R2I - HOLY COW!! NOW WHAT???

Once the big part of mentally making the decision was done, things started shifting to higher gear. while a lot of uncertainty was resolved, there were many new questions and challenges ahead. however since this was a well treaded path, most of the questions should have already been solved, or so our thinking went. we first started making a list of things to do or rather the set of questions that needed to be answered. they were along the lines of :
- what to do with our house - rent or sell? once that decision is made what are the next set of things to take care of.
- what to do with US investments? transfer to india or keep it as is? If transfer, what is the best way, how to get money back in us if required, etc.
- what type of bank account do we set up in india?is there anything that we need to do from US to set things up?
- tax implication of indian income, etc.
- what to get from US as opposed to buying in india? furniture, appliances, electronics, clothes, toys, children books, etc
- how much stuff will fit in a 40ft container?
- places to rent in bangalore close to work
- school for M
- things to do to close shop in US. change of address at a bunch of places, account closures, irs, ins, etc.

bangalore is a new city for us and we hardly know anyone there. arti has 2 very close friends whom we had met when we had gone there in june. but other than that we didnt know anyone, nor did we know the city. so we 1st started by pinging our friends that had returned to india in the recent past. for most of the questions, we got very good answers. for others we had to do our own investigation and it was very confusing. As an example, which type of bank account to open in india and how to efficiently transfer money back and forth. most people were very unclear about this and in some cases they were indian citizens and so different set of rules applied to them (presumably). this took up a lot of my time and even now, after being in india for 3 weeks, i don't have all the answers. but the higher level question has been answered and some of the details are unknown. so they have been put on the back burner. 
simultaneously we met with our realtor to get clarity on sell vs rent for our US house. We decided to go with the rent option and that meant less work right away. The work would start when we had clarity on our move date and when we could have our house in a shape for potential tenants to take a look.
we then got decent clarity on what to take from US and what not to take. soon we started taking an inventory of every room in our house and flagging each item in one of the following categories :
- sell
- donate/give away
- take to india via checked in luggage
- take to india via air shipment
- take to india via sea shipment
- tbd

in the 1st few days we did 2-3 rooms and really didn't progress much on this level of details for some of the other rooms.
In the meanwhile we were getting more clarity on arti's compensation package, move date, types of shipments, etc. Pretty soon it was clear that we would have to move within 2 months. the tentative move was set for end of august with arti joining amazon india on the 5th of sept. However there was one big hitch - OCI cards for arti and kids. I already had mine. The site mentioned that it would take about 8-10 weeks to get the OCI card as well as the lifelong visa on US passport. We had applied for Arti's OCI in april and the application was blocked for some reason. So Arti had to put the application on hold and rush to SFO to get a indian visa for our earlier trip to India. We didn't know what surprise lay in store for us this time. Since there was a bit of uncertainty in our departure date, we couldn't proceed on many things - when can tenants move into our house, when can the movers come, etc. There were many instances where we longed for a todo list where we could discard the ones that didnt apply for us and find out details about the ones that we cared about. However none of the forums that we scouted had anything comprehensive or detailed. Also most of the posts on the R2I forums are outdated and some of the things no longer apply. In the next few posts I will detail our experiences with some of the things that we had to spend significant amount of time/energy on.....