SINGAPORE: After six years of building a life in Singapore, one foreign talent is packing his bags for the United Arab Emirates (UAE). But before boarding that flight, he wanted to say one thing to the country that helped shape some of the most important years of his life: ‘Thank you for making a boy from India feel like he genuinely belonged.’
In a post on the singaporespeaks forum, the Indian national recalled arriving in Singapore for the first time.
“I landed at Changi as a 22-year-old only child who had never truly been on his own,” he said. “I’d travelled before, but always with the safety net of family, of familiarity, of India. This was different. This was sink or swim.”
And swim he did, although not without swallowing a fair bit of water along the way.
Back then, life was less about sightseeing and more about survival. For the first year and a half, his schedule was packed from morning to night. He would head to his internship during the day, attend classes in the evening, then spend his nights tackling assignments.
“It was 1.5 years of 7 am-to-10 pm days,” he wrote. “I was grinding to earn the right to stay.”
A difficult decision during the pandemic
When the pandemic arrived and the job market collapsed, he found himself weighing a difficult choice. He could return to India or remain in Singapore and hope for the best.
“Going back to India felt like admitting defeat, and staying felt like staring into uncertainty every single day,” he said, recounting how conflicted he felt during that time.
With no guarantees that things would work out, he chose to stay. It was a gamble that could easily have gone the other way, but he decided to hang on and see it through.
Fortunately, the risk paid off. He landed his first full-time job and began building a life for himself in Singapore.
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