Week 40 /2026

28th Sep to 4th Oct 2026

A few thoughts I wanted to share during the team meeting but couldn’t:

I keep wondering how much time our field staff actually gets. Making food, keeping the house clean, traveling, and every second day a new school, new children, a new village. It is tiring.

How will they get the time and mind space to reflect, to really be with questions? Is it realistically possible to be a reflective educator in this situation?

Why can’t we do more work in fewer schools? Is it because of funders’ requirements? Field staff need to work eight hours because the whole world is set up like this: we give money, it is a job, it is a responsibility.

Social work is not a job. We need to enable people to do social work. We need to give them opportunities where they can nourish themselves.

If it is a funding problem, we all need to find new funding opportunities, or do a different job ourselves and just volunteer for better education and society. Running an NGO just like any other institution or company is using the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house, which is impossible.

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Last week I was thinking and discussing the scale of our work: should we prioritise scale or depth? To get funding, you need scale, and when you are working at scale you get stuck in logistics and cannot go in depth. Sometimes it is possible to do diluted work at scale and, in parallel, run some in-depth experiments.

Until when will you yourself do the implementation? When will someone adopt your programs? How do you scale the philosophy? What did Gandhi and Krishnamurti do?

How can we co-create new models based on philosophy with different self-motivated people?

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I couldn’t attend India FOSS this time and I am having FOMO. I bought the tickets two or three months ago, I think. But then I got the fellowship and planned my Bangalore visit for the end of August, so I could not visit Bangalore again in September. My next Bangalore visit is planned for December, for GratConf at Christ University.

It was a long weekend, Friday to Sunday, and we had decided to go somewhere. I am the workaholic, so we didn’t. On Friday, Nidhi joined me on a work trip to Koba village near Gandhinagar, where we did a puppet show and a short activity with PTC college students at the Kasturba Gandhi Memorial Trust. The campus was really nice. On Saturday I went to the office, and in the evening we went to Indigo Musume as part of a community engagement event. Sunday we spent at home.

Oh yes, on Friday we also watched the theatre performance by Pratik Gandhi called Mohan no Masalo. It was nice.

There is a water shortage at our place because of the small water tank. The house owner doesn’t want to buy a new one. They say, “Pure area mein paani ki problem hai.” I don’t know what the truth is.