Photo by Andras Vas on Unsplash

While working for Accenture in Bangalore I landed in the U.S. on a 2-month sabbatical so I could spend some time with my new husband who was working for Oracle at the time in San Francisco. We’d known each other and dated for four years before getting married but I still wanted to spend some time with him as a newly married couple.

While on leave, I attended a webinar by the Accenture Labs team hosted from Palo Alto, CA and found the particular area of their work to be interesting. The research team at Accenture Labs was trying to tackle the hairy proposition of capturing client requirements in an objective manner and I had just spent some time the past year doing the same in Zurich for Accenture’s client UBS Asset Management. I thought I could lend a hand, and more importantly, help strike up a synergy between Accenture Labs, U.S. and Accenture Bangalore, which, incidentally, had started its own brand-new lab just months prior.

I decided to visit Accenture Palo Alto to discuss the prospect face to face. I was excited, not only for the possibilities that an alliance across the shores could bring, but also selfishly for an opportunity for me to be placed at the labs at Palo Alto thus allowing me to join my husband at the same geographical location.

There was one hitch: I had to make the trip to Palo Alto from San Francisco by myself as it was a weekday and my husband would be at work. So what, you say. Well, for those of you who are unaware, driving in India is a much different game than driving in the U.S. While I was very comfortable driving in Bangalore during peak traffic the concept of driving in America was completely new to me, not the least of which is the fact that the two countries drive on the opposite sides of the road. Highway speeds in India rarely go beyond 45-50 miles per hour. City traffic manages a mere 5-10 miles per hour speed during rush hour.

Palo Alto is in the heart of the Bay Area, the famous Silicon Valley where all the tech entrepreneurs thrive and it is a solid 30-minute drive from the city of San Francisco, specifically, the South of Market (SoMa) area where my husband resided then. There was no Uber or Lyft in those days and cabs would have been difficult to get given the suburban environment.

So, armed with my valid India Drivers’ License and a printed map of highway 280 (this was just before the time of maps on smartphones), I rented a Mitsubishi Galant from nearby Avis car rental and was on my way. Highway 101 would have been a far more challenging drive as it is usually quite busy. 280 was easier. But, I had never driven on the freeway in the U.S. before and my knuckles did turn white as I navigated high-speed traffic to make my way to the Accenture Labs. It was a scary experience, nevertheless made exhilarating due to a productive conversation and a solid prospect of a U.S.- India labs collaboration driven by the value that the offshore resources would bring in providing extra bandwidth to the researchers onshore.

The reassignment to the U.S. offices did not materialize for me, mostly because of the complexities of procuring a work visa. You see, I had a spouse visa back then but the U.S. did not allow spouses of high skilled workers on H1B to work. Spouses still can’t work unless their primary visa holder partners have already applied and are waiting for their Green Card. If such a hurdle hadn’t been there, I may have been successful in converting the afternoon meeting into a successful placement interview. Who knows.

But, at the end, job or not, the experience of driving long distance on a freeway in a foreign country for the first time to meet with like-minded professionals and assist them in furthering their mission made me more confident in my abilities. It also helped establish the belief that progress cannot come from taking the easy route. You have to get out of your comfort zone and do something white-knuckle terrifying to make a difference.