Showing Friends Around Odisha

Three years ago, I brought two friends from outside India to Odisha for a week. One was from the UK, one from Singapore. Neither had any prior knowledge of the state beyond a vague awareness that it existed. I had spent a decade away from home by that point and had developed the typical emigrant's selective memory — the things I missed had grown cleaner in recollection, the things I had been glad to leave had faded.

The experience of showing your home to people seeing it for the first time is a specific kind of re-education. You see it through their eyes and your own simultaneously. The combination is disorienting and illuminating.

What they noticed first

They noticed the temples.

I had grown up around the Lingaraj temple in Bhubaneswar — the 11th-century Shiva temple that is one of the finest examples of Kalinga architecture — and had developed the characteristic local blindness to it. It was just there, a massive, beautiful, slightly inconvenient presence in the middle of the city. My friends stood in front of it and were visibly moved by the scale and the antiquity and the fact that it was still functioning — that actual religious practice continued in a structure built nearly a thousand years ago.

Then they noticed Konark.

The Sun Temple at Konark, built in the 13th century, is one of the great monuments of world architecture. It was designed as a giant chariot of the sun god Surya — 24 stone wheels, several meters in diameter, horses pulling the chariot, the entire composition an act of architectural audacity at a scale that is hard to comprehend even standing in front of it. My friends were quiet for a long time. Eventually one of them said: why is nobody here?

The question stayed with me.

The tourism paradox

Konark is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It should, by any reasonable assessment, be receiving international tourist volumes comparable to Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu. The scale of the monument, its preservation, its art historical significance — all of these are comparable to destinations that receive millions of visitors per year.

It does not receive those numbers. The reasons are partly infrastructure — the roads and accommodation that would support high tourist volumes are not what they should be — and partly visibility — Odisha has not been effectively marketed internationally as a cultural tourism destination in the way that Rajasthan or Kerala have been. But there is something deeper too: the lack of investment in the visitor experience around Konark, the absence of the interpretive infrastructure that helps international visitors understand what they are looking at, has kept the monument from becoming a destination rather than a detour.

This is not inevitable. It is a policy and investment choice that could be made differently.

What I understand differently now

After that trip, I started seeing Odisha through the lens of what it could be for people who have not been conditioned to take it for granted.

The Chilika Lake — the largest brackish water lagoon in Asia, a migratory bird destination of global significance — is an ecological and tourism asset that most of the world does not know exists. The tribal art traditions of the western districts — Pattachitra, Dhokra casting, the Saura tribal art of southern Odisha — are among the most distinctive craft traditions in India, with an international market that remains almost entirely untapped.

The state is sitting on a tourism endowment that is genuinely extraordinary. What it lacks is the investment in infrastructure and the marketing effort to convert that endowment into the kind of visitor experience that produces word-of-mouth, return visits, and the economic development that sustainable tourism can generate.

My friends left Odisha having seen things they did not expect to see and wanting to come back. That response — genuine, unsolicited, from people who had no prior investment in finding the state impressive — is the seed of something.

The question is who tends it.