People of Odisha, Berhampur (2026)

28/08/2026

There was one word in my head every single day, for years. NEET.

I wanted to be a doctor, and I don't mean casually. I gave that dream everything. Five years of sleepless nights. Endless tuitions. Exam after exam after exam. One goal, one word.

I didn't crack it.

And just like that, I became another number in a list of people who didn't make it. Another failure. I had to go to Plan B, except there was no Plan B. I hadn't made one. Why would I? I was going to be a doctor.

If I fell apart a little, it was because I had never once needed a backup. But if there was one thing my life had quietly trained me for, it was starting over.

Settling down was never really a concept I grew up with. My father served in the Indian Navy, and because of that, every year or two we'd get transferred. A new city, a new house, a new set of faces to learn. I loved the adventure of it, but there was a real cost too, one that's hard to explain unless you've lived it. I'd finally make close friends, and then it was time to pack up and start over again. I never really formed deep attachments to anyone outside my own family, simply because I never had the time to.

But that constant movement gave me something in return. It made me me. Looking back, I think this is really where my love for travel began, except I didn't know it as travel back then. Staying anywhere for a year or two, fully living in a place rather than just passing through, was slow travel before I even knew the term existed. And that shaped me more than any single trip ever could. The more we moved, the more adaptable I became. My mind stayed open because I was always meeting new people, always having to unlearn old assumptions and pick up new ones, and that restlessness quietly became one of my core values. It's also how I ended up seeing so much of the country so early in life, and how I learned to genuinely respect India's diversity, not just as an idea, but as something I'd actually lived.

I've always been ambitious. Even as a kid, I wanted to build my life on my own terms, without needing anyone's permission to chase what I dreamed of. I listen to everyone around me, but in the end I follow what my heart tells me. Growing is non-negotiable for me. I believe learning never really stops, and I'm someone who is genuinely willing to take risks, because I think that's where real growth lives.

I grew up seeing a patriarchal world up close, but I count myself lucky. My family never underestimated me and always backed me, even when the world around us didn't always make that easy. That's how I've grown into the adult I am today: strong, confident, opinionated, with a voice of my own, someone who can hold her ground against anyone who tries to pull her down. And when I set my mind to something, I work for it relentlessly until it happens.

At my core, I'm a nature girl, and that's really where my love for travel comes from. For me, travel was never about the number of countries I've stamped my passport with. It's about the culture, the roots, the people, the food, the stories that don't make it into the guidebooks. I take those things back with me and let them shape who I am. The more I travel, the less judgmental I become, and the more open I am to the world in all its differences. That's a belief I hold onto tightly. I want to keep growing as a human being, from the inside out. I don't want to live an ordinary life, the kind that feels meaningless, mundane, on autopilot. It's not about wanting to be famous. It's about building a life I'm genuinely proud of, on my own terms, one that gives me a real sense of fulfilment. I want to chase my goals, live the life I've dreamed of, and collect experiences that shape me, that transform me into who I'm meant to become.

Odisha, though, was different. Growing up, it was just where we went for summer vacations. Meeting cousins, wandering the village, piling around the TV together, which honestly was one of the best times of my childhood. But it wasn't home in any deep sense. So when my father retired and we decided to settle here for good, I remember thinking it was a mistake. I didn't know Odisha beyond my village, and it felt small compared to everywhere else I'd lived.

I was wrong.

The longer I stayed, the more Odisha revealed itself to me. After having lived across so many states, I can say this with confidence: this is a state that holds onto its culture and traditions with a kind of quiet pride you don't see everywhere. People here still value the old ways, and there's a rootedness to life that I hadn't fully appreciated until I'd seen its absence elsewhere. The sense of community is tight-knit, the values genuinely warm, and the food, honestly, some of the best in the country, hands down. Odisha feels like a blanket to me now. Warm, familiar, something I wrap myself in. I did my graduation here, and somewhere along the way, it stopped being my father's retirement plan and became my homeland. I do think we, as a state, could stand to be a little more open to change, but I'm genuinely glad to be watching that shift happen, slowly, in real time.

Ask me for my favourite destination and I won't have one. What I have are moments, the kind that still make my heart skip a beat every time I think about them.

The first time I saw a shooting star, I was in Hanle, Ladakh. Until that night, I genuinely believed shooting stars only existed in movies. It was 2 AM, around minus fifteen degrees, freezing cold, and my boyfriend, now my husband, woke me from deep sleep and dragged me outside. I stepped out and the entire galaxy was just there. The Milky Way, shooting stars one after another. I felt like a kid again, standing in my own version of Disney World. I had tears in my eyes. I remember just thanking whatever's out there for showing me how beautiful the universe actually is.

Then there was South Korea. As a 90s kid, it was one of those places I'd only ever seen on TV, a place that felt impossibly far away. So when I finally got there, on my own terms, with my own adult money, it hit differently. That's what success actually feels like, maybe. Not a trophy, just a quiet "I made it." I still remember dragging my suitcase off the subway from Incheon Airport, riding the escalator up toward Myeongdong, and watching the city slowly reveal itself as I rose, my eyes wide open the entire time. This was the place I'd always dreamed of being, and somehow, dreams really do come true if you hold onto them. Those few days in Korea felt like the little girl in me finally getting to live out her fantasy, and thanking her adult self for never giving up on her.

Mongolia was, without question, the most challenging and life-altering trip I've ever taken. Some journeys don't just take you somewhere, they push you to your edge and introduce you to a version of yourself you never knew existed. I'm someone who showers daily, eats three proper meals, has proper accommodation, and suddenly all of that was gone. I spent four or five days without a shower, living deep in the Siberian wilderness surrounded by wolves and horses, in a super basic tent almost sleeping over grass, eating what the nomads ate, reindeer milk and dried pork, drinking straight from the river, relieving myself in the open forest, riding horseback for hundreds of kilometres without seeing another human being. I lived alongside nomadic families and their reindeer and yaks, and somewhere in all of that, I met a side of myself I never knew was there. That's exactly why I believe travel changes you in ways you simply can't predict. I shared local alcohol with a nomadic family under a sky absolutely full of stars, in the middle of nowhere, and I don't have the right words for that feeling. It was that real, that pure. Meeting people like that, having experiences like that, I think it's essential to becoming who you're meant to be. I'm still in touch with some of the people I met there, and I don't think many people are as lucky as I am to have such friends in their lives.

And then there was the Manaslu Circuit in Nepal, where I learnt to trust myself. Before this trek, I hadn't done more than a single day-hike in my life. The Manaslu Circuit is a 12-day, moderate-to-difficult, high-altitude trek around an 8,000-meter peak, not exactly beginner territory. I was terrified, but like I said, I love to take risks. That is what Pratibha is all about. I'd always been a gym girl, but five to six months out, I started training seriously, legs, endurance, running, building up to D-day.

Manaslu taught me that if you truly believe in yourself, not even an 8,000-meter mountain can stop you. Sixteen to twenty kilometres a day, uphill and downhill, my legs raw with rashes, and on day three, of all days, I got my period, right before the toughest elevation gain was about to begin. Everything was stripped down to basics, the food, the stay, everything. But that's exactly when I understood how much happiness lives in the basics. A warm meal after a brutal day. Water to drink in the middle of the trek. A proper sleep after a long day. A shower after days without one. Things we take completely for granted until we don't have them. When I finally reached the highest point, I broke down in tears. I never truly believed I could do it, and there I was, standing in front of an 8,000-meter giant, having done exactly that. What I took from it: when you believe in yourself, nothing can really stop you. In fact, I think the universe conspires to help you get there.

Here's to many more moments like these, and everything they still have to teach me.

That belief, that the universe conspires for you, I didn't always have it. It was built somewhere far less beautiful than a mountain in Nepal, in the years I spent finding my way back from the word I couldn't crack.

Four years of college, back here in Odisha. Four years of ups and downs, and what I now know was God's plan, the kind you don't recognise while you're inside it. You look at it in that moment and think, why is this happening to me. You look at it years later and think, thank God it happened exactly like that.

This is that story.

So I picked a course I had zero interest in. Zero. I wish I had sat with that decision a little longer, taken it a little more seriously. But honestly, for all four years, I had only one thought running in my head: how do I get out of this. I cried through a lot of those nights. The gap between who I wanted to be and what I was actually doing felt enormous and unfixable.

Then in my third year, I started preparing for CAT. Nobody around me was making a big deal of it. It was just me, quietly deciding I wasn't going to let a wrong turn become the whole road. I got into one of the best colleges in my field. And from there, I got placed.

The job terrified me.

I had to travel to rural Odisha. Understand agriculture on the ground, how it actually works, not how a textbook says it works. Study the business model of a farm. And then sell loans to farmers, based on their crop output and their input requirements. Sell loans. To people who were already low on funds. As a complete newbie.

I was 23. I stayed in villages that weren't always safe. I travelled by trains, buses, rickshaws, whatever got me there. And then I would wait. For hours. Just for someone to take me seriously enough to sit down and talk. There were days I travelled hundreds of kilometres to be completely ignored. I cried on those journeys back. It chipped away at me. I started doubting whether I was capable of anything at all.

And then something shifted. The third time it happened, it stung less. The fourth time, less than that. By the fifth and sixth, I felt almost nothing. I had stopped taking it personally, and somewhere in that indifference, confidence quietly grew. The faces became familiar. I started recognizing people, and they started recognizing me. And slowly, without any single dramatic moment, trust was built.

That job shaped me in ways no classroom ever could. I spent days in villages understanding what a farmer's problem actually looks like at the grassroots. I learnt how agriculture moves from a field to our homes, and met every single intermediary in that chain. I saw where the gaps were, and I learnt how to offer financial support in a form people were actually willing to accept. I understood more about finance in those months than any analyst sitting in an office ever could.

Eventually I started looking for a switch. It was a startup, and I was badly underpaid. I genuinely didn't know how much my knowledge was worth. I thought I was just a girl who had spent too much time on dusty roads.

Then the interviews started. One after another, people were floored by what I knew. Not theory, the real thing. The grassroots detail. The volume of work I had actually done with my own hands and feet. I watched the table turn overnight. At one point I had three offer letters in my hand, all from the best companies in the space. And I walked into one of my dream companies.

It has been uphill ever since.

Everything I have today, I owe to those hard days. The waiting. The ignoring. The crying on trains. If I had gotten what I wanted at 18, I would not be here.

Here's what I've learnt: life will not hand you anything on a platter. You keep showing up. You keep learning. You keep making yourself valuable. And you never, ever get comfortable, because staying stuck in your comfort zone is the fastest way to destroy everything you could have been.

So now, after five years in corporate, I've started creating content alongside my job. Starting from scratch. Again.

People ask if it's because I hate my 9-to-5, or if I've quit. Neither. I'm doing it because I have always wanted to. Yes, I procrastinated. For years. But that's okay. I'm doing it now, and I truly believe it's never too late to begin. The opportunities it has opened up in just these early days are more than I imagined.

Because here's the secret nobody tells you. You look around and think the space is crowded, that everyone is doing this. But out of everyone who wants to, only about 40% actually start. Only 10% stay consistent. And maybe 5% figure out how it works. So if you just keep going, you're already ahead. And somewhere in that consistency, you'll figure out the rest.

You were never competing with them anyway. You just have to be better than you were yesterday.

— People of Odisha

This feature is in the voice of Pratibha Sahoo, risk associate in asset management and travel & lifestyle creator. All photographs were provided by the subject and are not for reproduction elsewhere.

01/08/2026

Winning the RoboCup World Championship in Brazil with my team is still one of the most memorable moments of my life.

There were years before that when I sat up late into the night in Odisha, preparing for exams, writing papers, applying to universities, unsure whether any of it would lead anywhere. I kept going anyway. Those years taught me patience and persistence more than anything else.

Before all the degrees and job titles, I'm someone who has always dreamed big. Each milestone has given me the confidence to aim a little higher than before. I've always enjoyed learning, taking on new challenges, and stepping outside my comfort zone, and I see challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. A quote from The Alchemist has stayed with me for a long time: "And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." To me it means that when you are clear about what you want and keep working towards it, opportunities begin to appear that you may never have imagined at the start.

I grew up in Odisha and did most of my schooling at Kendriya Vidyalaya. Later I studied Electrical Engineering at the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar, which is now known as the Odisha University of Technology and Research. During my engineering years I became increasingly interested in technology beyond the traditional electrical engineering curriculum. From quite early on I knew I wanted to pursue higher studies abroad, because I was fascinated by fields like AI and robotics and wanted to be part of that ecosystem.

Initially I planned to study in the US, but after looking into the tuition fees and living expenses, I realized it wasn't the right option for me at that time. While exploring alternatives, I came across Germany. The quality of education, the strong research in engineering, and the affordable public universities made it the perfect fit. Around the same time, I saw seniors and friends from Odisha moving abroad and building great careers. Watching people from backgrounds similar to mine achieve those milestones made me feel that this was something I could do as well.

After working at TCS for about two years, I decided it was the right time to take that step. Looking back, moving to Germany wasn't just about getting a Master's degree. It was about giving myself the chance to grow, both professionally and personally.

Moving at 24 was life-changing. It was the first time I had lived so far from home, and there was a lot to learn, from understanding how everyday systems worked to managing studies, work, paperwork, finances, and daily responsibilities on my own. In the beginning even simple things felt unfamiliar, especially without family around. Being the first person in my family to move abroad also came with a certain amount of uncertainty, because none of us knew exactly what to expect.

Over time I learned to handle things independently and build a life for myself in a completely new environment. I met people from many different countries, and that was one of the most interesting parts of the experience. It gave me a much broader perspective and made me more open to different ways of thinking and living. People were often curious about India, Odisha, our food, festivals, and languages, which led to many meaningful conversations. It also made me appreciate my own background more.

Germany gave me opportunities I had never imagined when I was growing up. I worked on several interesting projects, travelled across Europe, and represented my university at the RoboCup World Championship in Brazil. Working at Schaeffler with a supportive and talented team was another experience I am very grateful for. I worked hard for these opportunities, but I am also thankful to God for the way everything unfolded. Looking back, many of the best moments came in ways I could never have planned.

Odisha is home for me. I spent most of my life there before moving to Germany four years ago, and my family, upbringing, language, food, and values all come from there. Pakhala is still my comfort food, and I continue to eat it during summers in Germany. In the same way, seeing familiar traditions from Odisha being celebrated here also makes me feel connected to home. Ratha Yatra is now celebrated in different cities across Germany, bringing together people from Odisha, other parts of India, and many Germans as well. Seeing Lord Jagannath's Ratha Yatra celebrated outside India gives me a real sense of pride in how far our culture has reached.

What I carry from Odisha is the way I was raised, the importance of family, staying grounded, and working consistently towards what I want. I have also drawn a lot of inspiration from seniors and fellow Odias who have done well in higher studies and their careers. Seeing what they had achieved made my own goals feel more possible and encouraged me to keep moving forward.

I'm still someone with many dreams. Some have already become reality, many are still ahead of me, and that's what keeps life exciting. I believe life is less about having everything planned and more about staying curious, putting in consistent effort, and making the most of the opportunities that come your way.

— People of Odisha

This feature is in the voice of Ayusee Swain, robotics and AI engineer, based in Sankt Augustin, Germany.

13/07/2026

I grew up between Odisha and West Bengal, in a simple middle-class family. Most of my fairly large extended family lived between Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, so those two cities are the backdrop to most of what I remember from being young. After school I moved to Bangalore for college, and that is where I started with Microsoft. From there, life and career took me all around the world, until I eventually landed in New York, where I have lived for the past fifteen years.

Jobs and titles aside, when I look back, the thing that has actually driven me is an insatiable love for adventure. Seeking new things, seeing new places, meeting new people. I never really had a specific plan or a dream of a particular path. Every few years I would just find myself wanting a new experience, feeling restless and uncomfortable wherever I was, and I would go looking for the next thing.

For me, adventure was always the next step up. A new job, a new place to travel to, and almost always something that felt like a challenge from wherever I was standing at the time. I did not really understand until I was older that, what I was chasing was the challenge itself. The excitement of something new is what pulled me forward. The butterflies and the jitters came along with it every time, and instead of holding me back, they were the thing that pushed me to do better and reach for higher ground.

Underneath all of it, I am still the same curious kid I have always been. I want to know how things work, and why they work the way they do. Long before any of this, there was music. My father, Debashis Mohapatra, is a playback singer who has sung on Odia radio and in Odia films since the 1970s. His older brother, my late uncle Shantanu Mohapatra, composed music for films and radio for over five decades before he passed. Both are names people in Odisha still recognize.

I grew up inside that world, often in recording studios between Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, surrounded by musicians and performers. Almost everyone in the family sang or played an instrument, my aunts and my cousins included. Every wedding, puja or function was bookended with music programs. Sometimes with professional musicians, sometimes just my uncle with his harmonium and everyone gathered around singing. That is the soil I came from, and it made me a musician too.

I started learning the guitar in high school and played in bands in Bangalore all through college. I loved it. For a while I genuinely thought about being a professional musician, but my curiosity for technology pulled harder, and that is the direction I went. I never let the music go, though. In the US, I taught myself to play blues guitar and played in a band for a while.

I still carry a desire to produce and publish my own music someday. That impulse has been getting restless lately. Knowing me, it might be the next leap I take.

In hindsight, it has been quite the journey. A fairly rich one, and an entirely unplanned one. Growing up, my father worked for a public sector bank, which meant we changed bases every three or four years. Mostly around Odisha and West Bengal, but it was a new school every few years, new friends, sometimes in the middle of a school session. Maybe that is what shaped my need for movement. My parents were always supportive and made sure each transition was manageable for us. Wherever we happened to be, we always came back to Bhubaneswar for the holidays, spending time with family and cousins. Growing up with more than twenty cousins all in close proximity in Odisha was always a lot of fun.

After school, I wanted something new. I wanted to experience a big city, and I decided to land in Bangalore for my engineering degree. Those four years were formative. Being independent for the first time was intoxicating, and I enjoyed every bit of it. It was hard being on your own and managing life, but I had the support of a large circle of friends. While I was in college I had no real idea what job I wanted or what company I wanted to work for. One thing led to another, and through campus placements I found myself at the technical support center at Microsoft Bangalore, with no idea what I was walking into or what it would mean for me. For a small-town kid who loves adventure, landing in a corporate environment at one of the largest companies in the world was quite the change. I worked nights, I worked hard, and I enjoyed it. I was like a sponge, soaking it all in. And I loved Bangalore.

A couple of years in, I got tired of working nights, so I knew I had to change something, even if I did not know what. There was an opening on a field engineering team. I had no clue why anyone would need a field engineer, which is close to what people call a forward deployed engineer today, but I gave it a shot. At 25, I was the youngest person hired onto a team full of people with at least ten years of experience. The pressure was on, because even my manager was not convinced I could deliver. But I had taken the leap. I was out of night shifts and heading into something I had no idea would shape who I am today.

Back then, field engineering was mostly break-fix work: fixing the global datacenter issues of Microsoft's biggest clients. That meant crisis management from day one. I was thrown into situations where I had to hold everything together while trying to solve complex technical problems at the same time. Nobody teaches you how to do that. You just have to figure it out as you go, keep your composure, and keep the ball rolling. That job took me all over Southeast Asia. I worked with hundreds of customers, trained thousands of IT professionals, and saw dozens of countries. What a blast it was.

A few years in, when the cloud came about, an opportunity opened up in the US. In true adventurer fashion, I thought to myself, why not. A few interviews and a few conversations later, I was on my way to New York, again with no clue what lay ahead.

I started working on the cloud. The business and the software were evolving fast, and break-fix was a thing of the past. I was learning how businesses actually work, and I wanted to make more money. I had a few engineering friends who had made the leap into sales. I never thought I wanted to be a seller, but then again, why not. So I became a sales engineer. That put me in rooms I had never imagined I would be in. Within three years I was managing large financial services accounts, big deals, big pressure. This is where I started to really understand my need to chase a challenge.

Ten years working with financial services shaped how I saw the corporate world. I learned how money works, and my mind opened up to possibilities I had not seen before. The curiosity and the hunger for adventure kept driving me forward, and I needed a bigger challenge. So I took the leap to become a data and AI sales specialist, managing a large territory of capital markets customers. This was being forged in fire, in the driver's seat when it came to making deals. It was tough, but I was in it. No way out, only up.
That road eventually took me to Director of Data and AI Sales for Capital Markets, based in New York. Twenty years after walking into a night shift in Bangalore with no idea what I was doing, I was leading the Microsoft business for some of the largest financial institutions in the world.

The layoff came at an interesting spot. I had been on an H1B visa in the US for twelve years, and that visa limits how freely you can move professionally. After almost two decades at Microsoft, I was ready for something new. I just did not know what. When I finally got my green card, I started exploring, interviewing with other organizations, putting feelers out. By the middle of 2022 I was making real progress with my search, but that is exactly when the tech labor market started showing cracks. Open job requisitions were being pulled back. The hyperscalers were rethinking their hiring investments. And in 2023, I was hit with the layoff.
If I am being honest, I felt a sense of relief. Now I was forced to go find something new. That does not mean it was easy. My entire professional identity was tied to Microsoft and its ecosystem. Even my friends, the ones I saw every week, the camaraderie went back years. All of that changed overnight. The first Monday when there was nothing to log into, no team to show up for, no next meeting on the calendar, that is when it really landed. I found myself having to reinvent who I was.

The choices in front of me were simple enough on paper. Find a gig at a competitor or somewhere inside the same ecosystem, or do something completely different. What that different thing would be, I had no idea. I chose the second path anyway, still needing the challenge. Since then I have tried many things. Day trading the S&P 500, automation consulting, buying a laundromat, and now building with AI. On the surface they look scattered, but they share something: each one was mine to own and run, with no boss and no visa deciding what I could do next. This period made me realize something about myself. I like trying different things. Maybe it is the ADHD, but if I do not throw things at the wall, I never learn what actually sticks. That means failing, sometimes many times over, then brushing it off and trying the next thing. You have to persevere and stay in the game.

The thing that is sticking now is Rift Lab, which I am building with a mission to scale human capability with AI systems. I believe participation is the way to amplify human agency, so what I do is teach people how to amplify themselves with AI. After a career spent chasing my own next challenge, helping other people find and rise to theirs feels like the right thing to be doing.

Keep propelling forward and eventually you find the thing that sticks, on your own terms. That is the goal, and I am still working on it. Maybe I will keep working on it my whole life. There are many people who made a difference in my journey. My trajectory was never planned, and my impulsive, adventure-seeking self was always reaching for bigger things I probably was not ready for. The reason I was able to make those leaps at all is because of the people who chose to bet on me at critical points in my life.

It was my field engineering manager trusting a 25-year-old to deliver on large enterprise conversations. It was the manager who chose to hire me and bring me to work in the US. It was the CTO at a large bank who decided to respond to a cold email from someone he had never met. Those bets are what allowed me to keep taking the leap, and along the way there were so many moments of mentorship that shaped who I am. There are far too many people to name, but without the ones who believed in me, I would not be where I am today.

As a founder, that has only amplified. A new client taking a chance on you, a new student trusting you with their AI journey. A new connection introducing you to their network. Every little bit matters and I am grateful for every single one of those moments. If there is one thing I have learned, it is this: as you climb in your own journey, remember and acknowledge the people who lifted you up along the way. The best thing you can do is pay it forward. Odisha is home. It is where I am from, and it is the roots that ground me through all my leaps and adventures. I have not physically lived in Odisha since 1998, but it has always been home. The throughline of my life keeps bringing me back to it, in my own values and in my own people.

My family still lives in Odisha, which brings me back often. I will admit that I do not really recognize the twin cities anymore. They have grown and changed so much that parts of them feel new to me every time I visit. But the moment I am there, the familiarity finds me anyway and brings it all back. The people, the food, the sights and the sounds. They stay with me wherever I am in the world.

— People of Odisha

This feature is in the voice of Shashwat Mohapatra, founder of Rift Lab, based in New York.

— Shashwat Mohapatra · New York, USA

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