May 2009 officially ushered in four years of us having returned to India after a longish stint in the US, 14 years for my husband and 10 for me, for those who are curious - and everyone is - the moment I say that we returned from the US, most people (especially people visiting from the US) ask "How long were you there?", because you see, the length of your stay determines how the rest of the conversation will go, and how much "NRIness" they should attribute to you - Did we acquire US citizenship? Did we buy and sell a house there? Were our children born there? All three of them? And how old were the kids when we returned? (yes, yes, yes, yes and 3, .5 and .5 respectively).
But I digress. I stumbled across some blogs and articles about returning to India today and began to ruminate about my own experiences. When we first returned, I blogged about my experiences for a year or so - some of those posts really embarass me when I read them now, but I've left the blog stay, because so many people have written telling me they've found it useful. Many of the things I seem obsessed about then (supermarkets, pediatricians etc.) seem fairly trivial now - I have settled on a good ped, I know my way around my favourite supermarkets etc. etc. Some of the other stuff I wrote about earlier are still very important to me - grappling with servants, my general disgust with our run down cities and lack of civic services and so on.
I'll focus this post on my #1 pet topic nowadays - schools.
Schools, of course, predominate my life nowadays - my oldest is now a 2nd standard student and the twins are in their 3rd year of Montessori (a real Montessori school unlike the many doppelgangers in India, but yes, they do dole out pages of homework every day - the pressure of the 1st standard entrance exam looms). I am, frankly, not very enamoured of schools here. I don't have much to compare with - D and I went to Grad School in the US, and our oldest was in a daycare when we left. But comparisons apart, most Indian schools are still where they were in our zamaana - teaching by the rote, tons of homework and exams and tests, students and parents having to be ultra-respectful, almost servile to undeserving, underpaid teachers, and so on.
My experience getting my oldest into grade school deserves a whole another post. Suffice to say that entrance in most schools is still arbitrary, based on entrance exams which can be easily bypassed by making overt or covert "donations". I deliberately steered clear of the so-called international schools - where money is the altar at which the staff worships, where prominence is given to the A/Cs littering the classrooms rather than the English-speaking ability of the teachers, where...suffice to say, international schools are not my cup of filter coffee.
Anyways, my oldest secured a seat at "The" public school of Hyderabad, sans donations, with merit - it is my husband's alma mater, so said husband was naturally overjoyed. Overall, my experience with the school in the last two years has been mixed - the teachers are great, but management sucks, the grounds are out of this world but the toilets stink, the academic pressure is quite minimal but learning by rote is very real and so on. The teachers are currently striking, by the way - demanding pay on par with the 6th Commission recommendation, which management initially agreed to pay but is refusing to do now. So my dear son is lolling around at home, getting royally frustrated. Many friends make not-so-polite enquiries about the state of the strike, and pepper conversations with "I told you so's" - they had warned me liberally about not putting him in the school.
In the meanwhile, precious time is being lost - time when my son could have learnt huge amounts of stuff in an environment where staff and management are not warring. That is the sad part of all this - that the student seems to be the very last concern of all parties in this squalid row.
So I can't help having an ocassional thought (maybe 1 in 50 thoughts, but it is still there) - what if Ani had been in, say, the Head Start school in Pleasanton, or the new elementary school in Dublin Hills, and was actually learning about the way things work? In this one respect, yes, we were probably better off in the US.
More about other aspects in coming posts.
P.S: The enforced vacation was not a total washout for Ani - he has managed to read books 2-5 of the Harry Potter series in these weeks. Not bad for a boy whose first milk tooth is yet to fall (he turned 7 in July), eh?
