On Identity and Where You Come From

There is a version of this essay that would be about how leaving a place like Kalahandi was difficult and how I navigated that difficulty and what I learned. That essay writes itself and is not very interesting.

What I want to think about instead is something more structural: how the place you come from becomes part of how you think — not what you think about, but the equipment you use to think — and what it means to carry that into contexts that don't share it.

What place actually gives you

The thing that origin gives you is not primarily culture in the sense of customs or language, though it gives those too. It gives you a set of initial models about how the world works — formed before you had the capacity to evaluate them, which is what makes them so durable.

What I absorbed from growing up in Kalahandi: that resources and opportunity are scarce and compete with each other. That the gap between what people say they will do and what they will do is wide and consequential. That institutions are usually less reliable than personal relationships. That the people who change things are usually from somewhere else or connected to someone from somewhere else — and that the exception to this is both remarkable and instructive. That resilience is ordinary rather than heroic — it is simply what people do when the alternative is not surviving.

These are not universally true. Some of them are specifically true about Kalahandi in particular periods. Some of them transfer usefully to contexts that look quite different. Some of them are blindspots — places where the model formed in a specific context leads me to expect things that don't apply elsewhere.

The question is which are which, and I don't always know.

The double vision problem

Moving between contexts — from Kalahandi to Bhubaneswar, from Odisha to other parts of India, from India to other countries and cultures — produces something that might be called double vision. Two models for how things work, running simultaneously, sometimes in conflict.

The value of double vision is that it prevents any single model from being invisible. When you have only one framework for how the world works and you've never encountered a serious alternative, the framework becomes transparent — it's just the way things are, not a way of seeing. When you have two, both become visible. You can see each one as a frame rather than as reality.

This is genuinely useful. A lot of what gets called insight is just the product of comparative vision — being able to see something in one context through the lens of another. I use it constantly: understanding what is specific about hiring dysfunction in one kind of organisation by comparing it to how things work in a structurally different kind, understanding what is specific about Odisha's development by comparing it to Karnataka's or Tamil Nadu's trajectory.

The cost of double vision is that neither model feels entirely like home. The place you left doesn't quite match the model you have of it — the model was formed by a version of the place that has continued to change while you have been elsewhere. The place you're in doesn't quite match the model you've formed of it — you're always carrying the other frame.

What I carry that I don't always acknowledge

There are specific things from Kalahandi that I carry into every professional context that I don't always name as what they are:

A low prior for the reliability of systems and a high weight on personal relationships as the actual mechanism through which things happen. This leads me to invest disproportionately in personal trust, to be sceptical of process-heavy approaches that assume system reliability, and to be less surprised than most people when systems fail.

A specific sensitivity to the gap between stated and revealed priorities. In Kalahandi, as in any resource-scarce environment, the gap between what someone says they will do and what they will actually do when the resources run out is a survival-relevant thing to track. I track it by habit in professional contexts where the stakes are lower and the gap usually smaller. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes it makes me more suspicious than the situation warrants.

A strong intuition that the highest-leverage intervention is usually early in a process rather than late. In an environment where you can't count on later stages of a process working smoothly, you learn to front-load the quality and the effort. This shows up in how I structure searches, in how I designed the architecture of Majhi OS, in how I think about problem-solving generally.

What it means to be from somewhere specific

I have noticed that people who come from places with strong global recognition — from cities or countries that appear in the mental maps of most educated people — can often leave the origin implicit. It is context without needing to be explained.

Coming from Kalahandi requires more active work. Most people I encounter professionally have no map of Odisha, and even fewer have a map of Kalahandi specifically. The place I come from doesn't register as a context; it registers as absence — as the unfamiliar, which is sometimes heard as the underprivileged, which is not quite right and not quite wrong.

What I've found is that explaining where you come from specifically is more useful than leaving it generic. Not as identity performance — not to establish origin as a credential or a sympathetic backstory — but because the specificity is informative in a way that the generic isn't.

Where I come from is a place where people did difficult things with very limited resources and very limited institutional support. The pattern of doing difficult things with limited resources has travelled well. It is more useful than the pattern I've observed in people who came up in more resource-abundant environments — that pattern seems to produce a higher reliance on the scaffolding holding.

Neither here nor there as a stable position

The version of identity that is most honest for someone in my position is neither full assimilation into the contexts I now operate in nor preservation of the origin as something fixed and separate. It is something more dynamic — carrying the origin as a live tool rather than a museum piece, using the double vision actively, being willing to be changed by what I encounter without losing the thread back to where the models started.

What I have found is that the places we come from are not destinations to return to or stages to leave behind. They are equipment — ways of seeing that were formed in a particular context and that travel with us into every subsequent one. The question is not whether to carry them but how to carry them: when to rely on them, when to question them, when to update them in light of what the new context shows.

I am still working this out. After years of operating in contexts that look very different from Kalahandi, the distance has not made the origin less present. If anything, the specificity of where I come from gets clearer with more context to compare it against. You understand your home town better from far away than you do from inside it. The distance is part of the perception.