The School Thing

For any of you that haven't ever followed any of the school admission posts in Indian blog/ news land - let me inform you - it is a big, big thing. If you never do anything else for your child - become a politician so it can get paroled easy, start exporting lead pipes or some such unglamourous thing so your child never has to worry about where it can find money for the next snort of coke, become a Bollywood star so your child can star in flop after flop for crores...do this - get your child into a good school. And let me tell you, it may be more difficult to achieve than any of the aforementioned.

In Delhi, the courts finally decided the handful of good schools had had a party for way too long and established a point system - so many points for living within 5 kilometers of a school, so many points for girl children, so many points for being a sibling of a child already in that school or the offspring of an alumnus and so on. So you would think the whole process is simple and transparent, and the stress is off. Right? Well, no. It turns out Delhi had too few 'good schools' and parents living farther off were ina real quandary. add to that the limited number of seats available at the good schools and the levels of stress are reaching stratospheric levels. Especially for those who have recently migrated into Delhi, live more than 5 km away from the school of choice and whose elder son is eligible for admission.

We live in Gurgaon, where the number of good schools is even more limited, so we weren't sure how stressed we should get when Chubbocks had to apply for admission. I decided that we were going to be the stress-free type of parents which then meant that thanks to not subscribing to the Times of India, which is where all the admissions open ads come out, we were late for almost every school's list. In panic, we even shelled out an obscene amount of money to book Chubbocks seat in a school which I really, really dislike. Thankfully, we were on time for The Shriram School admissions and Chubbocks managed to get in.

This year, we have to try our luck for Puddi. I can't imagine any school not taking her - can you? but then, I imagine that's what all parents feel about their offspring. In any case, we decided, both for emotional and financial reasons since this year has seen our bank accounts get wiped out, that we're going to put all our eggs into the Shriram school basket. Word has it the school has a friendly policy towards siblings and Chubbocks has been doing pretty well in school. So fingers, toes and all our moveable body parts crossed until our interaction next week!