Rana Rosen, center, of Chicago, who now works in India, tries on a pair of shoes on an outing with her friend Neelam Verjee, left, Jan. 31 in Mumbai, India. In spite of a global recession and its own financial woes, India still remains a relative land of opportunity further corroborated by the National Foreign Trade Council survey, which found that India replaced Germany last year as one of the top four countries where multinational companies planned to move employees.

Chicago ? Rana Rosen can hear the stress in her friends’ voices when she calls home from India. It’s getting increasingly difficult for them to get by, they tell her.

So she finds herself downplaying details about her new life in Pune, India, where she moved four months ago to take a job. She has a driver and a housekeeper, both common perks for corporate types there, even younger ones like her. At age 31, she’s already a senior manager.

“I almost feel guilty telling them how well it is going,” says Rosen, a former freelance writer who’s now in charge of setting up an internal training program for Mindcrest, a Chicago-based company that does outsourced legal work in India for American firms. “But the truth is, I’m busy, thriving and eager as ever.”

That’s no small accomplishment, especially in a global recession. But recruiters, business owners and employees themselves say that despite its own financial woes, India is, so far, a relative land of opportunity.

Earlier this month, one of the country’s leading financial newspapers went as far as declaring 2009 “The Year of India.” Word of such optimism is spreading to this country, where Stephanie Bartosiewicz lost her job at a New York City management consulting firm last fall. A few weeks ago, she picked up and moved to India, a country that had always intrigued her.

“It sounds like a naive thing to say — but it feels like I can’t lose,” says the 29-year-old, who’s looking for work in Mumbai and amazed how cheaply she can live there. “If nothing else, at least it’s a grand adventure.”

Lisa Johnson, director of consulting services with Cartus Corporation, a global relocation firm based in Connecticut, has heard the buzz, too, and believes there’s something to it: “India is one of our hot topics,” she says.

An annual survey done for Cartus and the National Foreign Trade Council found, for instance, that India replaced Germany last year as one of the top four countries where multinational companies planned to move employees. The other three were the United States, China and the United Kingdom.

Rosen’s company has hired four other Americans to work in India in recent months, an unprecedented number.

“The American dream, as such, is there,” says Ganesh Natarajan, president of Mindcrest. “I’m not saying it’s gone from here, but it’s that same kind of feeling.”

In this economy, he and others say they’re getting more applications than ever from Americans looking for work in India. And that, they say, matches well with a demand for management skills that’s been growing in India over the past few years.

“There’s no shortage of entry-level types of people for relatively routine kinds of jobs in India,” says Colin Gounden, the CEO of Grail Research, a data-mining company with offices in several countries, India included.

“But for the more skilled jobs, the more knowledge-intensive it is — those have been consistently in short supply in terms of talent.”

The irony is that much of India’s top talent has come to countries such as the United States to get experience. But that, too, is changing as India’s economy has grown.

Anindya Ghosh is an India native who worked in Phoenix for a major financial firm until February 2008.

“It was a good life in Phoenix. But did I come here to have a good life? Or to climb up the corporate ladder?” asks the 36-year-old executive.

He says he felt stagnant in his job and sensed that the U.S. economy was slowing. So he moved with his wife and young daughter to take a job in Grail Research’s office in New Delhi. He now makes slightly less than he did in his old job, but says the low cost of living, the chance to grow in his career and the proximity to family more than make up for that.