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There are small surprises in life that give us much more happiness than their monetary costs ... Getting a box of your favorite chocolates as gift ... finding the long forgotten 500 rupee note in the jacket pocket ... one can think of numerous examples ...

Today I had one such small-joys-of-life experience ... I got a cheque ... not too much in value ... but totally unexpected ... It was the payment for my piece in "Men's Health" ... I remember writing that stuff with no expectation of getting paid for it (Had I known maybe I would have written it more carefully) ... I was under the impression that people wrote such stuff just for the kick of it ... but then the cheque came ... and it gave me a high that no drug (at least none worth the cheque's value) could have managed ... :-)

Makes me wonder if one can sustain ones self just by writing opinion, insight and analysis pieces. There are a truck load of topics out there ... eco, Int relations and trade, health issues, climate issues, race/religion issues, rich-poor issues, moral-immoral issues ... If you can think about it , then you can write about it ... there can be many interesting pieces on many interesting topics ... but the point is - will people like to read them ??? will someone pay for them ??? does anybody apart from Vir Singhvi(or is it Sanghvi?) make a living by dishing out his style and guile, cheers and fears, vices and biases, fakes and takes ..et cetera et cetera for public consumption ... and then make a good life out of it ...

All you journalists out there ... tell me ... is it possible to make ends meet just by writing off your heart's content ???

(It's very unlikely that any journalist will ever read this post ... so the question passes to anybody who has foggiest idea about the publishing industry :-))

* I remember that I had promised a piece on Sudoku .. and I will definitely keep my promise some day ...