I Got Out. That Is the Problem.

Very close to my home in India, people my age — my generation — are getting hurt for wanting something better. I am half the world away, worrying about exams and apartments. That's where my problem begins.

Not with the distant, abstract concern reserved for a country you were born in but no longer live in. Not with the convenient patriotism that shows up on national holidays and disappears the moment the country becomes hard to defend.

This is guilt. The kind that sits quietly in my chest and makes ordinary problems feel obscene. People I could have known. People who sat in classrooms like mine, on benches like mine. People who could have been me.

Because I did get away. I can say that plainly: I made it out of the place many of the people I grew up around are still trying to survive. And now, watching from another country, I feel the strange, specific guilt of someone who escaped a fire while knowing there are still people inside.

I am not even sure what I am guilty of. Leaving. Surviving. Having the audacity to complain about a bad day when somewhere else people are fighting battles that could have been mine.

When I was a child, adults loved hearing that I wanted to be a doctor. A good answer. A safe, respectable one. Everyone wants their child to help people — just not in ways that involve danger.

My friends back home want to protest. Their parents are telling them not to go, because they could get hurt. I understand that. What parent would send their child into danger willingly? But I keep circling one question: what if it were their own child being harmed, silenced, denied justice? Would please stay home still be enough?

Because this is the contradiction we've somehow normalised: we want our children to grow up and change the world. We just don't want them to do anything dangerous while changing it. We want doctors who save lives, not citizens who risk their own. We want brave children. We just want their bravery to be convenient.

Then there is the government. I have disliked it for a long time, but watching how it has handled this has produced something past ordinary anger — the specific disbelief of watching people in power and thinking, is this really the best you can do? A protest is not a foreign invasion. Citizens demanding accountability are not an enemy army. And if your first instinct when your people are angry is to silence them rather than ask why, the problem probably isn't the people.

I know I am speaking from a position of privilege. I am not there. I am safe — with a student visa, a new country, a new life, the ability to watch all of this through a screen. I got to leave. Other people did not.

I did not choose to be the one who got out. I am allowed to laugh, to study, to worry about my future without every worry being haunted by the place I came from.

And yet I refuse to pretend I am disconnected from it.

I remember the classrooms. The benches. The people. The distance between them and me is not as large as I sometimes need it to be.

I am not writing this because I have a solution. I am not writing this because posting about something makes anyone brave. I am writing it because I cannot look at what is happening and simply decide that distance has made it none of my concern.

I still don't know what to do with that.

Whether the guilt is instructive or just guilt. Whether staying uncomfortable is a form of loyalty, or just the only thing left I know how to give people I can't otherwise reach.

Maybe I got out.

Maybe that is the problem.

Maybe it is also the reason I cannot look away.