Cheering from the Exit

Exit, Voice, and the hollow comfort of long-distance loyalty

One of Dale Carnegie’s sound pieces of advice, the one that has stayed with me six or seven years after reading him, is deceptively simple: give genuine appreciation. The praise that is specific, earned and true, not flattery or hollow compliments. The distinction matters because most people are terrible at it, and the ones who are good at it are immediately obvious. You can feel the difference. I have tried to follow it diligently or have abstained from praising someone if it is not sincere.

Which is probably why hollow praise irritates me as much as it does.

I was having a chat with a very distant acquaintance (The husband of a friend’s friend). It went political very quickly. There were huge praises for the current regime. Apparently, everything is quite smooth now in India. We have ‘honest’ people working in the bureaucracy. The previous regime was full of corrupt officials and politicians. I nodded. Within 10 mins, I came to know that he is planning to leave the country pretty soon. He will be settling in the USA, at least for the next 10 years, with his spouse. In Texas.

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There’s a particular kind of frustration that doesn’t have a clean name. It shows up when someone posts “India is rising” from their apartment in New Jersey, or writes “Joy Bangla” from a flat in Gurgaon. I’ve felt it plenty of times and never been able to fully articulate why it bothers me.

It isn’t envy. It’s something closer to a credibility problem. Which ties it back to the point of hollow appreciation.

If the government is genuinely doing a great job, the most obvious vote of confidence you could cast is to live under it. To use its roads, breathe its air, send your kids to its schools, get sick in its hospitals. Praise from someone embedded in the consequences of governance is, at minimum, an informed opinion. It is genuine. Praise from someone who has already left is a bit like a restaurant critic writing glowing reviews from a country that doesn’t serve that cuisine.

Praise from someone embedded in the consequences of governance is, at minimum, an informed opinion. Praise from someone who has already left is a bit like a restaurant critic writing glowing reviews from a country that doesn't serve that cuisine.

There’s a political science framework that explains this cleanly. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: when institutions (like your country or state) fail you, your options are to exit (leave), voice your dissatisfaction (engage, push back), or show loyalty (stay and absorb it). Most emigrants have chosen exit. Cheering from abroad is loyalty without the burden of staying. Combining the worst of two worlds.

Sanjaya Baru, the economist and former media advisor to ex-PM Manmohan Singh, has a term for this. He calls it performative nationalism (don’t think he has coined it). In his recent book and interviews, he points to a specific irony: the same diaspora that fills Madison Square Garden and Wembley to chant “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” (“Glory to Mother India”) accounts for 1.8 million citizenship surrenders since 2014. They praise India loudly, and then formally, legally, permanently exit it.

(Here is a clip from one of his interviews; the full interview is also worth a watch)

If anything, distance is meant to create objectivity. You’ve seen how other governments operate. Fine. But if that comparative clarity has genuinely convinced you that India is doing well, the logical next step is to return. Yet they aren’t. Because they’re in Canada, not Cuba.

That’s the thing. The praise costs them nothing ¹. They are cheering from the outside.

It isn’t that NRIs can’t have opinions about India, or Bengalis outside Bengal can’t care about West Bengal. Of course they can. But there is a difference between “here is my concern from the outside” and “everything is great, keep it up.” The former requires engagement. In a way, it is actually quite authentic; you are worried about your people, even after leaving your city-state-country. You think about them, you are up to date. The latter requires nothing except a good wifi connection and some ambient nationalism.

None of this is about vilifying someone for leaving their state or country. For hundreds of years, people have been moving from cities with fewer opportunities to ones where there is a relative abundance. It is natural to outgrow a place. Your city. Your state. Your country. The problem isn’t the leaving. It’s the cheerleading that follows, often directed at the very institutions that couldn’t hold you.

Praise from someone who could leave but stayed means something. They’ve seen the alternative and decided to remain. That skin in the game gives the endorsement weight. Praise from someone who left tells you, at best, that they feel nostalgic. At worst, that they need the identity without the inconvenience.

Put your money where your mouth is, or at least your postal address.

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Ordinary thoughts, shared with hope. Pass it along if it resonated.

Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from those who stayed, those who left, and those who are currently packed and ready to go.

1. There is an obvious counter here. NRIs send over ~$130 billion home annually. Nearly 3% of India’s GDP. That is not nothing. Remittances are real. Love, obligation, investment, sometimes all three at once. And the ones sending the most money home are probably not the ones shouting “India is Rising” on social media. These are not perfectly overlapping sets. But even if they were, sending money home and endorsing the government are not the same thing. One is personal. The other is political.