Mera desh paagal hai!

(Translation of title: My country is crazy... although that doesn't do it justice!).

Why? Well, because I just found out I am going to try doing something innovative within the most bizarre educational system ever! Remember my newspaper in education workshops? Well, I signed the official paperwork for that today and went to the office to discuss remuneration. How do you think they'd pay a freelancer? By number of hours? Wrong! By number of workshops? Wrong again! they pay you by the number of students in the workshop... they pay you a certain amount for every 50 students who show up! And then they reassured me... don't worry, we almost always have 200-300 kids per workshop! Umm... and that's a workshop?!

This is going to be interesting. On one hand, it's hard to imagine that i will have very meaningful writing workshops in groups of 200 or more. On the other hand, with about 4 hours of work there a month, I can meet my basic monthly expenses. I figure why not? It will leave me enough time to write and to do other meaningful work without worrying about remuneration!

It also seems like I will be writing regularly for infochangeindia.org. I don't know what kind of a journalist I will make, but I did always want to write about and for the people I have met through my volunteer experiences, to share those worlds with my other worlds. Here's my perfect opportunity to do that; so why am I afraid? It'll take some figuring out, but yes, it looks like my work life is moving in a very interesting, not to mention unexpected, direction!

Keep watching this space for more stories as I write them!