Skip to main content

Eternal Tunnel

I have lived through the H1-B ordeal that upended my personal and professional live profoundly. My story is over two decades old counting from when it started. I had and continue to look at it as the price to pay for making my own choices and pursuing my personal idea of freedom. I was not forced into any situation against my will and I am very cognizant of that. While that is likely true for people enduring the same pain today, it does not diminish the level of needless suffering and how it makes a person feel like they are on unstable ground every minute of "their life" as "normal life" goes on all around them. The ones who try to insulate the kids from the chaos, try to plant roots - buy home, form community and more, incur even more stress because they have added the weight of baggage to the unrelenting uncertainty of their lives. Nothing seems to have changed in the two decades that have gone by since my time. There are wave upon wave of people who go through the same crush of anxiety walking through a tunnel where there is no light at the end. 

The 60-day grace period that foreign workers have to remain in the U.S. and try to secure new jobs doesn’t apply to those who are laid off while abroad, says Hiba Mona Anver, a partner at Erickson Immigration Group, a law firm based in Arlington, Va. If a worker on a temporary work visa has their role terminated while they are traveling out of the country, she says, that visa is no longer valid for re-entry unless the worker manages to secure another job while abroad. 

I made some hard, inflexible choices in the day - no buying a home, no travel out of the country including India, no  vacation beyond a day or two added to a long weekend once a year. Not everyone should have to make choices like that and extend their suffering on to their family - but sometimes that is the only way to survive with some sense of control over your destiny. I would not wish the way I lived through that time upon anyone else but the truth is people did and continue to have it even worse than I did. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more