Money, teams, and the tools I build at midnight.
I'm Amit — an Indian in the UAE, twenty years in banking technology. Three things I keep coming back to: making sense of money across two countries, leading engineering teams, and the small AI tools I build for myself and share here. One piece a week — the real numbers, the real trade-offs, the parts that went wrong.
Your Indian mutual fund gains may owe no tax in India. One UAE certificate makes it real.
The India-UAE treaty assigns mutual fund capital gains to the UAE alone — rate: zero. Three tribunal rulings, the AED 1,050 certificate, the break-even math, and how to claim it.
Read the story →NRI Finance
The questions that kept me up after I left India: is the money safer in rupees or dollars, what does the taxman in each country actually want, and am I quietly losing to the exchange rate every year? I dig up the real answers, keep the maths in plain sight, and leave the deciding to you.
How many days can you spend in India this year? Probably not the number in your head
The 182-day rule stopped being the whole story in 2020. The day-count ladder, the ₹15 lakh line, the zero-day rule, and what to check before a long India stay.
Your NRO account is paying ~31% tax. The India-UAE treaty caps it at 12.5%.
The India-UAE DTAA halves the withholding rate on NRO interest and dividends. ITR deadline to reclaim FY2025-26 excess is July 31. Here's the exact process, the break-even, and the Form 10F vs Form 41 transition that's tripping people up.
The dirham buys 26 rupees. Send money now, or wait?
The rupee went from 89.9 to a record 96.84 against the dollar in five months, and the dirham briefly bought more rupees than ever. Here's the math on what timing your transfer is still worth — and what actually matters more now.
For once, the dollar deposit is the interesting one
Indian banks are suddenly paying 6–7% on US dollar deposits — tax-free, with no rupee risk. Why that's a genuinely good deal for a UAE NRI, how it compares to your other options, and why the flashy '27%' version doing the rounds is a much riskier bet.
Engineering Leadership
Twenty years of leading engineering teams, mostly in banks, taught me that the hard part is rarely the code. This is where I write about the people part — plainly, and including the calls I got wrong.
Building with AI
Most of what I build starts with me being too lazy to do something twice. I make small AI tools to take the friction out of my own days, and when one turns out genuinely useful I clean it up and share it here — with the full story of how it came together and what it taught me.
Nothing else here yet — newest is up top.