Two threads

1.)
I was reflecting on how my stay at Arghyam has worked out.

I started off saying that I would help them with launching the portal, a roughly 1.5 month job. They pointed out immediately that it would be meaningful to stay atleast for a month more until things settled down after the launch, which I agreed to. Then in order to justify meeting the PM :-), I decided to stay on till April. I was firmly convinced that my interests and direction would not be met by continuing to work on the portal, as I just wanted to do a well-defined set of tasks and move on. To my surprise I found that I was quite absorbed in the post-launch dissemination and other tasks. I could see myself being fully engaged for a few more months. After that as the scope of tasks expanded I could see myself being engaged for yet more months and so set myself a year's stay as a provisional goal ie through november (always such time-bound commitments ! I wanted to work at Neoteris for 2 years, I wanted to go on a sabbatical for a year..). Most recently I got a vision in the brain that saw me engaged here for 2 years..
Well, I'm definitely in for a year, lets see what happens after that

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2.)
Another thing I thought I would mention is some degree of understanding of my curious attitude to money, that I got over the course of this sabbatical. I realize now that there is a zone of comfort with money for me and that zone is not having much more than I concretely need in the here and now. For eg. at Juniper I was earning such that my monthly expenditure was a small fraction (25% perhaps, 50% if you count the house loan) of my income. Now, I am quite comfortable with income coming down to the level of meeting expenditure with not much left over. The point is most people I think would be very uneasy with this kind of downshift whereas I took it remarkably well. I feel its because I came down into my comfort zone. The additional money over and above expenses that I had earlier, had a steep diminishing return for me in terms of added feeling of fulfillment, security etc. So I didn't feel too bad about losing it. Looking back to my time in the US, I'm amazed by how little I saved. I just didn't have any strong sense that extra income over expenditure had to be saved for the future.

On one side one can argue that this is a classic case of a person who is bad with money and doesn't understand the compounding power of savings and blah blah blah. Its valid, but I think that there's something more fundamental in my case. I am sure I am going to suffer a bit at some point for not having enough foresight, but I think more fundamentally its just natural for me to not be earning a lot :-). When I was earning a lot more than now, I simply didn't pay the extra money the attention it deserved. Somehow I just don't tune into money that way. The first time I seriously thought about money was when we bought the flat (pushed by Priya there) and then again when I was planning the sabbatical. Then money suddenly became really interesting -- it became real to me. I was making very concrete plans for doing something that I wanted and money was a critical instrument to making that happen. Some might remember that I even published my budgeting exercise on the blog :-). This kind of use of money is different in my mind from something you save for 'retirement' or 'kids education' or 'investing in the stock market' etc. My mind simply doesn't wrap itself around those uses for money.
There are other aspects to this that don't quite fit in -- I want to travel a lot, which costs money, and I'm fascinated by the real estate market and want to buy land. But I think these are perturbations on the basic thesis above.