Why I Keep Talking About Odisha

A contact in London, after I had mentioned Odisha in the third conversation in a row, asked me: "Why do you keep talking about it? You've been away for years. Most people just move on."

It was a reasonable question. The honest answer took me some time to work out.

The representation problem

When I first started working internationally, I encountered a specific gap: the map of India in most people's mental geography was extremely incomplete. They knew Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore. They knew Goa for tourism, perhaps Kerala for backwaters and Ayurveda. They had heard of the IT sector, the Bollywood industry, the tech startup scene.

They knew almost nothing about the 700 million people living in the states that do not feature in this map. Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, the northeastern states, rural Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — the majority of India's population lives in places that the mainstream representation of India almost entirely excludes. The case for why Odisha specifically matters is the subject of a separate essay.

This exclusion has consequences. It shapes where capital and attention go. It shapes which markets get served and which are treated as non-existent. It shapes how Indians from these places relate to narratives of national success and development — whether they see themselves in the story or understand that the story is about someone else.

I keep talking about Odisha partly because someone needs to. The state has extraordinary culture, complex history, real development challenges, and real development momentum — none of which is adequately represented in the conversations where representation would matter.

The accountability problem

The second reason is harder to articulate and more personal.

I left Odisha at 18. I built a career that took me away from the conditions that shaped me. I have benefited from opportunities that most people who grew up in similar circumstances did not have access to. And the people who gave me those opportunities — my family, my teachers, the institutional investments that made my education possible — cannot all be repaid individually. They can only be repaid systemically, by doing something with the opportunity that contributes in some way to the conditions that produced it.

This is not guilt. It is closer to a sense of obligation that I think is rational rather than sentimental. The people who enabled me cannot be repaid individually. What can be repaid is attention, advocacy, and whatever concrete contribution becomes possible.

Talking about Odisha — accurately, seriously, to audiences that would not otherwise encounter it — is one form that contribution takes. Writing about it is another. Actively looking for ways to connect talent and capital and opportunity to the place is another.

None of this solves the development challenges that the state faces. But the sum of people who left places like Odisha and do nothing with that connection is a real loss — a resource that could be available for the work of development and is not because nobody maintained the connection.

What it produces

The practical output of keeping the connection has surprised me.

Conversations that started with "oh, where is that?" have produced mentorships, investments, business relationships, and introductions that would not have existed if I had answered the "where are you from?" question with Bangalore. The specificity turns out to be an asset, not a liability.

Being clearly and unapologetically from somewhere particular — rather than positioning oneself as a generic global professional — is, I have found, more interesting to the people worth being interesting to. It produces more honest conversations, more genuine relationships, and a clearer sense of what you are actually about.

I talk about Odisha because I am from there and it made me what I am. That is not a complicated answer. It just took me a while to stop being ambivalent about saying it.