Why Talent Shouldn't Depend on Your PIN Code

I grew up in Bhilai, a steel town where the nearest "creative agency" was two hundred kilometers away in Raipur. Everyone I knew who was good at something — design, writing, editing, coding — eventually said the same thing: "Yahan kuch nahi hai. I'll have to move to Bangalore or Mumbai."

I believed that too, for a while. I spent two years applying to internships that all wanted "candidates based in Delhi NCR" or "must be willing to relocate." My portfolio was fine. My commute wasn't.

What changed wasn't my talent. It was where I looked for people.

I joined a small design community online — not a job board, not LinkedIn spam, just a group of people who cared about the same weird, specific thing I did: editorial illustration for regional-language publishers. Someone in that group was a Kolkata-based magazine editor looking for exactly that. She didn't ask where I lived. She asked to see my work.

That first project paid ₹8,000. It felt like a lakh.

Six months later, I've worked with clients in four cities I've never visited. Every single one found me through the same community, not a resume portal. Nobody has asked for my PIN code once.

Here's what I've come to believe: talent has never been the scarce thing. Access was. The internet promised to fix that and then quietly rebuilt the same old gatekeeping — algorithms that favor people who already have followers, platforms that favor cities that already have infrastructure. A boy in Bhilai and a boy in Bandra get shown completely different opportunities, even though they're using the same app.

Communities don't work that way. A community doesn't care about your address. It cares whether you show up, whether you're useful, whether you're kind to the next person who asks a dumb question. That's a fairer filter than any algorithm I've met.

I still live in Bhilai. I have no plans to leave. My work reaches further than I ever expected it to — not because I got louder, but because I finally found the room where the right people could actually hear me.

Talent was never the problem. The room was.