back to USA?

..and the ping-pong game continues as I may be moving back to the US to take up a job there.
This will also let me and my wife live together and also live close to our respective workplaces.
Whether this time it will be permanent remains to be seen, since it depends a lot on how our careers shape up. No doubt it will be a hectic time and may involve starting a family, which brings its own issues about which country is better for kids. Well, all I can say is that after all this shuttling, both India and the US seem like home at times and foreign some times. The US is kind of in the doldrums right now and needs to figure out a way to get out of it and reaffirm its belief in itself. India is doing pretty well on the whole, although progress is next to zero in the political class. In any case, neither is anywhere near perfect so I'm quite happy living anywhere and have no over riding preference either way. What a nice way to solve the R2I/LIA dilemma. My advice, such as it is from my limited experience, is that R2I is fine and will work out if you give it time (1 year at least). All that worrying about R2I adjustment and letting go of the "good life" in US seems trifling to me in retrospect. Life is fine anywhere if you let it carry you a bit here and there and dont try to control it too much. As for LIA (i mean with house and kids and all, not the single no-responsibility life), I may find out soon enough what that's like. Its good to feel at home in both places finally!
The old adage "someone long ago said it best" is true (writing has deteriorated in the last few centuries anyway), so here is something that best summarizes my feelings, and I suspect is universal, about R2I vs LIA (from Adam Smith, 1600s):
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.