Growing Up in Kalahandi

I got my first job on the 184th interview.

Not 18. Not 84. One hundred and eighty-four.

I want to be precise about that number because it is easy to let it become a metaphor. It is not a metaphor. Each of those interviews was a room I walked into, a panel that looked at me, a call I sat by the phone waiting for. The 184th was for a position at an international call center, a BPO in Delhi, and when the offer came, I remember the specific weight of it. That was the biggest turning point in my life.

I need to start earlier to explain why it took 184.

Junagarh

I grew up in Junagarh, a town in Kalahandi district in interior Odisha. My schooling was entirely at a government school there. The medium of instruction was Odia. This is how most children in the district were educated, and it seemed normal because it was normal, there was nothing to compare it against.

What it meant, in practice, was this: I reached my late teens with genuinely poor spoken English and poor Hindi. In a country where both open professional doors, I had neither. I did not fully understand how significant this gap was until I left.

My father served at the Junagarh Notified Area Council and was recognised as running the best NAC in Odisha, an acknowledgment from the Urban Development ministry that meant something in a town where such recognition was not common. The family had agricultural land on the outskirts of Junagarh, eighteen acres of it, some of it disputed for years before it was finally settled in our favour. These were the textures of the life I grew up inside: modest government service, agricultural land, a district town that had real infrastructure in places and real absence in others.

I was a reasonably good student. Not exceptional, reasonably good. Good enough to get a seat in an engineering institution in Delhi, which felt, from inside Kalahandi, like a different country.

Delhi

When I arrived in Delhi, I was in complete shock.

I had never seen a city like this. Everything I knew about Delhi was from textbooks. No photograph or description had communicated what it would feel like to stand inside it. The scale. The noise. The assumption, built into the city's operating system, that you already knew how things worked.

I was skinny and shabbily dressed, a typical young man from a district town who had never needed to think about how he appeared in context. I had no language command. No English worth speaking. No Hindi beyond the basic. Everybody around me seemed to know something I didn't, and most of them were not gentle about it.

I found myself in a strange situation. I felt like I did not belong there. The other students had friends from similar backgrounds, older siblings who had been through the same process, families who had navigated the city before. I had none of that. I was 1,000 kilometres from everyone I knew, in a place that had no particular interest in my adjustment.

I almost gave up. I wanted to come home.

Then some seniors noticed what I was going through and helped. They did not make a production of it, they just included me, explained things, made the environment slightly less hostile. I started making friends. I still have those friendships now.

Slowly, the city became navigable. And in that process of becoming navigable, I learned something that I could not have learned in Kalahandi because there was nothing in Kalahandi that required it: if I did not speak good English, I would not get a job. Not the kind of job that justified the distance I had travelled.

So I started. Reading newspapers. Listening. Watching how people communicated in environments that valued the kind of communication I did not yet have. My whole intention in studying engineering was not science, it was economics. To earn well and lead a good life. English was the currency I needed to access what I had come for.

That period taught me how to acquire something from scratch when you have no infrastructure for it. No tutor. No course. No system. You just begin and repeat and fail and continue.

184

After engineering, I was in the job market. The market was not generous.

My English had improved significantly but not uniformly. Call centers required more than I had initially. The interviews were about fluency, tone, comprehension at speed, things I was still building. Each rejection was specific: I could read the room well enough by the end to know what hadn't worked. I kept going.

By the 183rd, I was not optimistic. I was simply continuing.

The 184th was at an international call center. I was in a rented room in Delhi when the call came. I remember sitting very still after I put the phone down. Not celebration, I did not call anyone. I just sat there. What I felt was not triumph. It was closer to relief that I would not have to find out what came after 184.

What I felt was not triumph. It was closer to relief that I would not have to find out what came after 184.

What changed

I go back to Junagarh regularly. The town has changed in ways that are visible on every visit.

Roads that weren't there before. A hospital that has improved. Schools. A town-wide water supply that wasn't reliable when I was young. JioFiber broadband, which matters more than it might appear, because when I started my first venture in 2013, the lack of reliable connectivity in Kalahandi was not a minor inconvenience but a structural barrier. We tried BSNL ADSL, WLL, VSAT. The latency killed everything that required real-time communication. The business had to run despite the infrastructure, not with it. 4G changed what was possible. Fibre changed it further.

What Junagarh still needs is a medical college. An engineering college. The foundation is there, a town with the administrative history and existing infrastructure to support institutions of that kind. What hasn't followed is the investment that would make it a place young people from Kalahandi can build careers without leaving.

That gap is still there. The gap between what a place has and what the systems built around it recognise. The town has changed. The structural gap between places like Kalahandi and the cities that accumulate institutions and investment, that gap is slower to close.

What the place gave me

I did not understand what Junagarh had given me until I needed it outside of it.

The capacity to keep going when the external environment is not cooperating. The ability to navigate a system with no guide, no map, no one who has done it before you. The patience for processes that take longer than they should, because you have seen what happens in places where processes move slowly by default and the work still has to get done.

The capacity to keep going when the external environment is not cooperating. The ability to navigate a system with no guide, no map, no one who has done it before you. That is not a character trait. It is a formation - and Junagarh built it.

I do not romanticise the difficulty. The difficulty was real and unnecessary. A better-resourced starting point would have accelerated everything and spared real cost, not just to me but to every person from Kalahandi who starts at the same deficit.

But the starting point is what it was. And what it produced, whatever operational shape I came out with, was built in Junagarh, in that government school with its Odia medium instruction, in the first year in Delhi when I almost didn't stay.

I stayed. I kept going past 184. That is not a story about grit. It is a story about where I was from, and what that place, without meaning to, made sure I knew how to do.

Manas Majhi grew up in Junagarh, Kalahandi, Odisha. He writes about opportunity, development, and the systems that fail to distribute either equitably. He is the founder of Majhi Group and Majhi OS.

See also: Kalahandi and the Opportunity Gap, Lessons From Rural India That Apply Globally, What Kalahandi Taught Me About Human Nature

Sources

TRAI Telecom Subscription Data

ASER Report 2023: Annual Status of Education Report

World Bank Human Capital Index 2024