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The Indian middle-class dream was, once upon a time, very straightforward. The sum total of their wildest ambitions added up to a house, a small car and a telephone. And that was for the high achievers who had climbed their way to the top of the greasy pole.
For those who had greater dreams of material wealth, there was the world outside India. The motto was: young man go West or at least to the Middle East.
In my home state of Kerala in south India, anyone who graduated from university immediately turned their eyes towards the Gulf states like Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
It was the same story at the five elite Indian Institutes of Technology, which churned out thousands of engineers each year. About 60 per cent of the engineers who graduated from the IITs would head for further studies in the United States, and from there in the 1970s and 1980s many drifted towards Silicon Valley, which was only just emerging as the world's technology hotspot.
Every now and then, in earlier decades, there would be heated newspaper debates about what was called "the brain drain". Why were the country's brightest, best and most qualified - the doctors and the engineers especially - being lost and couldn't they be held back?
Should they be forced to work for a few years - a sort of mandatory national service - before being allowed to emigrate?
Today's picture couldn't be more different. The brain drain has metamorphosed magically into today's brain gain. As India's economy goes into explosive growth mode, thousands of these Indians are catching flights back from techno-paradises like Silicon Valley and Seattle.
They're returning to the Indian corporate world with expertise picked up over the years at cutting-edge industry leaders like Cisco, Google and Microsoft.
The ultimate dream, in fact, for many Indians living abroad, is to be posted back to India by their company: First World salaries and working conditions combined with Third World comforts like inexpensive chauffeurs and maids at home.
Nasscom, which represents the Indian software industry, reckons about 40,000 Indians have come back in recent years to jobs in hi-tech companies and the trickle has now turned into a flood.
"The number of people coming back has gone up significantly in the last year," says Rajeev Vasudeva, partner at manpower consultancy Egon Zehnder International.
It isn't just the software professionals who are returning. Industry's booming and hot new sectors are in take-off mode. As new hospitals open up, doctors and healthcare executives are in hot demand. And as new airlines take flight, aviation industry executives are in short supply. "We consciously look overseas to broaden the talent pool," says Vasudeva.
Adds Purvi Sheth, vice-president, Shilputsi Consultants: "The world is becoming a smaller place so in general one tends to look at talent from the outside to make sure you are not missing anything."
The fact is, overseas Indians do constitute a huge talent pool. Take the airline industry, for instance, where Rono Dutta, the former chief of United Airlines returned to head the much smaller Air Sahara in India.
Similarly, Rakesh Gangwal, a former president of US Airways, is now a backer of Indigo, a low-cost Indian airline. And Ford India is headed by Arvind Mathew, who spent 15 years with the automobile giant in different parts of the world.
Meanwhile, an entirely different scenario is unfolding in the Middle East where Indians, along with Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Filipinos, provide the cheap labour - and the executive talent - that keeps the region running.
As the price of oil shoots through the roof, Indians working in the region are being walloped by a double-whammy of rising rents and reduced purchasing power.
In places like Dubai, rents have tripled in the past two years.
"Many people are sending families back," says Suresh Nair, vice-president of RL Group, India's largest airline management company.
Nair worked in Dubai for a few years before returning to India.
"I thought there were better opportunities here. And I could make the same money in India," he adds.
That's not all. The falling dollar has taken many Middle East currencies down with it. The Indian rupee, by contrast, has been climbing. So, Indians in the Middle East - from executives to construction workers - have seen their salaries fall by almost 20 per cent when converted back into rupees.
So that's why Dubai witnessed the unusual spectacle of expatriate construction workers - a large number of them Indian - going on strike a month ago.
Now many of them are thinking of returning. Some of the bigger Indian real estate firms are eager to hire trained workers from the Gulf - where construction quality and safety standards are far higher than in India.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s there were well-known horror stories of Indians returning from the US and Britain.
Doctors would return to find under-equipped hospitals with poor hygiene and patients in corridors.
Similarly, executives felt stifled in family-run concerns where the owner called the shots and left little room for individual initiative.
After a few months they'd hotfoot it back to the First World and vow never to return.
Today that's not happening as much. Conditions in the corporate world have altered beyond recognition. Says Vasudeva: "There are enough instances of people who have relocated. People are more knowledgeable now about what they are returning to."
And it's easier to make a soft landing in India than before. In cities like Bangalore, there are gated housing estates aimed at Indians returning from the comforts of the First World. You might have to traverse a potholed road to get there, but once past the gates there are super-smooth roads and spacious housing.
And what about salaries? Wages have risen in the past five years and many executives returning from abroad can expect almost as much as they were earning in the US. "Salaries have come into line with other cultures. The numbers in terms of total cost to company look fairly similar to the Western World," says Sheth.
Oddly enough, however, Sheth says executives may find life in India more expensive than in the First World. Real estate prices have soared so it's more expensive to buy or to rent than in many places in the US. "A manager might be earning a good salary but has to spend much more," says Sheth.
Of course, it isn't just a one-way reverse migration. Today's global executives are constantly shuttling back and forth between continents. So a stint in Bangalore or Gurgaon may be followed by another in Shanghai or Sydney. That's part of the merry-go-round of globalisation.
