What to do?

Its been crazy three weeks cramming in time for the various deadlines that I've been trying to meet on all fronts. My plate has been rather stashed up with a teaching job, a freelancing project with an education firm, my masters program, enrolling for a car rally, figuring out a summer holiday, toying with the idea of starting a small circulating library and beating the Mumbai heat. The result: I haven't had time to look at my brand new inheritance of lovely old books from half a century ago or even contemplate my future career moves.
If there's one thing i dislike greatly, it is making decisions. I know its awefully lucky to be spoilt for choice, but that's one spot I dread being in. So just as I was making my peace about postponing career decisions to a later week, Shorty sent me a mail frigidly titled "freelancer?professor? student of education...?" Attached was an article by Alain De Botton on office culture.An excerpt,

"Watch anyone halfway competent at work and it’s hard to do anything other than respect them. In our age, levels of commitment that in previous societies were devoted to military adventures and religious intoxication have been channelled into numerical, legal and managerial needlework. In the olden days, home used to be the place of kindness and refuge while the workplace was cruel and blunt. Now the equation is often reversed. How politely we tend to behave at work, next to the insults we throw at one another at home, where there is no human resource department to coax us into being more civilised. Nowadays workers have to be “motivated,” meaning they have — more or less — to like their work. So long as workers had only to retrieve stray ears of corn from the threshing-room floor or heave quarried stones up a slope, they could be struck hard and often, with impunity and benefit. But the rules had to be rewritten with the emergence of tasks whose adequate performance required their protagonists to be, to a significant degree, content, rather than simply terrified or resigned. The new figures of authority must involve themselves with childcare centres and, at monthly get-togethers, animatedly ask their subordinates how they are enjoying their jobs so far. Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in a velvet glove is, of course, the human resource department.

Office work distracts us, it focusses our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it gives us a sense of mastery, it makes us respectably tired, it puts food on the table. It keeps us out of greater trouble. "

Just a few days earlier, I found out that my designation at the place I was freelancing was that of an 'education consultant.' It had a fancy ring to it. But that was it. It was a booming, hollow fancy ring. As I sat on a swivel chair in their air conditioned office, designing 'quality' educational products I realized how 'quality' education can never be produced in the four walls of a capital driven business venture. Adding quality to education needs a human helping hand....no high end multimedia kit can bring that dimension of quality or meaning to education which an ordinary teacher can. Quality education begins and ferments in a classroom.

My work isn't merely distraction. It doesn't put much food on my plate, but I'm happy gorging on the food for thought it often leaves me with. So is the decision made? I don't know.

I'll just have to wait for another academic year to unfold... :)