First the news….
V has got admission into Junior KG!!! By Mumbai standards, it is bigger than making it into a professional college, or so I was told.
For what it is worth, Mumbai just does not have enough schools, and not just reputed schools, just any school. I could say that again and again. I meet people who refuse to move to Mumbai, because getting admissions is Mumbai is a pain in the a**. I had colleagues who were still fighting for an admission in February last year and had resigned myself to the same fate, mentally. It has been a year of angst.
Thankfully we stay in that part of Mumbai which has more schools that the rest of the city. I have been calling up schools, picking up forms, filling them out like we are applying for a PG abroad, and wondering why am I doing so much for the admission of a 4 year old????????
TB and I have studied state board till tenth, and personally I think both of us have done decently in life. It was a little difficult to absorb the obsession about school/ brand / status etc. I still don’t get it. Schools here prefer children with non working mothers, so that they have a family support system. So what is my education worth? Peanuts? I could be a post PhD and a doctor, but………….
“Sorry maam, the school policy prefers to have one stay in parent”. That was the exact line said to my senior colleague, who is a Harvard Business school alumnus, by a “reputed” south Mumbai school. The next time around, she was wiser, she got through, by “lying through my teeth, because that is what they wanted to hear”.
I did not want to lie; I did not want to play down my status and achievements in life. Neither did I want to compromise on his education. The biggest gift that our parents have given us was our education, and we want V to have the best, always. This school was one among the two that I secretly hoped V should get into. It was closest to our house, and the bus comes into our complex, and the review is quite good. And above all, it has a mix of kids from all walks of life. I firmly believe that what we learn in early years form our personality and social foundation, and i definitely do not want him to feel like a very " priviledged" child. He should be able to distunguish between his 'needs' and 'wants'....and i wanted a school where he will learn to appreciate what he has in life and not take it for granted.
Before we walked in, TB said” I am nervous”, and I replied “So am I, but let’s just go and be ourselves. And leave the rest to almighty”. Thankfully, this interview was much better that I expected. Of course they asked everything about me and TB except our horoscopes (which even we have no clue about), and both of us were equivocal.
TB was asked what he had heard about the school and why we chose to apply there. I could almost hear him say “because my wife says this is a decent school and because you called us for the interview”. But the man rose to the occasion and fed them some bull shit about how he has heard from some of our neighbors’, who send their children here about all the good feedback some crap like that. I can vouch for the fact that he does not even know one of those “so called neighbors” he has quoted. But anyhow, they seemed to have bought the story.
The star of the day, however, was the boy himself, who has been showing all the signs of a stand off minutes before we entered the interview room.
He sat where he was asked to, answered all the questions, shied away from singing a rhyme and looked down (!). The clincher was when the principal (I am assuming so) asking him
P: " Why do you want to come to this school?" (Tell me, how does a 4 year old boy respond to that question. I can’t imagine!!!!I was quite sure he would say something in lines of I don’t want to come here)
But surprise, he says” This is a big school”. So what does “princi the porcupine” do? Stop there? No. she goes on….
P: Which school do you study now?
V: “xyz” (current school name)
P: Is that not a big school? Why you want to come here? (I could have strangled her; she was asking all this to a 4 year old!!!)
V: “No, that is a small school, this is a biiiiiig school”*complete with actions*
Then P the Porcupine called him around and gave him a chocolate. He took that, and asked for more, for” papa and mama”. They laughed as they told us that he was admitted! Considering they told most of parents to come back and check the list for admission later on, I re checked again, to make sure I had heard properly. We had made it…..yippee
Phew! That was close. I had thought we had lost out on the rhyme part. It could not have been so simple? We walked out grinning like fools, and very very relieved. We still have to fork out a huge amount as fees, but for now, we have a seat to send him to next June, and better still, at a place we wanted.
Right now, I am feeling like V has made it to Harvard, or Leeds or Princeton…trust me, the paperwork is as much, and so is the relief.
