Sitting alone in her hostel room at a university in Delhi, a 32-year-old PhD scholar scrolls through Instagram constantly, watching shaky videos scroll past her screen. “Some posts vanish within minutes. Others contradict one another. There’s no way to find out whether my family is ok… if my parents are alive,” she said.
She left Iran four years ago to pursue doctoral research in cultural and humanities studies. Until last week, she spoke to her parents every day. Now, her calls don’t connect and messages remain undelivered.
“I cannot focus. I cannot sleep,” she said. “Every moment my phone buzzes, I hope it’s my family… The only thing that would make this better is hearing their voices.”
Her mother is a homemaker. Her father runs a small groceries shop in Tehran. The shop, she believes, is shut now. “The last time I spoke to my parents, they told me it’s not stable,” she said. “People are protesting. Police are everywhere.”
Across Delhi and other Indian cities, Iranian students and Indian students with families in Iran are grappling with the same helplessness as protests spiral back home and communication channels collapse.
Their anxiety has deepened as India begins preparing to evacuate its nationals from Iran. With Tehran temporarily closing its airspace to commercial flights on Thursday and tensions mounting in West Asia amid uncertainty over possible US action against the Iranian regime, the Ministry of External Affairs has said it is making arrangements to facilitate the return of Indian nationals who wish to travel back.
Around 10,000 Indians stuck in Iran
There are an estimated 10,000 Indians in Iran — including students in medical colleges in Tehran and Isfahan and pilgrims studying in seminaries in Qom and Mashhad. A day earlier, the Indian embassy in Tehran urged Indian nationals to avoid protest sites and consider leaving the country.
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For the 32-year-old scholar, the current crisis began with the collapse of Iran’s currency. “One dollar is about 1.4 million rials now,” she said. “That’s when everything started falling apart.”
She recalled how shopkeepers and businessmen were the first to protest, unable to keep their businesses running. “Then everyone came out. No one was satisfied with the situation… but what is shown outside Iran is very different from what is happening inside,” she said.
The internet shutdown, she believes, is intentional. “They don’t want people to speak. That’s why they shut everything down.”
A few kilometres away in Jamia Nagar, Syed Hadi, a 21-year-old undergraduate student of Peace and Conflict Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, is counting days in much the same way.
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His younger sister, 19, moved to Tehran in 2023 and began college this year, studying psychology. She lives in a hostel. Hadi last heard from her on January 8.
“After that, nothing,” he said. “Since the internet dropped, there has been no contact.”
‘Tehran was never distant — until now’
Hadi is a third generation Iranian, but has an Indian passport. His family has lived in Kashmir. Ethnically they are Shirazis — with extended family spread across Iran. Growing up, pilgrimage trips to Qom and Mashhad were routine. Tehran, he said, was never a distant place. “That’s where my sister is now,” he said.
His parents, his father, a doctor, and his mother, now stay awake late into the night in Kashmir, phones in hand. “There is panic in my house because she’s living alone.” “I feel helpless,” he added. “What can I do from here?”
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As a student of conflict, Hadi is wary of the flood of information online. “Most of it is biased or intellectual propaganda,” he said. “In the age of AI, you don’t even know what’s real anymore.” Still, like the others, he scrolls constantly.
Sharing his takeaway from the current situation in Iran, Hadi said, “Iran has a 5,000-year-old civilisation. It does not need foreign involvement. This is a family issue. We know how to deal with it.”
Last week, Hadi said his aunt and uncle landed in India. “Until I went to the airport, I did not know that they would even make it. There are absolutely no communication channels.”
A third student, a 33-year-old PhD scholar in commerce and management at Fergusson College in Pune, studying under an ICCR scholarship, was going through the same emotional rollercoaster.
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“It has been more than a week since I last heard from my family,” she said. “I don’t know whether they are alive or dead.”
Citing reports circulating among Iranian networks, she claimed that more than 13,000 people had been shot and killed in the streets.
The PhD student in Delhi, meanwhile, says she wants to return to Iran someday. “It’s a beautiful place… what is happening right now is going to shape my future. I don’t know if I would be able to live in Iran or settle down in another country, but all I know is that it is home and my family is there… I haven’t met them in two years and I am praying every day to see them at least once.”
One day, she hopes to write about what is happening now. “I want to be strong enough to speak,” she said. “Strong enough to write about what is happening to my people.”
