I’m angry. So I’m writing.

Trying to process what I’m seeing unfold in India.

I’ve built my life around one word: freedom.

The freedom to choose where I live. The freedom to work on my own terms. The freedom to travel, question the default, and build a life that feels like mine.

It’s what I write about here every week. This week I can’t.

For the last few days, I’ve been thinking about a much more fundamental kind of freedom.

The freedom to speak.
The freedom to question.
The freedom to disagree.
The freedom to protest.
The freedom to hold those in power accountable.

And I’ve been feeling angry, agitated, afraid and sad about the direction I see my country moving in.

I know this is not what you subscribed for. Some of you will disagree with what follows. Some might unsubscribe. That’s okay. Because if I’m going to build my work around the idea of freedom, I can’t only talk about it when freedom means working from a mountain town.

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For the last few days I’ve been sitting in my room scrolling through clips from Delhi, and I’ve welled up more times than I can count.

Students protesting peacefully. Police acting against them. Injured people showing up at the protest site again the next day anyway. Thousands gathered at Jantar Mantar on July 20, demanding accountability over alleged paper leaks and irregularities in competitive exams, asking a single question: will someone be answerable for this?

I kept wondering how you watch all of this and simply go about your day. I couldn’t.

Partly it was anger. Partly fear. But also, pride, at watching young people show up and demand answers from institutions far more powerful than them.

And shame, at realising how little I have participated in our democracy myself.

I’m ashamed to write that I’ve never voted.

I’ve had the privilege of a life so mobile and so comfortable that I could treat the whole thing as somebody else’s job. I always had reasons. I was somewhere else. I was travelling. One vote wouldn’t change anything anyway.

And if I had voted in 2014, I would probably have voted for the BJP. And I’d have been wrong. I’d have changed my mind by the next term.

I’m telling you this because I’m not writing from some morally superior position of having figured everything out. I’m writing as someone who looked away for a long time and can’t anymore. Changing your beliefs as you learn more, experience more and see the consequences of those beliefs is not weakness. That’s the whole point of thinking for yourself.

And perhaps democracy doesn’t work when all of us wait for somebody else to protect it.

None of this touches me directly.

Paper leaks don’t affect my livelihood. Forests being cleared doesn’t move me out of my house. I don't belong to a tribal community fighting to keep its land. I could stay quiet and lose nothing today.

But students taking their own lives after those leaks does affect me. Tribal communities losing everything in the name of development does. Animals losing the forests they live in does.

I don’t want my definition of caring to end at the boundary of what affects me personally. Because eventually, all of us will need systems that work. Institutions we can trust. People willing to speak when something unjust happens to us.

We are not separate from one another simply because the consequences haven’t reached our doorstep yet.

And if you support the current government, stay with me for one more paragraph.

You and I want the same thing. We both want this country to do well. We’re disagreeing about the route, not the destination.

I don’t have a political affiliation. I’m just unable to find a reason in which violence against peacefully protesting students is acceptable. And all anyone is asking for is dialogue. Why is there time for everything except a conversation with your own people?

Holding the BJP government accountable does not automatically make someone pro-Congress or pro-CJP. Criticising a government does not make someone anti-India. And supporting a political party should not mean defending everything it does.

Governments are not countries.

India is bigger than whoever happens to govern it.

A government is elected by its people, to serve its people, to answer to them, and to make amends when things go wrong.

You and I may disagree completely about which party should run this country and still want exactly the same thing:

A safer, fairer, more prosperous India.

In fact, disagreement is supposed to be part of democracy. The problem begins when disagreement itself becomes unacceptable.

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I’ve never said this publicly, but I love this country.

Despite travelling extensively, I’ve never seriously wanted to leave India permanently, even though I know I could, and even though my life would be easier elsewhere. I’ve built an entire existence around location independence and still chose to stay. Loving India is precisely why I want better from the people who govern it.

You can love your country and question its government. You can be proud of where you come from and frightened by where it’s heading. You can change your political beliefs when new information changes your understanding of the world. That’s not disloyalty. That’s thinking.

This week has also forced me to ask what I’m willing to do beyond being angry on the internet. So I’m starting with something embarrassingly basic.

I’m going to vote.

I’ve promised myself that no matter where I am in the world during the next election, I’ll come back and cast my vote.

Will my single vote change the result? Probably not. But that’s not the point. Participating is.

For years, I thought freedom meant having agency over my own life. And it does. I’ve worked hard to build that freedom for myself. But personal freedom exists inside something bigger.

The freedom to question power without fear. To disagree publicly. To protest peacefully. To ask the people we elect:

What are you doing? And why?

That’s the freedom that makes all the others possible, including mine.

So today I’m not thinking about the freedom to work from the mountains.

I’m thinking about how dangerous it is to assume that something we’ve always had is something we can never lose.

Love & strength,
Kanak