The ultimate Indian dream? To leave the country

Everyone is moving abroad. I stayed. And I don’t know if that’s brave or foolish.

There are two types of Indians:
those who leave, and those who wonder if they should have.

Lately, I feel like I live in a ghost town of old friendships.

My childhood best friend is in London, studying child psychology. Another just booked a one-way ticket to Dublin. A third left for Sydney last week.

My first-ever boyfriend has been in LA since 2017. My closest high school friend is heading to Chicago for an MBA—she promises she’ll come back, but I’ve heard that before. Even my closest building friend is likely moving to Canada by the end of the year.

At some point, the departures blurred together. Airport goodbyes turned into WhatsApp texts. Made it! became Sorry, just saw this—time zones are hell.

One by one, they all left. And I stayed.

I never thought I’d be the one left behind. That in the city I was born and raised in, I’d wake up one day to find it quieter, emptier, a little more unfamiliar.

Every night, before I sleep, I glance at my phone’s clock app.
Dublin. Melbourne. Chicago.
A digital graveyard of friendships,
always five hours too early or seven hours too late.

The shame of staying

I once saw a meme that said,

I'm from a country where leaving the country is the biggest achievement.

And it stayed with me. Because, in many ways, it feels true.

I don’t have a fancy master’s degree from a first-world country. I don’t have “global” experiences beyond what’s been available through a screen. And while I tell myself it doesn’t matter—that I am still enough—there are moments where that belief wavers.

Like last August.

A friend had just returned from a summer backpacking through Europe after finishing an academic year in the US. We were catching up at Kala Ghoda Café when a man at the next table, sketching in his notebook, overheard her mention Prague.

He immediately joined our conversation, animatedly discussing the city, their shared experiences, the best coffee spots.

He never once looked at me. Never acknowledged me.

I sat there, swirling my spoon in my cappuccino, waiting for a gap in the conversation. It never came. I wasn’t part of this world, and they didn’t need to say it out loud for me to know it.

The café was warm, the scent of freshly brewed coffee and toast hanging in the air, but I felt cold. Like I was standing outside on the dimly lit street being drenched in the late August downpour.

Later, in the cab ride home, I broke down. Called a friend and spiraled about not being enough. About how I would always be the one on the outside looking in. About how the world belongs to the ones who leave.

The conflicted feeling of staying vs leaving

I listen to my NRI friends complain about missing home—the food, the familiarity, the ease of belonging. I know it’s hard. Even moving to a city next door isn’t easy, let alone a whole new country.

I acknowledge their struggles, I allow them to rant, I sympathize with the loneliness of being away.

But then, I hear the same thing over and over again: If it weren’t for the money, I’d never stay here.

And that makes me sad.

Sad for them, for our economy, for the choices they have to make. For what they have to give up in order to get what they want.

And then there’s the diaspora, those who have lived abroad for decades, who still talk about India in rose-tinted, archaic clichés.

They romanticize a version of the country that doesn’t exist anymore. And to them, I want to quote Vir Das—Maidan me aa, nahin to gaand mara.

The privilege of leaving, the privilege of staying

One thing I’ve realized is that both leaving and staying require privilege—just different kinds.

The ones who move don’t all move the same way. Some leave with the luxury of choice:

• Funded by their parents

• Debt-free

• Pursuing courses they actually love

• Hopping on spring break trips to Italy & Spain

Others leave because they have no other choice:

• Scraping together enough for just first-year tuition

• Working two part-time jobs to survive

• Stuck in a cycle of visa renewals & uncertainty

And those who stay? That, too, is a privilege.

Because they can build a career for themselves without having to leave everything they care about behind. Because their family won’t get them arranged married against their will. Because they have the choice to decide they want to stay.

Privileged people leave.
Privileged people stay.

The privilege just takes different forms.

And maybe that’s what makes it all so complicated. Because success, movement, staying, leaving—none of it is as simple as it looks from the outside.

The economics of staying

I can say I want to stay, but I’m not oblivious to what that means.

I recognize that staying means navigating an economy where rent is high, salaries are stagnant, and everything—from groceries to healthcare—is getting more expensive.

I know that if I want to live comfortably, if I want to support the lifestyle I dream of, it’s going to be tough.

Every time I open my credit card statement, I think, maybe I should have left too. Maybe I should be converting my paycheck into dollars instead of hoping for a marginal salary increase that never comes.

I want to believe that staying is a choice. That I can build something here. That my life doesn’t have to be a compromise.

But I know it’s going to take work.

Mangoes and family lunches

I thought about all of this when my 10-year-old cousin visited India for the first time. She’s spent her entire life in Canada, but within a week of being here, she turned to me and sighed,

I wish we lived in India. Why did we ever move?

I looked at her tiny face, all scrunched up in dismay, and found myself trying to explain socio-economic realities to a fourth grader.

I told her how her parents had already done the hard work. How if she were raised here, she’d be doing everything in her power—since high school—to get out.

To study abroad. To build a life somewhere that paid better, where opportunities weren’t rationed. How she was already reaping the benefits of that decision without realizing it.

She blinked at me, unimpressed,

But the mangoes are better here. And all of you are here!

And honestly, I couldn’t argue with that. Sometimes, staying isn’t just an economic equation. Sometimes, it’s mangoes in the summer and family on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes, it’s home.

What it really means to be global

The feeling of “not being enough”? I’ve sat with it all through my mid-20s as I watched one by one all in my circle leave.

And now I have a new conclusion on that feeling:

A passport stamp does not make someone global. Living in a different country does not automatically make someone open-minded.

Many of the people I know who have moved abroad barely engage with the culture they now live in.

They mock traditions, refuse to learn the language, stick to their Indian circles, and hold on to their biases as tightly as ever. They live in these first-world countries but actively reject their new worlds—except, of course, for the money.

And then there’s me and some others like me.
Still here. Still in the country we were born in.

But if being "global" is about being curious, about being immersed in different perspectives, about making connections across borders—then I think we’ve done just fine.

I attended an online course at Seoul National University, learning Korean alongside classmates from Iran, Ecuador, Norway, and the Philippines.

I woke up at 5 am every morning (thanks, Korean Standard Time!) and enjoyed every minute of that intensive three-hour morning lecture with people who knew broken English, trying to improve their broken Korean, and thinking in a language none of the other students in the class could speak a word of.

A friend from Norway bought me bookmarks made of reindeer leather, then hesitated to send them because she wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it.

I have spent my life consuming stories from places I may never set foot in—books by Irish and Nigerian writers, poems by Korean feminists.

I’ve had friendships that spanned oceans, conversations that stretched across time zones, connections built entirely through words on a screen.

People from across the world have found my poetry (on tumblr), translated it into their languages (Italian, Filipino, Portuguese) and sent me messages about how my words resonated with them.

So who is really more "global"?

The one who physically leaves, or the one who allows the world to seep into them, no matter where they are?

Role models who never left

For a long time, I thought all the greats had to leave. That success, especially as a writer, meant exiting India and looking back at it through the safe distance of nostalgia.

The authors I grew up reading and admiring—Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie—were all part of the diaspora. Their stories, no matter how deeply tied to India, were often shaped by the vantage point of having left.

But in the last few years, something changed.

I started reading more and more Indian authors who never left. Writers who live in the same cities they write about. Writers whose stories don’t have to cross an ocean to be told.

Jerry Pinto, who still lives in Mumbai. His Mumbai. Not a memory of it, not a reconstructed version from abroad, but the one he still walks through every day.

Rupleena Bose, writing about Delhi and Kolkata from within Delhi and Kolkata.

There’s something about reading them that feels… steadfast. Rooted. Defiant, even.

It made me realize that staying doesn’t mean being stuck. That there are stories to be told right here, by people who never needed to leave to make them feel important.

That maybe I don’t either.

Staying

There are two types of Indians:
those who leave, and those who wonder if they should have.

And maybe, just maybe, those of us who stay aren’t wondering anymore.

Which one are you? And how do you feel about that?