Setting up a home office in India

India is quite a bit different from the United States, and it’s been hard for me to make the adjustment.

Things can take longer here and even the simplest things take lots of follow up.

There were two major holidays in the past two days, Eid and Ganipati, and as a result, a lot of the Mumbai shut down, including my internet and that of the internet cafe’s in my neighborhood, which were recently battered by the monsoon anyways. To get an idea of how widespread the shut-downs are, all of Mumbai’s newspapers shut down for lack of infrastructure: http://www.firstpost.com/ideas/newspapers-cant-afford-no-papers-days-anymore-74985.html. To put the shut down in perspective, remember that this is a city with over 25 million people. That’s twice as big as New York City. 25 times as big as San Francisco.

When the difficulty of remote working gets compounded with the difficulty of just being in India, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and feel ineffective.

Here’s the bare minimum of what it takes to start making a dent at the requirements to work remotely from India:

  • Reliable internet
  • Home and business internet will 100% go down. Several times/ day, in fact.
  • In addition to home internet, it is important to get mobile broadband from at least 2 separate companies because those go down also. They also have erratic connection speeds.
  • Uninterruptable Power Supply systems to plug your electronics into
    • Indian circuit breakers and surge protectors don’t work
  • An honest electronics shop
    • In Bandra, go to “Decent Electronics” on Hill Road, near Mt. Holi Hospital. Their prices for a replacement power supply for my macbook were half of what others were charging (even Cronos, which is supposed to be the Best Buy of India).

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