Week 16/2026

(Raw note by Mihir)

First principles thinking to selcte work opportunity.

In February 2025, Nidhi and I moved to Ahmedabad. I got a job at a foundation that wanted to build a nature-based, project-based learning premium school for 3 to 8-year-old children in Ahmedabad. I joined the curriculum team as a learning facilitator. My job is to do pilot projects with children directly, and work with curriculum designers, researchers, and other team members.

On the other side, Nidhi did volunteering for two months and finally got a job at a nature-based preschool at the Centre for Environment Education.

Parallelly, I was working on developing ‘Khojbeen Mandali’ as an org. In January 2026, Bansi and I initiated a Gujarati children’s magazine publication project, and slowly built the website of KM with help from the Tech4Good community. We made a mentorship forum, started the NGO registration process, and started working on curriculum development projects with four orgs. I wrote one article based on past work with children, which is in the process of getting published in Sandarbh magazine by Eklavya.

In about a year, the org I am working at took a pivot. Their vision to build an innovative school changed. Management is not communicating with the team about next steps, and slowly the leadership team started moving out. I was feeling happy that I was getting a good salary, home was set, and Nidhi also got a job with meaningful work — but now things will change if I need to exit this. They are not telling us to go, but they are giving us random tasks without vision.

Nidhi also shared that she wants to visit Kanpur frequently because of health issues of her father and dadaji.

Our needs:

• Financial: ₹70K combined income minimum if we are living in a small town; ₹1L if we are living in a big city like Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Pune, or Bhopal.
• Flexibility to take frequent leave, OR a place near Kanpur (for example, Bhopal — overnight from Kanpur).
• Meaningful work ethos: experiential learning, mentoring role, curriculum design / learning experience design, direct work with children, theater-, project-, and nature-based pedagogy, work with young children or teenagers, long-term sustained work — not short-term project-based.
• Possibilities to grow Khojbeen Mandali (ongoing magazine project, curriculum development, and mentoring work).

Options:

1. Continue work at the same org in Ahmedabad. Nidhi leaves the job or does part-time work at CEE so she can go to Kanpur whenever needed. Financially things are okay, and I can grow KM. The loss is that I will struggle to find meaning in the current org, and if the org shuts down, I will need to find a job immediately with similar pay — which is difficult to find in Ahmedabad.

2. Find a remote job with a good salary and move to Bhopal. Nidhi can do part-time work. I can grow KM, but it will be a struggle to do so in Bhopal because my network is in Ahmedabad/Gujarat.

3. Find a job in Bhopal with a good salary. Nidhi can do part-time or freelance work. It is difficult to find a good-paying, meaningful job in Bhopal. There are big orgs, but the work is very mechanical — I hate that type of work. Difficult to grow KM.

4. Both Nidhi and I got offers from Shaishav Trust to join their Dediyapada project.

   • Mihir: Work on curriculum development and training for their newly launched rural fellowship project (similar to Teach For India).
   • Nidhi: Work as project manager and mentor for fellows in the same project.
   • Finance: We will get ₹70K combined, and ₹80K combined after 6 months.
   • For the long term, we need to help with fundraising and take initiative to run the org, as the founding team is stepping back and giving seats to young people. If the young team works hard, they will survive — otherwise there is a chance things could go downhill.
   • Nidhi will get flexibility to take leave for Kanpur visits.
   • Our living costs will be low — around ₹10–15K — as we will be living in a small town called Dediyapada in Gujarat.
   • I will not be able to grow KM independently, because as a full-time employee of Shaishav, all volunteer and freelance work I do comes under Shaishav. I can request that the magazine and publication work be treated as independent.
   • There will be freedom to do different types of projects inside the Shaishav ecosystem as an intrapreneur.

Looking at all the possibilities, risks, and challenges, we are finalizing the fourth option.

There are two or three concerns:

1. I need to leave my network in Ahmedabad and Vadodara and shift to a village.
2. I need to pause KM’s work.
3. It’s a cooperative kind of structure, so we need to work for our own financial growth — we need to get projects and implement them. In this process, we might pivot from the original ethos, and there is a possibility of burnout too.

But I think I can prepare myself for this.

• While giving full energy to Shaishav, I will also invest energy in continuing to build my personal brand — sharing my work, writing blogs and articles, and volunteering not as KM but as Mihir Pathak, an educator working with Shaishav. Shaishav will be part of my identity, but not the whole thing. I will continue engaging with the feedback forum and mentors to do projects inside Shaishav.

• The growth struggle I would have done for KM, I will now do for Shaishav.

• Running a lab-kind of space and doing multiple small projects inside the ecosystem will help me stay motivated.