most of the last decade, a textbook Type A personality. I liked structure. I liked knowing what came next. I liked having a Plan A and a Plan B and, ideally, a contingency for the contingency. There is nothing wrong with this, up to a point. The problem is that structure, taken too far, becomes a kind of fiction - a story you tell yourself about how much control you actually have. And the world, as it turns out, is not particularly interested in your story.
This is something we also spoke about during the Sustain Labs fellowship, a programme that brought together senior executives, business leaders, and policymakers to think about decarbonisation and systems change. These were people with established careers, real authority, track records - the kind of people you look at from the outside and assume have it figured out. What surprised me was how many of them, when the room felt safe enough, said the same thing: they didn't either. That they were navigating uncertainty the same as everyone else, just with more experience of having survived it. The vulnerability in those conversations was striking, and clarifying.
What I took from it was that comfort with uncertainty is not a personality trait you either have or don't. Rather, it's a muscle worth building deliberately, because the alternative - clinging to the illusion of control - is exhausting and perhaps detrimental to reacting with urgency. We are living through a period of genuine geopolitical turbulence. Think about trade wars, shifting alliances, institutions under pressure, and entire industries being rewritten by technology. The variables in play right now are more numerous and less predictable than at almost any point in recent memory. Or, at least, my recent memory.
In that environment, the people who will navigate best are not the ones with the most detailed plans. They're the ones who have made peace with not knowing, and learned to move anyway.
I still don't have a clear answer to what comes next. The India chapter is open-ended. There are days when London feels like a long time ago, and days when it doesn't feel long ago at all. I think about going back - to Europe, to England - though I'm less certain now about what I'd be going back for.
For now, though - Bangalore. And tomorrow? Who knows?
Plan C, it turns out, was not so bad. In ways I only understand now, it became one of the most formative experiences of my early twenties. I’m grateful it arrived as early as it did.
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