On Leaving the US and More
Why I left the US, how it's been, and why I still need to write about what's unfolding in that icky superpower.
When I decided to leave the US, it was still the summer of Kamala and brat memes and pop culture references I had to google to understand - yes, I was still in my twenties that summer.
It was a time when Liberals felt like they had the upper hand, that they could still win by ignoring workers and off-shoring jobs and watch while private equity shored up their pockets.
Democrats thought that they will win just because they weren’t Trump.
They continued supporting the big corporations, propping up neo-liberalism, and championing for democracy, all while maintaining a facade of caring about women, immigrants and the poor. (Plus, strategically ignoring a genocide of course)
How could they lose?
Well, I had my doubts.
First, America was nowhere close to ready to see a woman in power, especially a woman of color.
Second, Democrats had strayed so far from their working class origins that they now represented a very small portion of educated urban liberals but thought they had the masses behind them. Oh, the hubris.
Third, all the billionaires were backing Trump. They wanted more economic de-regulation, the complete overhaul of the judiciary and anything else that could get in the way of their millions.
But no matter, American politics has been reliably predictable in one undeniable way: where the money goes so do the votes.
I didn’t want to be a doomer, but living in America was akin to fighting a losing battle every single day, and one that I was finding increasingly hard to care about. I wanted out, I wanted to be in my own country, have access to capital, and some modicum of rights again.
I had several other personal and professional reasons but more than anything I felt that the time was ripe to make a move. I didn’t want to stay and fight for survival in a nation that was keen to detain people like me and use our labour for free.
Also, I read Project 2025 and I was not happy.
And so, by the end of last year we packed up and moved back home. Which is partly why I have not been spending as much time writing for this newsletter as I should have. The other reason being that putting 2000+ miles between me and America has given me space to breathe and relax in a way that I haven’t been able to in the decade that I spent studying and working in the US.
My muscles loosened up, and most of the unacknowledged stress my body and mind had been holding onto dissipated into the humid but welcoming air of Chennai. It was a relief, not to worry about the US elections, not to think about Trump and his cronies, not to feel constantly bad about what my tax dollars where funding in the Middle East.
I felt good, but inevitably reality caught up to me, in the form of my editor and some dear readers who approached me to write about what’s going on.
The truth is that unfortunately, what unfolds in America has this annoying tendency to unleash tremors across the world. As we see with the Tariffs debacle, nowhere is truly safe as long our economic systems remain under American imperialism.
And so, I have dived back into learning and writing about what is going in America and what it means for the rest of us.
But, there is still hope.
When all the Tech oligarchs ran to Trump and swore unyielding allegiance, I thought well of course, Tech was bound to turn Republican at some point, surely the people working for Tech, the ones that matter, the white collar workers will not stay silent.
And they have not, multiple organizations have sprung up to oppose the ongoing authoritarian regime.
It was heartening to hear about Vaniya Agrawal and Ibtihal Aboussad, members of an employee coalition called “No Azure for Apartheid“, who bravely called out the Microsoft C-Suite about the genocide unfolding in Palestine and how Microsoft has been actively supporting the Israeli army and are complicit in its crimes.
The Tech Workers Coalition is another global grassroots organization working to empower tech workers and strengthen unions. They have been organizing to speak out for Immigrant labor rights and recognize the indenture like nature of the life that many tech workers on H1Bs are forced into.
The onslaught against both Federal and private company workers, the never-ending layoffs, the unnecessary paycuts, the loud dismantling of labor rights, and the slew of corporations including Disney and Google that were delighted to roll back on their DEI pledges, and finally go back to not having to pretend to care about “the others“, show us one thing:
The lines have been clearly drawn.
The only way to fight back is to educate, organize, and unionize to fight back against the oligarchy.
And the fight has to happen not just in the US, but across nations. Universal solidarity against billionaire capitalism may be the only way to save our dying planet and our local communities.