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Single women still an oddity in India

Vaneeta Ahuja, who was raised in California and is of Indian descent, relaxes in a coffee shop in New Delhi on Tuesday. Ahuja, a teacher at the American Embassy School, is one of thousands of people who have headed to booming India. But young, single Indian women face different challenges than their male peers. PHOTO: AFP

Along with the software gurus migrating to India's tech hubs as part of what some call a reverse brain drain, an unexpected lot -- young, single Indian women -- are heading back to India too.

While it is difficult to gauge just how many Indians are returning to India each year, a popular joke at parties these days is that the acronym NRI no longer stands for "non-resident Indian" but for "newly-returned Indian."

According to the technology industry body NASSCOM, about 40,000 returned in the five years from 2001 to last year to work in technology jobs in India. But they represent only the most visible face of a larger phenomenon in a wide range of sectors as India's economy booms.

A couple of years ago, Sumana Boothalingam, 30, finally took the step that she had been mulling for years. After five years working in public relations in New York City, she bought a one-way ticket to India and switched to journalism.

"New York got kind of boring," said Boothalingam, adding that the atmosphere in the US also changed, becoming less open after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But women who move to India without the protective shield of a husband and children can find that everything from renting an apartment to taking a walk is a challenging experience.

Boothalingam went from living with a roommate in New York City and taking the metro at all hours to living with her retired parents and worrying about how she would get home at night in a city considered very unsafe for women.

"I definitely had that deer-in-the-headlights look my first weeks here," recalled the wavy-haired Boothalingam, who has lived very little in India since moving at 16 with her family to England.

For women with few ties in the city, the logistics of finding a place to live are just as difficult.

"Basically they think a single woman is sort of a woman of ill-repute, like she'll have a stream of men coming back and forth," said Anita Jain, 32, a financial journalist, who looked at 40 places before landing an apartment.

In marriage-centric India, working women in their late 20s and 30s who work and live on their own are still viewed with curiosity, and sometimes with suspicion.

By virtue of leading lives that many in India would consider "alternative" -- centering around work and friends rather than marriage -- many have found it hard to befriend Indian women in their age group.

More "modest, down-to-earth people" lack experience in common with her, making it hard to truly relate to each other, said Vaneeta Ahuja, a teacher at the American Embassy School who was raised in California.

Yet, for all its difficulties, many of the women who have moved to Delhi said they had no regrets.

For Jain, India provided a sense of homecoming.

"I was drawn to a social intimacy people might have here or warmth that I didn't feel I had in the United States. I definitely did find that," she said.
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