It is not often that one comes across an article as provocative as the one recently written by Abhinanda Bhattacharyya. At first, we didn’t bother reading it, we thought it was just another predictable rant – ‘India sucks, I can’t deal with the issues here, so I am going to run away to some other country where my feminism finds a comfortable couch.’ To all this, we would normally just say, ‘Great, good for you, don’t care.’ The struggle of being a woman in India is concerned, the struggle is too real, so if you want to go on a privileged hunt for greener pastures, great. However, many women think like Bhattacharyya does, so we decided to respond in the spirit of genuine engagement.In her article, Bhattacharyya explains, in detail, why she chose to become an “American woman”. She claims that she did not want to return to India because our country has failed its women, and adds that she felt “oppressed” by the “weight of being female in a country that didn’t know what to do with its women.” Bhattacharyya’s story is neither unique nor perplexing. In fact, the most confusing aspect of the article is why two major sites decided to publish it.As graduate students at an elite university in a crime-ridden US, both of us have heard some version of this story at one point or another. Many of our family members have questioned our decision to return to India for research and asked us why we want to return to this ‘unsafe’, ‘crowded’, ‘dirty’ and ‘good for nothing’ country for our post-PhD plans.We always answer with versions of ‘Each country has its own problems’, ‘Do you even how messed up America is?’ or ‘My wish, what’s your problem?’ Mind you, we are not ‘proud Indians’ – our opinions, actions and dietary habits are apparently considered ‘anti-national’. And yet, in situations like this, we find ourselves sharing space with the RSS. Neither they nor we have any sympathy for Bhattacharyya – but for extremely different reasons.While some people have criticised Bhattacharyya’s piece because she paints India in a bad light, we agree with her on this point – India is no heaven for women. We know that there are systemic issues with women’s safety and that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Harassment, stalking and eve-teasing are part of everyday life for those of us who take public transport and walk the streets on a daily basis. Bhattacharyya acknowledges as much:“But, the issue with systemic oppression and cultural bias is that change is not enough. You have to undo the damage already done. You have to look inwards, and ask the harder questions. What were the messages Bollywood had been teaching us for decades? What had our history taught us about men, and women? What were our own biases?”However, she follows that up with, “Driving to the airport in Mumbai in January of 2013, I decided not to come back.” Is this the supposed solution to the “systemic oppression” this author had so rightly alluded to just a couple of sentences earlier? How did an article about the visceral experience of feeling oppressed fail to discuss the potential for collective action, everyday tactics of survival, activism or solidarity. We cannot make sense of how this entire article was written without once thinking of the countless women who – for better or worse – do not have the option of exiting India, or even their abusive marriages. This article, billed as a ‘woman’s narrative’ ignores the work that fellow women have been doing at various levels to undercut and challenge patriarchal violence for decades now.From the recent media-friendly event such as ‘We Will Go Out’ to a more long-standing questioning of women’s place in public with the ‘Why Loiter?‘ movement to empowering conferences like Dalit Women Speak Out that call for intersectional feminism, the mood of the hour is to work towards empowerment – through art, activism, life. This work need not always be as sensational even. Anthropologists and historians have documented several instances where women across caste, class, and religious lines have deployed, what social scientist James Scott has termed, “weapons of the weak” in their immediate environments. In all, the struggle is real but the empowering solution has hardly ever been escape.Further, the author’s decision to enlist in the US army, in a desperate bid to remain as far away as possible from the “interesting, smelly, soulful melting pot of too many things and too many people,” reveals her ignorance of the US army’s own systemic problems with sexual assault. That someone who seeks to escape perceived oppression should voluntarily become an instrument of an equally (if not exponentially more) violent oppressor is bad enough; but what is worse is that Bhattacharya’s zeal to ask “the harder questions” only applies to India, not the US. Her flippant comparison between“potentially violent Indian men” and US immigration and homeland security glosses over the issues of structural racism in the US, which barely find mention in this article.Finally, the flattening out of the complexity of migration is upsetting to say the least. People who have migrated abroad experience a multitude of feelings upon leaving their homeland ‘forever’. While Bhattacharya may have only felt a sigh of relief at exiting India, other migrants voice complex and often contradictory feelings vis-à-vis the ‘homeland’. Of course, we are not trying to deny her experience but we are worried that a one-sided understanding of the ‘exit option’ is unfair to the generations of women that have moved to the US – it reduces all ‘exit options’ to ‘escape options’. Generalisations such as ‘India wasn’t made for women’, and that all Indian and Chinese students abroad are escaping the horrors of home, belittle the efforts of thousands of women and other minority-groups who fight their fears every day in order to survive. Sometimes because they don’t have the option to leave, sometimes because they choose to stay and sometimes because they decide to return.