Chapter 9

2019/20

2019 was a pivotal year — a time of hard truths and severing ties.

There are three foundational pillars in a relationship: respect, trust, and commitment. In the absence of any of these, I believe a relationship is destined to fail. My relationship with Nat was time-tested and built on deep trust, and there was no lack of respect. But ever since we started dating in 2012, she had always been wary of the societal barriers standing in the way of marrying me. She had once left Kochi to put an end to it. Ignoring her decision and forcing the relationship back together by following her to Chennai was a mistake. Even though I won her over a second time in 2016, she harbored lingering doubts about our future. When the moment of reckoning arrived, those ignored doubts resurfaced as decisive factors.

Throughout our year living together, opinions clashed frequently. Compounding that, my feelings for her had subtly shifted from romantic to mentor-mentee. My professional reputation was on the line, and all I cared about was her succeeding as a software engineer — pushing us forward at the expense of nurturing a loving relationship. This conflict of interest suffocated the romance. That was the second problem.

But the root issue was failing to realize the sheer effort required to rekindle a relationship at its lowest ebb. Living together puts a romantic relationship to the ultimate test, exposing every hairline crack. Couples have to actively work through issues to survive. For both of us, it was our first time living with a partner.

These pressures piled up over time. After a year of trying to make it work, realizing we couldn't bridge our differences, and weighing the immense pressure she faced to marry within her community, we mutually decided to separate and move on.

The silver lining is that after four years of rigorous mentoring, she was fully equipped to take on the tech world independently — a fact we are both immensely proud of to this day. I am glad that our time together wasn't for nothing.

With the breakup, it felt like it was time for a complete reset, which gave me a major push to leave London for good. There was also a structural catalyst behind the move. It took me three years in London to realize that my visa (Tier 2 ICT) did not qualify for residency after five years, unlike General visas, despite paying the exact same rates of tax, National Insurance, and health surcharges. In the chaos of chasing career success and romance, I hadn't paid attention to residency rules initially. But when you pour so much of your hard-earned money into a system over years, you eventually ask where it’s all going. When governments constantly tweak immigration and tax frameworks, you begin to question your place in the system.

The answer was stark: Great Britain’s imperial peak was long gone, and its economic power was declining. To fund its vast social schemes, capital had to come from somewhere. What genius policy: import skilled workers who generated immense value and replenished public funds while remaining permanently ineligible to claim social benefits. The ICT visa was a masterclass in extracting economic value without offering stability. It bound immigrants to pay into a system they could never call home; if they left or were forced out, they forfeited every contribution they made. Many employers exploited this framework to the hilt, adhering to rigid salary caps to maintain a two-tier workforce. Watching others perform the exact same engineering role on General visas secure their path to permanent residency while I remained permanently sidelined was my breaking point. I realized I was in a dead-end lane. I resigned immediately and moved back to India, choosing uncertainty over exploitation. It boggled my mind that no one talks about how these systems are engineered.

Most people migrate for economic survival without ever looking under the hood of these systems. I hope more people critically scrutinize these frameworks before making irreversible decisions about their lives. On July 31, 2019, Nat dropped me off at Heathrow one last time.

A month later, Nat left London for good and returned to Chennai. She spent a few years advancing her career there, earned a promotion, and eventually married and moved to Dubai, where she now lives happily. She aced her interviews out there and secured a great role — something that makes me deeply proud as her former mentor. She is also the mother of a wonderful child. We stayed in touch for a while; on one of my trips to Dubai a few years later, we met up and lamented how things might have turned out if I had been more emotionally grounded. But we both made peace with our choices. She was a bold, daring woman unfortunately constrained by a family terrified of social ostracization. Life taught me that society bends toward the bold, and conventional ideals easily crumble in the face of confident individuals who challenge them — though they readily crush the gullible. Our paths diverged permanently after that.

As I was wrapping up my London life, Delivery Hero reached out with a job opportunity. Having never heard of the company, I approached their interview loop with zero pretense, answering questions with blunt, unfiltered honesty. Figuring I had zero chance, I casually accepted remote work for a startup instead. To my utter surprise, Delivery Hero came back with an official offer: a Senior Engineer position with their Austrian business unit, backed by a significant salary hike over my London pay (not counting bonuses and stock options). It was an offer I couldn't refuse. I negotiated a bit higher, and — fueled partly by my long-standing fandom of Die Mannschaft ever since I won a school bet during the 2002 World Cup — I decided to move to Germany. It was the first time I had ever been actively headhunted.

Moving countries is a powerful lever to accelerate net worth, and mine spiked by nearly 100% — though in reality, it was mostly just normalizing my compensation after years of being underpaid relative to market rate. The transition window between leaving one company and joining the next is arguably the most stress-free time in a software engineer's life. I used it to sharpen my skills and prep for the move.

Saying "I moved to Berlin" is a massive oversimplification. Relocating across borders requires wading through an ocean of bureaucracy. It starts with the interview gauntlet: statistically speaking, if an engineering loop has five rounds, you mathematically face a 1/32 chance of clearing it on any given attempt. Surviving those odds was incredible on its own. Then came the red tape. As if proving technical competence wasn't enough, securing a National Visa required an endless trail of documentation: getting a fresh copy of my birth certificate from my native village, police clearance certificates, degree authentications and official translations (ZAB approval), health insurance proof, and Zav-Zusage letters. And that was just to get into Germany. Once there, I had to convert the national visa into an EU Blue Card, which offered a fast track to residency in 33 months with B1 German proficiency, or 21 months with C1.

After spending three months in India and making multiple trips to Bangalore for visa processing, I finally relocated to Berlin in November 2019. Governments love throwing around the word "talent," but talent is just a glorified word for labor. If it were purely about talent, they wouldn't erect bureaucratic mazes to keep people out.

Having spent my entire working life sharing cramped spaces, I was completely done with hunting for the cheapest room. I wanted to break out of extreme frugality and adopt a balanced, sustainable approach to living. I invested in a great studio apartment in Friedrichshain, reasonably close to the city center, leaving behind the economic isolation of cheap neighborhoods on the periphery. For the first time, I started living a genuinely decent life.

At Delivery Hero, I found an exceptional team of engineers who embodied the company's motto — "We are heroes because we care" — while operating at an elite technical level. Just a few months in, I was tapped to lead the team in delivering a high-visibility project. I felt really at home there. The work was high octane, but the people were truly great humans. I worked for the Austrian wing of the business which had a 20 or so strong Engineering team from all around the world all who gelled extremely well. Our favourite time of the week was the friday evening get-together at Nik's terrace in Mitte.

After temporarily crashing in a friend's vacant apartment on Winterthurstraße I later rented a 1-bed flat in Friedrichshain for a steep €1,000 a month.

In 2020, everything was about to change.