Not your employer's. For work that travels fine over a VPN, no one should be uprooted from their family and priced into a city they didn't choose. We're not asking to abolish the office. We're asking for the one thing that ends forced relocation: the right to work remote.
Hybrid was never the answer to this.
When the office mandates came back, companies offered hybrid as the compromise — two or three days in, the rest at home. But notice what hybrid does not fix. If you must be in the building even one day a week, you must live within reach of it. You still leave your hometown. You still pay the metro rent. You're still pulled from your family and your roots, just with a shorter commute on the days you go in. Hybrid softens the schedule. It does nothing for the thing that actually breaks people: being forced to live somewhere for a job that doesn't need you there.
Only one arrangement ends forced relocation: the genuine right to work fully remote. Not imposed on everyone — chosen by those whose work allows it. The person who wants office days keeps them. The person in Indore who would otherwise have to uproot their whole life gets to stay home and still do the job. That is the difference between a perk and a freedom.
— Most IT/ITES, services, and knowledge roles are remote-capable by nature; the PM's May 2026 fuel-conservation WFH appeal is itself an acknowledgement that this work can be done from home.
So ask it plainly. If the work can be done from home well enough to reshape the country's fuel use — what is the forced relocation actually for? The stated reasons (culture, mentoring, trust) don't explain why you must live in the city rather than simply visit it. The honest reasons sit lower: inertia that equates a full campus with a productive company; sunk costs in real estate that looks like failure when empty; and the suspicion engineers voice most bitterly — that an unliveable mandate is a quieter way to shed headcount than a layoff. We can't prove that's the intent. We can only notice how neatly it serves it.
Notice who pays. Not the company — it keeps its campus full and its options open. The cost lands entirely on you: the move away from family, the savings swallowed by rent, the years before a home of your own feels possible, the fear of being ordered back to a city you escaped. The office was never the point. The freedom to treat where you live as the adjustable variable — that was the point.
This is the same shape as the wage gap this movement exists to name, drawn on a different surface. The value you create flows out and up; the cost of producing it is pushed back down onto your life — your wages, and your geography, your hours, your home.
We are not asking the government to ban offices, or to force every company remote. Mandates aren't the answer, and a movement that demands one looks naive to the very people it speaks for. We are asking for something narrower and harder: that the right to work remote exist — so that where you build your life is your decision, not a condition of employment for work that never needed a desk.
If the work can steady the rupee from home, it can let you stay near your family. The only thing between those two sentences is a decision — and it should be yours.
The full essay, and the movement it belongs to. No leader. No face. No fee.