Week 38 & 39 /2026
14th to 27th Sep 2026 (two weeks)
Let me start with this: I have no memory of the last two weeks. I’m opening my notebook and my phone’s gallery to see what I did in that time.
I felt like there was no anchoring during these past two weeks. Work felt meaningless, and some very fundamental questions emerged.
It felt like I was going into the same loop of making programs and scaling them, just coordinating and fundraising. Meanwhile, I can feel a treasure of creative energy inside me, bubbling to come out. I want to create, make, tinker, and tell stories. I want to make deeper connections with children and have deeper dialogue. That is how I would like to live my day-to-day life.
But things come in packages, and sometimes I disagree with that. Sometimes we choose things that don’t make sense, either out of habit or because we don’t know that “it is okay if we don’t do that stuff.” Sometimes we are in fear, or low in confidence to try new things, so we choose familiar ones. There’s no harm in that, but let’s not put a sticker on it saying that things come in a package, and that you need to do boring or unnecessary stuff just for numbers or scale before you can do creative work.
I know the funding game is different, and it is very, very difficult for us to remain small and do deeper creative work. But we need to make radical attempts to resist, create new models, and imagine new scales.
I don’t know if this makes sense. I am just rambling.
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A few wonderful things also happened:
- I felt very happy that Avani and Jemmy from Mulya Foundation are facilitating a workshop at the Climate Chakraview event in Udaipur.
- Suruthan and Neeraj were also travelling to the Chakraview event. They were in Ahmedabad for a few hours and visited us. We met for the first time, had a chat, and ate fafda-jalebi.
- The Savarkundla workshop was nice. After a long time, I enjoyed spending time with children and young people.
- I am excited to work with the PTC college in Koba. They are a really interesting group, and they genuinely want to work deeply with their students.
- We have a visitor from Kerala, Navamee. She is doing a fellowship from Traveller’s University and is visiting Ahmedabad to see different experiments in education.
- We celebrated Nidhi’s birthday on 16th Sep. This time I made an effort to give her a personalised gift. I selected and printed a few funny and cute photos in Polaroid style and size, and she really liked them.
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I haven’t been able to spend quality time with Nidhi for the last few months. Weekends are going to workshops and travel, and during the week I don’t have the energy left to go out in the evening. A long weekend is coming up on 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Oct. Let’s see what we can do.