Growing Up in an Odia Medium School

I grew up in Kalahandi, in a government school that taught everything in Odia.

The classrooms had concrete floors and windows that let in more noise than light. The teachers showed up every day. That last part mattered more than I understood at the time.

There was no computer lab. No library worth the name. The medium of instruction was Odia from beginning to end — no English in the classroom, none at home, none anywhere nearby. What the school had was structure, and teachers who treated curiosity as its own reward.

That quiet assumption shaped everything that came after.

What a single-language education actually teaches

Learning entirely in your mother tongue does something to the way you think. You are not translating. You are not holding two systems in your head simultaneously, one for thinking and one for expressing. You are just thinking — directly, in the language you dream in.

The cognitive habit this builds is underrated. Ideas feel native, not borrowed. Reasoning happens in your own register. When I eventually moved into English-medium environments, I noticed that many of my peers were fluent but somehow at a slight remove from their own thinking — performing intelligence in a borrowed language. I was clumsy in English for a while. But I was never clumsy in my ideas.

There is a real education in studying in the language that is actually yours.

The school as a laboratory

Without the infrastructure that makes learning look a certain way — the curated resources, the enrichment programs, the structured paths — you develop a different relationship with figuring things out.

When there is no search engine, you sit with not knowing longer. You turn a question over. You build tolerance for the gap between curiosity and resolution, which turns out to be one of the most useful things you can build. Most of what matters in adult life happens in that gap.

When there is no obvious mentor — no one nearby who has done what you are imagining doing — you learn to read outcomes rather than instructions. You observe. You reconstruct. You develop the habit of asking: what did this person actually do, not just what do they say they did?

These are not substitutes for resources. More resources would have been better. But the school produced something real — a self-directed curiosity that did not wait for permission or infrastructure to operate. It connects to something I explore in learning from people — how the most durable education rarely announces itself.

What I carried out

I left Kalahandi for New Delhi to study engineering. The transition was disorienting in ways I had not fully anticipated — a different pace, different assumptions, people who had grown up in contexts I had only read about.

What made it manageable was not preparation. It was a disposition built over years in that school: the ability to move through unfamiliar territory without needing the territory to be mapped first. To be confused and keep going anyway. To treat the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be as a problem worth working on, not evidence that I was in the wrong place.

That disposition is not teachable in a curriculum. It develops in the encounter between genuine curiosity and real constraint — when you want to know something and there is no easy way to get the answer, so you find a harder way.

The question worth asking

We spend a great deal of energy identifying what Odia-medium government school students lack relative to students in better-resourced environments. That comparison is valid and the gaps it identifies are real and worth closing.

But it is only half the picture.

The other half is what those students build — in competence, in character, in the particular kind of intelligence that develops when you cannot outsource the difficulty of figuring things out. That half of the picture gets less attention. Not because it is less real, but because it is harder to measure.

I went to a government school in Kalahandi with no internet, no English, and no map for the path I was imagining. What I left with was harder to name than any credential — and more durable than most of them.