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An expat friend of mine — call him B — returned to India recently after more than 15 years spent in the US. I met him soon after he had arrived and was quite taken up by his enthusiasm. His company had posted him here and he had accepted without a second thought. It would be good for his career to have some India in it and besides, it was time the children connected with their roots. Periodic holidays had been too few and far between and mixing with other desis in their small town was not the same. This was the real thing.

Besides, he had taken a short trip to check things out for himself and had found India “changed beyond compare.” “Look at the swanky buildings, the cars, the malls — just like back home. It will be the best of two worlds.” Just to be on the safe side, of course, he managed to convince his company to give him a ‘hardship allowance’ that expat managers get when they are sent to developing nations.

Needless to say that he soon came down to earth when faced with the challenges of finding a suitable apartment, negotiating traffic every day and coping with the “incredible pollution” of Mumbai. But such was his attachment to the city that he was ready to overlook all of that. His family, having never lived here before, had none of his nostalgia or sense of belonging; they complained loudly and frequently. He was caught between defending India and admitting that his family especially his children were having the worst of it.

What really got him, however was his experience in getting his children into school. Coming from a humble background, he was determined that his kids would get into the best schools, so he set about applying to various prestigious institutions.

Most did not bother to even reply to his queries — it was mid-term and in any case there were no vacancies, even for the children of hotshot managers. He finally got a call from one, which offered his children an admission test.
The younger one got through the test, the elder failed. Ironically, the elder had always done well at school in the US, getting top grades and being marked for higher things. Why did she not make it here? “Her entrance test had maths, English and general knowledge,” he told me.

In the last-named paper, they asked questions about the first President of India, the longest river in the country, the national bird and such like. “Think about it — why would a child brought up in the US know about these things,” he asked, frustrated. The school was not impressed with his logic-she had flunked this test and though her marks in the other two papers were good, it was not enough. Calls to the school have naturally gone unanswered.

B’s experience is not unique — all of us have faced difficulties in admitting our children to school. Being an expatriate ought not to give him any advantage. As for the school’s inflexibility — cussedness, some may call it — in not changing the test to suit a foreigner, well, why should they?

But the travails of B are hardly the issue here. More pertinent is to ask why have these kinds of tests at all? What is about general knowledge that fascinates us so? How do schools make out, on the basis of questions usually asked in quiz contests, if a child is intelligent or not? Nor are schools the only ones — see the number of GK books produced for those sitting in competitive exams for government jobs.

Equally strange is our obsession with mathematics. Parents obsess about their children doing poorly in the subject, even ignoring areas where their children can bloom. B’s daughter is a talented artist — no school would ever deign to give her a test in art, leave alone interview her about it. We seem to want to produce a country full of math nerds who can then go on and make a lot of money in software companies.

B is now contemplating sending his family back while he stays on. In America, he says, the neighbourhood, state-owned school is obliged to take the child. There is no shame in sending your children to a
local ‘public’ school; in India that would never be an option.

Consider the irony of a capitalist country with a publicly funded school system and a self-proclaimed socialist nation where government schools are a shambles. Somewhere along the way, we got our priorities totally mixed up. We often argue that our school system has produced bright kids who are conquering the world, but that applies to a privileged few; a majority of the country’s children are left out.

Now, expensive schools that resemble five-star resorts are springing up all over the country. They have invested in good teachers and are pulling a good crop of students from here and abroad. The fees are astronomical — B says even with his expat salary it would cost him a lot to get two children educated — but he just might go in for them. After all, he wants to give his children the ‘real’ India experience and this, now is the real India.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net