Driver's kids, future engineers....
I am attaching a map of where we have been so far. The countdown for leaving Indore has started and things are getting very hectic. My sister came over from Delhi just for a day and we spent as much time as we could catching up. We were up till 2 to 3 am ( not sure because i was falling sleep off and on :) She is gone back now.
This trip is turning out to be destined for meeting old friends. Out of no where another close friend from elementary ( no picture yet, her brother look the pictures) school days called, we were the four nerds , SUrekha, Sadhna , Leelavati and myself that used to hang out together all the time. I lost touch with her after eight grade.
She is the head of the department at IIT Kanpur. If you are not familiar with the IIT's : these were five colleges started by then prime minster of the newly independent India in 1950s. These are scattered around the country , Bombay, Kanpur, Calcutta, Madras and Delhi. Each one was in collaboration with a developed country who pledged to help the adopted institute. These institutes are known, through out the world, for the quality of engineers they mint out. It is known that it is harder to get admission into an IIT than in any college in the world. Obviously, Leela is very smart and accomplished and it was heartwarming how she remembers the little details of our days together. Those were such selfless friendships..
Anyways, speaking of IITs brings us to the second biggest business in India : EDUCATION. I learned things unique to Indian Education now , few examples that I thought were most telling are listed below:
1) Coaching classes and Dummy schools: The goal of most parents and kids it to get into some professional college and to do that around tenth grade most are enrolled in the coaching classes of various kinds to get admission in the right college ( like engineering or medical etc) . These classes cost upward of 400 to 500 thousand Rupees ( depending of the reputation of the coach) per year and are in addition to going to schools.This caused the time problem becasue there are only 24 hours in a day and kids are required to attend the normal school during the day and go for the coaching classes in the evenings and then do the homework for both......you see the problem...literally not enough hours in the day.
So some genius business person came up with the idea of "DUMMY SCHOOLS" . You pay the tution ( typically several hundred thousand per year) , enroll i nthe DUMMY SCHOOL but you do not have to attend it full time. They fudge your attendance, even fudge your lab experiments and you spending time in the coaching class because there you learn the tricks and questions and answers to score in the common state wide exams. ...HUGE BUSINESS..
2) IITs, as you must have guessed already, are even weirder to get into. There is a multi billion dollar business to running the coaching classes for IIT entrance exams. In theory, after passing high school, one can give the IIT entrance exam and depending of the scores one gets admission into IIT of their choice. Reality is otherwise : kids finish high school, spend two years of their lives and several hundred thousands of their parents money and attend IIT coaching classes for one to two years before taking the entrance exam. I thought irony of all this is that there are coaching classes and entrance exams to get into the IIT coaching classes ....you can extrapolate this to any degree you like :)
3) The positive side of all this is that all perents are aware of the importance of education ( at least for boys) and spend their life savings and time to educate the kids. I have talked to one driver whose kids are IT professionals at Banglore, another one , with much younger kids, is very involved with their education and asked me to talk to them ( ages 3 t o8....very cute kids)
SO, like all things about India, education has two sides of the story. One last thing about it is a joke told by one of our colleagues at engineering college. _ Question: How many engineering colleges are there in INdore? Answer : You start making a list of all of them and put the name of the dean and the chancellor next to it and by the time you are done there will be one more college just opened...:) Correct answer at this moment is 65 ( remember there used to be ONE)
I can go on about education but it is time to get to the prewedding functions for wedding no 2. PIctures to follow in the next blog
This brings
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