University admissions this year have taken their toll on our neighbours and friends vying for the best courses and colleges for their children. In all the excitement about Delhi University’s 100 per cent marks and high cut-offs, the newspapers seem to have missed the real story about how Indian middle-class education budgets are keeping the economies afloat in the Western hemisphere. Obama doesn’t need to fear being Bangalored any more because Bangalore and Gurgaon and small town Bihar have taken over both Ivy League as well as nondescript colleges with a population that seems intent on doing the bhangra at their prom parties.
“My daughter’s off to New York this fall,” said my sister-in-law, on a visit to our home in the capital that coincided with my aunt-in-law, grumpy that her own brood had to settle for an Indian degree, declaring open war that the college her nephew was going to attend in Washington was better than anything the Big Apple had to offer. Before the kebabs could be flung at each other, my daughter said that her cousins – whether in NY or in DC – could hook up with her friends, all of them, it appeared, majoring and minoring in the US. Ranging from Frisco to Boston to Manhattan, they were out of town and country to study finance, fashion, aviation and filmmaking, slogging and pubbing in equal measure while mocking the resident desis for their parochial ways.
It’s no wonder everyone’s so not in saddi Dilli right now, even though the universities will open only a couple of months later. Anushka’s parents have taken an apartment in London for the entire duration their daughter in doing a summer course at the London School of Economics, to ensure she doesn’t drink, mistakenly eat beef or date a gora. Some lucky ones whose semesters include a stint, or exchange, in Spain, or Greece, or Singapore, have found their families descending on them with backpacks and sleeping bags to camp in their hostel rooms. Other mummys-daddys have taken to touring the US, or Europe, “to help the poor child acclimatise” two long months before they’ll step into a classroom, before which they’ve already browbeaten deans and those others in positions of authority, ensuring their ward isn’t polluted by sharing a room with a student who is “low-caste, north Indian/south Indian, East European, or even from another country — though Asian is all right, I suppose.”
Right now, therefore, all our friends, and some of the family, are away, checking out the availability, and prices, of contact lens solution and Lipton tea in Southall, overcoats and boots in Primark, the call rates on different cards and wi-fi Skype on campus, wondering how much basmati they can ask visiting friends and relatives to carry against IOUs of duty-free liquor on the home leg. The price of mangoes and buying dahi in a tub might pinch, but there’s the possibility that everyone from dada-dadi to chacha and taiji will visit them during their studies, so it might make sense to rent a place in a reasonable suburb from where one can run a part-time business while sundry relatives keep the bachcha-log kipped out in paratha and pulao.
None of our friends seems to want to send their baba-log to Ozland for fear their mobiles could be stolen, accompanied by an unfortunate punch in the gut, but the visiting Kiwi prime minister would have been pleased to learn that at least one family is considering a grad course in any course, in any college, in Wellington. Why New Zealand? “For the scenery, stupid!”
