I used to bind 'jk' to escape but it led to a few problems, in particular I would compulsively use jk as escape on remote systems I hadn't configured myself. In the end I realized I didn't mind ctrl-[ and have used that since.
I think you can however `inoremap <C-c> <esc>` locally to make it a bit safer, and just use the default Ctrl-C remotely (if your vimrc is not there then there’s probably no plugins or abbreviations to worry about).