Reason #4: The Worst of Both Worlds

You think you’re going to get the best of both worlds for your family, but could end up with the worst of both.

You’re familiar with this math: If I’m earning in dollars and spending in rupees, I couldn’t get any closer to winning a lottery. With servants to do my work, and saving pots of money because everything is dirt cheap, I’m going to live royally.

Isn’t that the ultimate heaven for a middle class Indian, or for anyone on an expat pay package?

It’s a better life than one could imagine when immigrating to London, New York or Sydney. But remember, too, that getting through your average day will sap every ounce of energy and patience you have and cost you dearly. You can’t always count on the government for power supply or water, so be prepared to arrange for your own power back-up, and patronize a water tanker that can drain the city’s depleted borewells even drier.

Getting someone to cook and clean for you and drive you around is wonderful. You could also end up with higher levels of stress because you’ve suddenly become parent, psychiatrist, moneylender and health care provider for your household help. Altering your life to this degree to just get someone to cook meals and dust your house for you? Suddenly this doesn’t seem very attractive.

Also consider that you will spend a great part of your day working with people who don’t deliver on what they’ve promised to, and chasing people who routinely don’t show up when they’re supposed to.

If you’re at a point in your life where you’ve achieved independence, self-sufficiency and equanimity, do you really want to sacrifice these?

The Parents' Guide to India's Education System

Copyrighted. Reprints only with attribution and the author’s permission


This blog offers the Only guide to education in India that is comprehensive, honest and useful. Most so-called guides are larded with PR bullshit. Take it from a parent and a former newspaper reporter who has scoured every option and is happy to share her findings with thousands of others who are likely to walk in the same shoes.

Families moving to India find themselves staring at an alphabet soup of educational systems: CBSE, ICSE, SSC, SSLC, NCERT, IGCSE, ISC .... The nightmare doesn’t end, and parents have to make the right choice in a snap.

Time is short. The education system is completely different from what your children are used to. The school year is different. The Indian school calendar runs from June to March so you agonize about whether it’s better to let your children finish their school year abroad so they experience closure before you all move, or better for them to cut short their school year, forgo their summer holidays and plunge into a fresh start in India. School admission can be a humiliating ordeal for parents and children. Schools typically have long waiting lists and grueling admission tests that can batter a child’s self-confidence. Your children are likely to be saddled with heavier school bags, loaded with homework, parrot their textbooks and constantly prepare for tests.

You stare at all these unappetizing options and have to take the perfect decision quickly ... because your child’s future depends on the oracle of a school principal and your ability to find the right school and curriculum.

Unscrambling the acronyms is easy. The challenge lies in finding the right school that can give your child an enriched and balanced learning experience that you want for them and would make your relocation worthwhile.

Those relocating for a brief period want to leapfrog into a compatible educational ecosystem. Those moving to India for good want to make that perfect, unerring decision that could make or break their family's adjustment to India.

Parents want to choose a school and an education system that together are most likely to make their kids happy, successful and well-prepared for admission to the most competitive colleges in India and abroad.

Read my succeeding posts for answers to the most asked questions about the Indian school system.

The next installment will answer:
What is CBSE?
What is ICSE?
Which is better: CBSE or ICSE?

Groundhog Day

Being in India often makes me feel like I’m stuck in my own version of Groundhog Day.

This is one of my favorite movies. Bill Murray is a self-centred and snide television weatherman who is smitten by Andi McDowell, a producer who detests him for the arrogant jerk that he is but is stuck as his partner during their news coverage of the cute annual ritual of Groundhog Day in a small town. Every year, the town officially hails the end of winter after a celebrated rodent and town mascot named Punxatawney Phil ends its hibernation by emerging from its hole in the ground and approving the weather by looking as though he is interested in remaining outdoors.

The same sequence of events in a single day repeat themselves, over and over again, giving Murray a shot at re-capturing lost opportunities and re-doing everything he did unthinkingly or clumsily again and again, with increasing purpose and elegance.

Again and again, he gets the same chance over to be kinder to the people whose toes he treaded on. He learns to open himself to the beauty of moments he missed in his usual snarkiness. And with each new effort, he gradually re-invents himself as a sensitive, happy person who celebrates each moment of his day till he makes it perfect, for himself and everyone he meets. As he finally perfects this single, all-important day in his life, he enriches the people he encounters and finds his own hidden talents. He learns to be kind and gentle, to play piano like a virtuoso, to find joy in little things. And by editing and retooling himself, he crafts his own happiness.

The lesson is that we are the creators of our own happiness. Every day can be the most meaningful day of our lives, and we have the power, within our own selves, to make little moments and gestures reverberate with beauty. We are the artists who can paint and re-paint each still frame until it imparts the beauty we imagined it should glow with and becomes perfect as a work of art.

Every time I’ve come back to India, it feels like I am stuck again in the same set of events and given another opportunity to do things over in order to make them come out better.

The props change a little over the years. There are more cars, grander buildings. People have more money, wear nicer clothes and still cut into queues and attack buffet tables.

But the situations are the same. I interact with the same prototypes of relatives, neighbors, people I meet for work, or at a dinner party.

Each time, I have the same conversations and go through the same motions, over and over.

Each time, I have an opportunity to feel utterly stuck and utterly blessed with something new.

Each time, I have an opportunity to do better and to get things right as I become aware of the renewed opportunity to understand the people whose lives intersect with mine better, to offer better of myself and to come away enriched with simple gladnesses I was blind to in previous times.

Moving to India has felt like enacting my own Groundhog Day. I feel stuck in a maddening yet serene cycle of karmic repetition. When things happen, they are new, yet infuriatingly similar. It is a second chance disguised as déjà vu. I’m still stuck, still trying to get it right.

The country I have a love-hate relationship keeps throwing me fresh chances to know it, and myself better; to forgive me, and to be forgiven, to disown me and to embrace me in its fragrant shoulders.

Coming to India

We’re leaving, I told myself.

I looked out at the red and yellow heliconia dangling like brilliant earrings in the postcard-sized garden of our Singapore condo. A sunbird groomed and fussed over one flower, then another. We’re leaving all this.

But for where?

We could go back to America and become insomniac mortgage slaves, our lives transmogrified into a whirl of commuting, picking up lumber from Home Depot, cutting our grass, spraying 409 around the house, whipping up plasticky macaroni for our kids, and whizzing them off to daycare and Little League games in the minivan we’ve washed and detailed and vacuumed because we spend so much time sitting and eating in it. We won’t have time for ourselves or for friends, an affordable luxury one gets used to in Asia. In America, parents of young children do not have much of a social life of their own. They wring themselves into their wage work, and squeeze any other time they can fight for into their children. The only friends they have are parents of their kids’ friends.

We could of course go to India. Home is where you go in the end to put your head down, and India is home, too.

I suppose, says a part of me niggardly. All right, I grant that it is more than a small part of me. Bigger than I care to admit sometimes.

It is home. I have tried at various times of my life to spread the branches of my self, pushed them with desire and ambition to places far away. But the kernel of my seed, the roots of my being are here. I hate and love this place intensely.

I didn’t leave India because I hated it. I could have stayed on, although looking back I am glad I did because it set me on the trajectory of finding and making my own happiness.

At the time I left, long before liberalization, there wasn’t very much that was interesting for me to do other than get married like the rest of my cousins, or get a job for not much money because my family didn’t have the connections to help me find something that my grades and ambition deserved.

My professors at the elite Calcutta college I graduated from clamped their lips into polite smiles when they heard I was sacrificing more years of feasting on Elizabethan poetry and Restoration drama for the prospect of studying – if it’s possible to really call it study – journalism in America. Why after the privilege of studying with some of the best literature professors in the country, did I want to soil my hands at some trade school for some dubious qualification?

“Why do you want to study about telegraph poles?” mumbled the head of the English department when I went to pick up a letter of recommendation he had written to a school of mass communication somewhere in the Midwest. I looked at him. He was not being ironic. His face showed concern and disappointment. He was a kind man who had electrified our class with his mournful interpretive readings of Yeats’ tragic drama, transporting us from the dank classroom with its pigeon crap-stained benches. I was taking the jeweled heirloom he had shared with us and was traipsing off unworthily to use it to fix plumbing.

I glanced at the recommendation on my way downstairs. The praise in it made me flinch with guilt and confusion. Was I throwing my life away?

As I stepped away from the Victorian columns and skittered across the street dodging pushcarts and trams and rickshaws and buses, I was grateful for my choice. I didn’t want to worship the embalmed. I wanted to throw myself into the hungry ardor and the sweat of the living as they pushed and elbowed a space out for themselves.

I’m going to fast forward here. I got that master’s degree in journalism. I worked for an American newspaper, traveled to incredible places, met my future husband and married him, had a baby, got burned out at my job, took time off, became a full time mother and had another baby.

Now, two decades, dozens of moves and two children later, I’m back in India.