NRIs returning to India
New Maruti car had hit the market and luckily we got an early allotment of a small shiny red car

Prospects for NRIs returning to India – Rajiv Krishna Sasxena

Recently (starting Jan 22, 2025) I wrote a series of posts on the portal Linkedin.  These posts went viral and attracted more than 2 lac reads and thousands of likes.  I am archiving these posts in www.geeta-kavita.com  for all readers.  Rajiv Krishna Saxena

Returning to India

Both I and my wife had done PhD under the supervision of Prof Talwar at AIIMS. He become the Director of the new National Institute of Immunology (NII)  in New Delhi, and in one of his visits to US, he offered jobs to both of us in the new institute.  I guess we were lucky that way. We returned and joined NII. We were given space in a new rented building with no research facilities. From being very active in research, we suddenly had nothing to do. That was tough time indeed. We rented an apartment in South Delhi  but  power supply  in Delhi was bad. Electricity would fail in hot sweltering nights and mosquitoes would buzz around our ears.  Then came the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi and riots broke in Delhi. I recall while driving through a rioting crowd in Yusuf Sarai on my scooter , with my wife on the back seat, a rioter banged a stick on my helmet. God saved us.  Our children had tough time too. School bathrooms were so bad that they just could not use it. Our salaries were pittance (about Rs 1500 PM after tax deduction) and we had to fall back on our savings from USA. While in US, I had applied for a research grant from DST that was approved but could not be  funded because NII was a DST institute. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going, as they say.

A position of Assoc Prof. (Immunology) opened up the School of Life Sciences,  JNU.   I applied and got the position. That was the turning point. The DST grant (40L in 1985) was funded at JNU and I got sufficient money to setup my lab. New Maruti car had hit the market and luckily we got an early allotment of a small shiny red car. We were all thrilled. Good thing about working in a university rather than in a research institute is that you have two legs to stand on: research and teaching.  Immunology was a very new subject in the university stream at that time and I got very bright and enthusiastic PhD students to supervise.  From the money we save in USA, we bought a small farm in outskirts of Delhi, as my wife loved greenery. She too moved from NII to the Malaria Research Institute and the life was back on the track.   As I look back, I have advice for young researchers to facilitate success in life and career. Next time…

राजीव कृष्ण सक्सेना

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