Why people go to India and come back different

(But not in ways they can explain)

Everyone I knew who had been to India described it almost identically. They spoke about being overwhelmed, exhausted, irritated, and then, almost reluctantly, about a shift. The country had loosened something they hadn’t realised was tight.

For as long as I could remember, I had been trained to move with intent: to set goals and improve things through effort and control. The American Dream isn’t about acceptance; it’s about reshaping your circumstances through persistence and ambition. India, I was told, operated on a different frequency altogether.

What I found when I finally made it to India was that resistance becomes too expensive. It’s impossible to impose order on the noise, the crowds, the heat, and the unpredictability. At some point you stop trying, and in that stopping something happens. It isn’t calming or gentle; it’s more like being worn down into the present moment.

In Delhi, a man tried to sell me a jar of tiger balm. When I told him I didn’t want it, he said, “That is a pity. I thought you might be my first sale of the day.” There was no performance in his voice, no pressure, no concern. Just the fact of it: he’d been out there for hours without a single sale.

I kept thinking about him afterwards. The same quality that allowed him to say that without bitterness — the capacity to absorb rather than resist — was also what I saw leaving people frighteningly exposed. Faith filling the space where planning might be. Endurance substituting for infrastructure. The peace was real, but so was the precarity underneath it.

A few weeks in, I met a labourer who hadn’t worked in weeks and was down to his last few rupees. Two weeks later I saw him again, smiling. He’d earned enough to live for the next week. When I asked what he would do after that, he shrugged and looked at me like the question hadn’t quite landed. To him, the future wasn’t a problem to solve; it was something that would simply arrive.

In the West, we live at the opposite extreme. We struggle to be present because we are always managing risk, hedging against uncertainty, planning several steps ahead. Our stability is bought with anxiety. In India, peace is often bought with precarity. Neither is clean, and neither is entirely enviable.

People who return from India often say they came back changed, though they struggle to say how. Their lives don’t become simpler; they don’t renounce ambition or abandon structure. Something subtler happens: they keep their routines, their schedules, their goals, but occasionally pause long enough to notice themselves breathing inside it all.

Maybe that’s why India keeps calling people back. Not because it offers answers or transformation, but because it briefly interrupts the story we tell ourselves about control.

You feel it in small moments: standing in traffic that won’t move, waiting for something that doesn’t arrive, realising that nothing you do will make the day unfold the way you planned.

And then, almost without noticing, you stop pushing against it.

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Meet the writer:

Hi! I’m Tom, the guy behind Never Quite a Local.

By day I work as a copywriter at a tech company. But writing about expat life, travel, and what it all does to us on the inside is what I really enjoy.

I’m originally from the UK, but I’ve been living in the Czech Republic for over ten years. I have Czech heritage, so the country always had a pull on me, and eventually I stopped resisting it.

Before the Czech Republic there was China, where I lived for five years. Going from the UK to China is about as culturally different as it gets, and that experience is really what planted the seed for everything I write about here.

I’ve also done a fair bit of travelling: overland from the UK to Thailand, around West Africa, up and down India, across Europe. Every trip has left me with the same feeling, that being somewhere unfamiliar does something interesting to you — and I never get tired of trying to figure out what that something is.

I started this Substack because I suspected other people living between cultures were sitting with the same questions. Turns out, a lot of you are, which makes me feel considerably more like a local!

Some of my most popular posts:

Were you treated like this in India? (A cliched injury, a village doctor, and a cure I still can’t explain)

Maybe you’re not as open-minded as you think (Even if you travel a lot)

How to stop people switching to English (Practical ways to keep conversations in your target language)