For Songadh, where forest and farmland meet and livelihoods are assembled from several partial ones.
A living assembled from pieces
Songadh sits where teak forest gives way to sugarcane. Households here commonly combine several partial incomes - some farming, some forest produce, some seasonal labour, sometimes a few months of work elsewhere.
None of those is a career in the sense the word usually implies. Together they are a livelihood, and it works, and it is precarious in a way a single job is not.
The cost of no single answer
When someone asks what you do, there is no clean answer. That sounds trivial and is not: identity attaches to occupation, and an occupation made of fragments gives you nothing to attach to.
Clients describe feeling they have not amounted to anything, while in fact managing something considerably more complex than a single job - multiple income streams, seasonal timing, constant reallocation of effort. The skill is real and entirely unrecognised, including by the person exercising it.
What the work addresses
Naming the competence that is already there. Someone running four partial livelihoods is doing sophisticated allocation under uncertainty, and has never once been told that is a skill.
Recognising it changes what feels possible, which is where any practical planning has to start.
Sessions
Online, in Gujarati or Hindi, scheduled around whichever season is currently demanding.
Frequently asked questions
- Can sessions be in Hindi?
- Yes, whichever you think in.