Saturday, May 17, around 6pm, I heard the most heartbreaking sound of my life.

We were walking our dog Luna. Another dog came charging at us. Off leash. His walker just standing there.

The dog bit Luna on the thigh. She was crying. I kicked him away. He came back, sunk his teeth into her back. Luna yelped. She soiled herself. I pulled him off her.

The walker finally grabbed his leash and walked off. I found him down the road talking to the security guard of the gated community where the dog lived. They were laughing. I was livid.

The dog, Psycho, was a rescue, aggressive with other dogs. The walker had never walked a dog. Psycho’s owner, Fakty Farkinson, had given him exactly zero training.

We took Luna to a vet. He glanced at her and said she was fine. ₹1,400. Fakty called sounding apologetic, said she’d cover the bills. I told her not to worry. Luna seemed fine.

I was in a daze.

That night I found bite marks on Luna’s back. Blood the first vet had missed.

The next morning a different vet found multiple bites, skin broken. Antibiotics. Ointment. Three prophylactic rabies shots. ₹10,000 with ubers.

I sent Fakty the costs. She didn’t reply.

That evening my shin started stinging. A small crescent shaped wound. I couldn’t tell if it was from the attack. I searched my phone for video from before. No wound on my shin.

Rabies is 100% fatal once symptoms show. The window to treat is days. The next morning I went to a clinic and got an Abhayrab vaccine. They did not give me a card or batch number. ₹1,200.

That night I read an active alert from India’s drug regulator. Counterfeit Abhayrab in circulation. The manufacturer had flagged it.

Shit.

Was 70 hours too late? Could the virus already be in a nerve?? Could my anxiety itself be weakening the vaccine???

I had no way to verify what I’d been given. I was spiralling.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next morning I went to Apollo emergency room. I expected a 12+ hour wait like Canada. I was wrong.

They examined the wound, restarted the course with a verified vaccine and rabies antibodies, gave me a card with the batch number. Twenty minutes. ₹4,300.

I sat in the Uber thinking about it. My brother works in an emergency department in Canada. The same treatment runs the system about $5,000 there. I’d just done it for the price of dinner.

It isn’t just rabies. MRI same day in Bangalore for $50. In Canada the wait can be over a year.

Canadian healthcare isn’t really free. We pay for it in taxes. We pay for it in time. Sometimes the wait is what kills you.

The doctors told me to monitor Psycho for ten days. That was the ask I brought back to Fakty.

I sent her the rest of the costs and the monitoring request. No reply. I called. No answer.

She finally texted: she’d cover the vet bills only. About a quarter of the total. She sent a vaccination certificate. Psycho’s name wasn’t on it. She ignored the rest.

What was she hiding?

I asked for two things. The cert with Psycho’s name. A two minute video call on day ten so my doctor could confirm Psycho was healthy.

She refused. “We are informed responsible citizens”, she said. “My sister is a vet in Canada. We don’t lie. I expect you to trust us.”

I wasn’t trusting the word of a stranger whose negligence had caused this attack. Actions speak louder than words.

My wife called her crying. We only wanted two minutes of her time. Two minutes! It would cost Fakty nothing. Still no.

I lost it.

‘What the fuck is wrong with you lady?’

I gave her 24 hours. A video call, or I file a police report. Her last message: “any scrutiny will not quell your anxiety. All the best.”

I was convinced she was a psychopath.

Word from her building came back. She’s not all there. Everyone avoids her.

We didn’t file. We live in the same neighborhood. The risk to Luna wasn’t worth it.

Crazy people are everywhere. I’ve met them in Canada too. That part wasn’t a dig at India. It was a reflection on how poorly I handled this.

I had just hit a productive stretch. The rest of the week went to dealing with this.

I’d sent her fifteen messages to her three. Every reply gave her something new to push back on.

I’d read Never Split the Difference years ago. I fed it to an AI with the WhatsApp thread and asked what I should have done.

It was almost the opposite of what I did. Don’t argue. Ask.

Instead of ‘I need a video call,’ it could have been ‘what would you suggest I tell my doctor when he asks me to confirm the dog’s condition?’ She can’t say ‘just trust me’ to that without sounding unreasonable.

You say you’re a responsible citizen? Ok. Using that:

‘I can see you take this seriously. That’s why I came to you instead of the police. What would you suggest as the best way to put this to rest?’

Refusing then would contradict her own self-image. Checkmate.

Have her solve the problem for me. It’s a genius strategy.

The arguing wasn’t even the worst of it. It was the shame I felt in asking. Why should I feel shame when this was entirely her fault?

I’ve been doing this my whole life. Someone owes me, I feel awkward asking, so I don’t. Or I wait too long. Or I send polite messages until the other side decides I’m too much trouble.

I lost the Fakty fight the moment she offered to cover the bills and I said don’t worry about it. The arguing afterwards was a postscript.

I’m trying to build a business. The business needs me to ask without flinching. I’d rather not have learned it this way. But the week with Fakty made sure I won’t forget.

I pulled myself out of the spiral. I went back to my desk. I started writing about the last 5 months. The good and the bad.

I posted it on Reddit.

The comments started rolling in. A hundred of them by the next day. People I’d never met sending me advice. Sharing their own versions of the move.

A few told me to enjoy it while it lasts. A few told me to follow the rules and stop complaining. Most were just trying to help.

I’d come to India to start a business. By the end of that day I was starting to wonder if I’d already stumbled on one.

P.S. Luna and I are doing fine now.

P.P.S. Fakty and Psycho are not their real names. I don’t want to lose any more time to this lady.

I went to a bank near our house to open an account. The woman behind the counter looked at my passport and said they don’t open accounts for foreigners.

That’s not true I said. She shrugged.

I’m Canadian. My wife is Indian. We moved to Bangalore on New Year’s Day.

Most of what you read about moving to India is written by NRIs going home.

They have family, childhood friends, context. I’m not an NRI. I’m the non-Indian spouse. Five months in, here’s what that’s actually like.

I still can’t open a bank account

That bank visit set the tone. Every step reveals a new requirement.

On my next visit, they said I need FRRO registration. That’s a government registration for foreign nationals. I applied online.

The website kept crashing and losing my info. Sent additional docs when they asked. Weeks later I got an email saying I had a notification. Logged into the portal.

The notification said come to our office. Went to the office. They told me I needed to give them my marriage certificate apostilled by Canada and sent me off.

My parents had to go to an office in Ontario and mail it over. The whole thing could have been one email saying “we need your apostilled marriage certificate.”

Instead it was an email telling me to check a portal, a portal telling me to visit an office, and an office telling me what they actually needed.

Got the FRRO. Back to the bank. Now they need Aadhaar and PAN. Applied for PAN, but without Aadhaar I can’t verify online, so I have to print and mail everything in.

Aadhaar needs 182 days in the country. I’m not there yet.

Five months in and I still can’t pay for things on my own. When we’re out, my wife handles every payment. If she’s not with me and I need to buy something, I can’t.

International credit cards are rarely accepted. Cash doesn’t really work either because nobody has change, not even the ATMs.

Getting sick

Starting in mid-February, I got sick three times in six weeks. First was a fever. Then a sore throat. Third was a high fever that lasted five days with a long recovery.

I think my immune system was just adjusting to a new environment. The fevers stopped after that rough patch.

The stomach stuff is separate and ongoing. We have an RO filter at home. I don’t eat anything raw at restaurants. Doesn’t matter.

Five months in and I still have on and off stomach issues. I guess I’m adjusting to the local stomach bacteria? I think that’s just going to be a long adjustment.

My Indian friends in Canada did warn me about this.

Daily life

A lot that was automatic back home has to be figured out here.

Settling in

The first month was a whirlwind. We had to buy all our furniture, appliances, kitchen stuff, house stuff. We’d plan to hit three stores in a day and end up finishing half of one.

Traffic was part of it, but also the sales people. They’d quote one price, try to push us toward something else, then at checkout the price was different from what they told us. Happened more than once.

I don’t know who trained them but it was frustrating.

Buying things

Things you take for granted back home are harder to find here, and electronics especially cost more. I spent weeks looking for the AC I wanted in stock. And the first unit I bought didn’t even work.

Bangalore is supposed to be the temperate city but this summer was the hottest in years. If you’re moving here, buy your AC before peak summer. And bring your small electronics with you if you can.

Traffic

Bangalore traffic has no lanes. Horns are how people communicate. If you follow the rules you just get stuck because everyone else cuts ahead.

We take Ubers everywhere right now, which is fine, but we’re planning to start a family. That means a child seat. Which means I need a car and to figure out how to drive in this. I’m not looking forward to that at all.

Dinner

My in-laws eat dinner at 9 or 10pm. I eat by 6. If I eat late and go to sleep, I have terrible sleep. So now I just eat before and join them for the outing after. Small thing, but the first few months are full of these. A lot of routines need to be rebuilt.

Language Barrier

Most daily interactions are fine. Delivery people call, I send my location on WhatsApp, they show up, I give them the OTP, they hand me the package.

Maybe 10% of the time there’s a real language barrier where we genuinely can’t understand each other. When that happens I call my wife and she translates. Works fine. But I should probably learn some Kannada.

Moving our dog

We brought our dog from Canada. That’s its own story and deserves its own post, but short version: Air India’s website says they allow service dogs in the cabin if you fill out certain forms, but they wouldn’t tell me where to send the forms.

Different answer every call. Eventually they told me to just go to the airport. Airport staff said call customer service. We gave up on Air India and switched to United.

Then there was the animal quarantine process. The government website was nonsensical. One form needed to be submitted 7 business days before arrival. That form required a Canadian health certificate only valid for 10 calendar days.

If you do the math, the certificate expires before you land. Couldn’t get a straight answer. Reddit told me to use an agency. Did that. The agency has “arrangements” with the officials to make the process work. No problems after that.

Making friends

When you move to India as the NRI, you have people here. Parents, old friends, maybe cousins. When you move as the non-Indian spouse, you have your partner.

My wife has her parents ten minutes away. She had childhood friends here, though most of them left Bangalore years ago. I didn’t know anyone.

And it’s different from being an expat posted somewhere by a company. There’s no office, no expat community, no built-in social circle. You have to go out and find people yourself.

We started organizing walks in Cubbon Park every other weekend. I went rock climbing. Tried some Luma events, hit and miss. It took a few months but I’m starting to build a solid set of friends I think.

The trust tax

A founder I met at one of our Cubbon Park walks, a friend of my wife’s uncle, told me India is a low trust society. I told him I had already experienced that as a consumer.

I’ve bought things on Amazon India with great ratings that turned out to be knockoffs piggybacking on global listings. Same listing as the international product, different thing in the box.

And most products don’t even allow returns. Spent hours on the phone with Amazon to get returns approved. Some things weren’t worth the hassle.

I’ve even seen posts on Reddit where people ordered a GPU and received laundry detergent. The weight didn’t even match. Amazon shouldn’t have shipped it.

When we were still naive and trusting, we bought a security system. The salesman promised we had a 15 day trial, money back guaranteed. He told us he would personally ensure our refund was done.

We asked for a contract. “We’ll send it tomorrow, promise.” They never did. Their service barely worked. Cameras were offline half the time. We asked to cancel. That was four months ago.

They keep saying “a few more days.” They haven’t collected their cameras. They haven’t refunded us. It’s around ₹40,000 ($420 USD). Probably not worth the legal costs to recover. I think they bank on that.

Shared spaces

There’s a big rottweiler on our street that the owner walks off leash. I’ve asked him to put it on a leash. He says rottweilers are misunderstood, gentle giants. The dog growls at other dogs when they walk by. If it goes after my dog, she’s probably a goner and I’m in trouble too.

Most neighbors are fine. But the ones who aren’t just do whatever they want and ignore you when you ask them for some basic consideration.

There’s a pattern to it. When a few people ignore the rules and nothing happens, everyone else adapts. You litter because there’s already litter everywhere. You skip the traffic signal because if you stop, nobody behind you expects it. It feeds on itself.

I’m standing at a counter about to order food and someone walks up and gives their order over me.

I’m at a networking event next in line to talk to a speaker and people keep pushing in until I’m standing behind them.

It’s not aggressive I think. It’s just how it works here. Everyone pushes forward and if you don’t, you get pushed out. I guess I should learn a bit of that, coming from Canada.

Yesterday somebody cut down a big rain tree on our street. Noticeably warmer now without the shade. One person’s decision, the whole street pays for it. I don’t know who did it or why. Nobody stopped them.

I get it on some level. There are a lot of people here competing for limited space and resources. If you don’t push, you fall behind. But coming from a place with different social norms, it takes getting used to.

What I like

South Indian food is incredible and cheap. I could eat ghee pudi masala dosa every day. Food here is cooked with real ingredients, real oils. I’ve lost about 14 pounds since I got here without trying.

Having a maid frees up so much time. She comes in the afternoon, cooks dinner and preps food for the next day. In Canada we’d spend a solid chunk of our free time on cooking, cleaning, groceries. Here that time goes to building.

Things get delivered to your door for almost nothing.The cost of eating out, weekend trips, none of it feels like a luxury here. We spend considerably less here than we did in Toronto.

Bangalore has a lot of people building things. There’s an energy here that I didn’t feel in Toronto. People are starting companies, running experiments, talking about ideas. That part of living here I genuinely love.

It’s warm, it’s green, it’s colourful, and it costs a fraction of what we were spending in Canada. For what we’re trying to do right now, there’s no better place.

Why I’m staying

It’s a weekday morning. I’m at my desk by 9, coffee in hand. Headphones on, focus EDM playing. By 11 I’ve knocked out a solid chunk of work. I didn’t ask anyone for permission. I just did.

I didn’t commute. I didn’t sit through back to back meetings where 23 people said no to every idea I brought. I don’t have the panic attacks I used to get at my banking job.

For the first time in my life, I’m working on things that excite me. That challenge me. That I actually want to work on. The cost of living here means I can do this without watching my savings drain every month. That peace of mind is why we came.

I know there are more negatives in this post than positives. But the negatives are mostly annoyances or isolated events. A confusing bureaucracy, a scam security system, shady Amazon sellers. They’re frustrating, but they don’t define my days.

The existential dread I felt going to work every day at a job that didn’t fulfill me, that was slowly wrecking my mental health, that was ongoing. That was the thing I couldn’t keep doing. So even with all the negatives, right now, it’s a fair trade.

I’ll be honest though. If our business starts making enough money that we can live wherever we want, the math changes.

Traffic and air pollution are real concerns, especially long term. Especially with kids. I don’t want to shorten our lifespans or theirs because of where we live.

Bangalore is the right choice right now. But it might not be forever.

Someone on r/returnToIndia wrote something I think about a lot:

Instead of thinking “this country is broken,” just live.

That’s the best advice I’ve gotten since I moved here.

Next week on From Canada to Kannada

Two weeks ago, I’d just hit a rhythm. Waking up early, focused work, feeling good about where things were going. Best stretch since we landed. About a week and a half of it.

I mentioned the rottweiler. The off leash dogs. The owners who don’t listen. I thought it was just annoying. Then a neighbor’s dog attacked mine on the street. What happened after was worse than the attack itself.

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It’s late March. Day three of a 39.4 degree fever. I’m delirious. I can barely get out of bed.

This is the third time I’ve been sick in six weeks. My wife brings me rice and dal and I have two spoonfuls before setting it down.

I keep doing the math. We landed on New Year’s Day. It’s almost April.

In those three months, I’ve spent maybe 10 hours working on the business I moved here to build.

Ten hours.

I used to have a 9 to 5 and still found time for side projects.

Now I have all the time in the world and I can’t find a few hours. How is that possible?

I gave up a six-figure career for this?

I thought I’d land and get right to work. Oh my sweet summer child.

Instead we spent the first month buying furniture, hunting for appliances, getting quoted one price and charged another.

Then the sickness started. Two weeks up, two weeks down. My body was adjusting to India and India was winning.

In between I had my consulting work, which paid the bills but ate the hours.

Three months gone. Nothing built.

The fever broke around day five. Two weeks of coughing after that, but at least I could sit upright. And then, somehow, the neverending sickness just stopped.

But the time problem didn’t go away. By then most of the setup was done. We had furniture, internet, a routine.

I had no excuse left. And I was still not doing the thing I came here to do.

One afternoon in late April I looked at what I’d done that week.

• Set up a second server for the project I hadn’t even launched yet.

• Bookmarked 38 useful Reddit posts on how to build a startup.

• Cancelled old Canadian subscriptions.

• Reorganized my workspace.

I’d been busy every single day and yet I hadn’t moved an inch closer to why I left Canada.

The errands weren’t the problem. I was using them to hide from the actual work.

Putting myself out there. Writing something and publishing it where strangers could read it. Launching a product.

That was the thing I came here to do and I’d spent four months circling around it.

So I started making myself do the scary thing first each day. Some days it worked. Some days I ended up comparing mattresses online.

I’m writing this in mid-May. Five months in. I’ve posted on Reddit, started this blog, recorded a podcast. I’m building again. None of that existed a month ago.

Was moving here the right call? I think so. But not for the reason I expected. I thought the value of India was the low cost of living. More runway, less pressure. And that’s true.

What I didn’t expect was that moving here stripped away every excuse I had.

No job to hide behind. No chores or commute eating my free time. No “I’ll start when things calm down.”

Just me, my laptop and Claude, with nothing standing between me and success, except me.

It’s you against you.

- David Goggins

That has been the hardest thing about this move. Not the fevers. Not the traffic or the heat or the salesmen lying to my face.

The hardest part is what happens when you get everything you asked for and then have to deliver on it. The hardest part is realizing I’m the only thing in my way.

I’m still figuring that out. But last week my wife looked at me and said you seem different than you did in March.

I think she’s right. Something changed. I’m feeling optimistic again.

But the other day I realized I hadn’t had a conversation with anyone except my wife in over a week.

No family here. Few friends. No coworkers.

Just me and her and a city of 14 million people where I don’t speak the language.

That’s a different kind of problem. And one I’m still trying to fix.

It’s September 2019. I’m at a charity event at our COO’s house. The band is playing Wish You Were Here.

I look to my left. A beautiful woman. I tell her this is my favorite song by my favorite band.

We end up talking about Pink Floyd, and how they were on LSD when they made that album, and how psychedelics helped create the computer age.

That woman became my wife. We met right before COVID. A few months later and we probably never would have gotten together.

Six years later, we quit our jobs, packed up our dog, and moved from Canada to Bangalore.

This is how that happened.

I worked in banking for 14 years. Most days I would come up with ideas to improve things, bring them to a committee, get told no, and go back to my desk.

Sometimes I’d try a different committee. Also no. My job didn’t need to exist and I think I knew that for most of the time I was there.

By 2023 I was burned out, but not from overwork. From the opposite. I had almost nothing to do, and it was making me lose my mind. I started having panic attacks. Daily.

I think humans need some kind of challenge or something else fills the space. For me that something was anxiety.

My brain started making up things to be afraid of because it had nothing real to work on.

The whole time, I’d been watching people on Twitter building their own products. Indie hackers. @levelsio. Making a living on their own terms.

And I kept thinking, that’s cool, but I can’t do that. I can’t code. I don’t know how any of this works.

So I watched from the sidelines while my chest got tighter and the panic attacks got worse.

I took a six month leave. Started seeing a social worker weekly.

And somewhere in those six months I accepted something I’d been running from for years: I have to try building my own thing. Even if it fails. No matter how much it scared me.

I’d met guys at the bank in their 50s who had the same look. They’d had ideas once too. They’d played it safe instead.

I didn’t want to become them. And I really didn’t want my kids growing up around that miserable version of me.

My wife wanted the same thing. So the question was how.

Canada is expensive. Really expensive. We couldn’t afford to both quit and have no income.

I’d visited Bangalore in 2023 to meet her parents and I remember thinking, I could live here. At the time it was just a vacation feeling.

But the math made sense. Lower cost of living. Her family nearby. More time, less pressure.

I think it was more my idea than hers, honestly.

We decided in mid-2025. And then we told people.

My mom cried. My family said I was throwing away a good career. My friends looked at me like I was crazy.

“Why India? Do you know what it’s like there? You have a good thing going. Why would you risk that?”

One couple got it. A friend of mine and his wife. They’d quit their jobs a couple years earlier and moved to Costa Rica to start a marketing agency.

They’re earning more now than they did at their job and they seem happy, free. They said: yeah, go do what you gotta do. It’s gonna be hard but it’s worth it.

They were the only ones.

I understood why everyone was worried. But I couldn’t find the words to explain to them that staying felt like the bigger risk.

That the panic attacks weren’t going to stop on their own. That I could already see where I’d be in 10 years if I didn’t take a chance on me, and it looked worse than anything India could throw at me.

We live one life. I don’t want regrets.

So we booked the flights.

We landed in Bangalore on New Year’s day.

By early April I hadn’t built any products or worked on my business more than a cumulative 10 hours.

I was lying in bed with a fever, the third time I had gotten sick in the past 6 weeks, thinking: I gave up a six-figure job for this. What the hell am I doing?

But that’s a story for next time.