BackToIndia is a project created by Mani Karthik and is owned, run, maintained, polished, updated, cleaned, coded, written, paid for, and everything else by himself (even writing this in the third person).
It all started in 2017 when he was working in US and started thinking about moving back to India. There were a lot of resources online but most were either outdated or all over the place.
Frustrated, furious, and overly dramatic, Karthik took things in his own hands. And he hid in a faraway dungeon (living room sofa) and started coding left and right. Flares blew up on his laptop, magical potions were added.
Several dosas and coffees later, Karthik came up with this website. He threw it into the wild and went to sleep.
Sounds cliche, but when he woke up, there were messages on WhatsApp, strangers calling him, his inbox flooded.
A perplexed Karthik frantically tried to save his server from crashing, as traffic to the site exploded.
Several hours later, he knew his destiny. He made it his mission.
“To help NRIs return back to their roots – India.”
Several months later, Karthik moved back to India and through his website helped hundreds return to India by helping them plan their move and help connecting with others who did.
After several hundred dollars spent, plenty of hours breaking keyboards and answering questions, he is a happy man today, having relocated back to India, to Kochi – his hometown.
Today, Karthik helps thousands of NRIs wanting to move back to India by helping them connect with others who did and answering their questions on pretty much everything about returning to India.
That includes answering five people each day make the toughest decision in their lives. Whether to bring their TVs to India or not.
You can contact Karthik here.
He is known to be friendly with a selective number of people, who he calls “supporters”. Apparently, they share the vision with him and support him by making generous donations to the project here.
Some people laugh off when he says that he bought the backtoindia.com domain for $2,500.
Makes him cry.
He did a TEDx talk also about this whole story. It’s much less dramatic than what you read above though.
BackToIndia has been featured in many press and media publications ever since.