What Kalahandi Taught Me About Human Nature

A few years ago I ran a Sunday webinar from a hilltop in Kalahandi. The participants joined from six countries. Before the session, most of them had Googled me. After the session, most of them Googled Kalahandi.

That is not a small thing. People who had come to hear about a specific topic, one they considered worth their Sunday, ended up curious about a place in interior Odisha they had never heard of. The curiosity was genuine. I could see it in the questions that came after.

What struck me was the sequence. First: who is this person? Then, after the webinar: where is this person from, and what is that place? The place became interesting because the person had been credible. The credibility reversed the assumption, from Kalahandi is not a place worth paying attention to, to if this came from there, what else came from there?

That sequence is a window into something I have been observing my whole life, from both sides of it.

What people do with things that don't fit

The human response to information that doesn't match an existing mental model has a predictable shape. When something is outside the expected range, people do not immediately update the model. They try to fit the new data into the existing structure. And when it doesn't fit, there are roughly three options: they reject it, they contain it as an exception, or they update the model.

Most people never reach the third option. Not because they are incapable of it but because it is expensive, it requires revising beliefs that have been useful, navigating uncertainty, and admitting that the picture was incomplete. The first two responses are cheaper.

Kalahandi has been showing people this dynamic for as long as I can remember.

The investors

When I was planning to open an office in Kalahandi, committing to building something in the place I was from rather than only operating from cities that were easier to operate from, I spoke with investors. Not for funding. Investors are useful critics. I wanted to understand the strongest case against the idea.

The first said: you are doing well remotely. Opening an office in Kalahandi is a suicidal step for a start-up.

The second said: you cannot plant trees in a desert and expect to grow an Amazon forest. You need the entire ecosystem to thrive.

The third said: Manas, you need to choose, business or public service. If you feel strongly for your people and the place you belong to, go into politics. You will have the entire government machinery behind you.

Three responses, three different versions of the same underlying move: fit the information into an existing model, and conclude from that model that the thing I was proposing was either dangerous, impossible, or misclassified as business when it should be classified as charity.

None of them updated the model. Not one said: tell me what you see there that I'm missing.

This is not a criticism of the investors. They were being rational within their model. The model simply didn't have a category for what I was describing.

The pattern I had already seen

The investor meeting was not the first time I had seen this. Years earlier, working in MNCs, I had regularly raised the idea of establishing an office in Kalahandi, some part of the delivery infrastructure there, in a place with available talent and significantly lower operating costs. The response was always the same. Management would dismiss it with laughter. "It's impossible, Manas," they would say. "Focus on your career."

The impossibility was assumed, not argued. Nobody had investigated whether it was impossible. The mental model said: things don't come from places like Kalahandi. Therefore this is not worth investigating.

The people who said this were not unintelligent. They were pattern-matching, which is what intelligence does efficiently. The problem is that pattern-matching produces confident wrong answers when the training data is incomplete.

What the webinar made visible

The hilltop webinar made visible the other side of this, what happens when the update does occur.

The participants arrived with one picture: here is a credible person talking about something I care about. During the session, a second data point entered: this person is doing this from a hilltop in a district in Odisha. After the session, the model updated: a place I had no picture of is a place where something real is happening.

That update happened because the credibility of the work preceded the revelation of the origin. The sequence mattered. If I had introduced Kalahandi first, if I had said, I am calling in from a hilltop in a district most of you have never heard of, the model would have interfaced with the place before the work had a chance to establish itself. The outcome would likely have been different.

This is not cynicism. It is observation. The order in which information arrives changes what people can absorb.

What this means in practice

The lesson I have carried from Kalahandi about human nature is not that people are biased against certain places, though they are. It is that the order and framing of information changes what can enter a model that isn't ready to update.

I lead with the work. Always. Not with the origin story. The origin story gets to be told once the work has established that there is something worth hearing. The investors who told me the desert analogy were not wrong that ecosystems matter. They were wrong that the ecosystem I was describing was not there. But I couldn't argue that point in the first meeting. The work has to make the argument first.

This is also why the webinar worked. By the end of it, Kalahandi was not a symbol of underdevelopment or a data point in a famine report. It was where the person who just ran that session came from. The place became interesting because the person had changed what the place could signify.

In a small way, on that Sunday from a hilltop, we were putting Kalahandi on the world stage. Not by arguing that it deserved to be there. By demonstrating it.

That is the only argument that works with human nature. Not the argument. The demonstration.

The order in which information arrives changes what people can absorb. Lead with the work. The origin story gets to be told once the work has established that there is something worth hearing.

The only argument that works with human nature is not the argument. It is the demonstration. On that Sunday from a hilltop in Kalahandi, we were putting the district on the world stage - not by arguing that it deserved to be there, but by demonstrating it.

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, Why Places Like Kalahandi Produce Determined People

Sources

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

McKinsey Global Institute: India's Turning Point: An Economic Agenda for the Decade

Observer Research Foundation: Aspirational Districts: Reimagining Development in India