School Time!

Most students on my program take a rickshaw to school. Not me. I am lucky enough to take a school bus – the one Niranjan takes – every morning. We eat our breakfasts – usually a hard-boiled egg or rice – and scamper down the one flight of stairs to the small school bus awaiting our arrival. If we get there a little early –  as we usually do given Sandhya’s punctual manner – Sandhya will feed the stray, three-legged dog named Gini who lives around the apartment buildings a raw egg. Then Gini will continue on her daily activity of chasing cars up and down the road (this is how she became three-legged). We greet the neighbors coming back from their morning walks, or those leaving for work, and then pile into the school bus. There are five of us, not including the driver. Achel, who is about ten or so, her little sister Andwi, who is five; Ved, who is Niranjan’s age  - twelve, and Ved's older brother, Tej, who is fourteen. And me. Together we make a pretty motley crew, but I love it and it brings a big smile to my face every morning. We always laugh at the bus driver's reckless zooming throughout the streets of Pune, honking every two seconds as he gallivants passed cows and stray dogs, motorcycles and eighteen-wheelers, and all the other crazy things you find in the streets of India. 

The bus driver drops me at the corner of the road before driving on to drop the rest of the passengers off. I walk about half a kilometer to school from there, stopping as I do everyday to buy bananas from the "banana lady" as we creatively call her. I buy three bananas for ten rupees - which comes out to about ten cents. Not bad. 

Every parent in Maharashtra has the choice of sending their child/children to a Marathi-medium school or an English-medium school. Many of the parents I have talked to about this, and just from what I know from school etc., is that people are so caught up in the global race, and are so fixated on their children being competitive and strong enough to make it in this new globalized world, that they overwhelmingly and frantically enroll their children in an English-medium school. Knowing English very well is a plus in this world, for better or worse. It's the way the tables have turned in history, and now almost every educated child in India will know at least basic communicative English by the time they are three. 

This is a sad truth in a lot of ways, and although I can say from my place of privilege that I'm glad to be able to go across the world to a foreign country and still get by quite well without knowing a lick of the local language (at the beginning), it's a pretty crazy concept when you think about it. 

No one feels stronger about the whole thing than my host mom, Sandhya. The first time it came up in conversation, a tear came to her eye, literally. She feels so strongly that Niranjan not be put in an English-medium school because she is so proud of her local language, customs, and traditions, and sees that India is rapidly moving away from all of the greatness it has to offer. There is a huge crisis now with young adults moving oversees before or after finishing their education. Westernizing is not the answer, clearly: all of the things that the West has impacted in India have led to the garbage crisis, skyrocketing disease rates, and more medications. But alas. 

Niranjan still learns English in his Marathi-medium school, just not nearly as well. He can't speak a lot of English, which has definitely impacted our relationship, just like it has with Ajie, who can't speak it at all. But I would prefer that to a world with a future where little kids know five languages by the time they're three and a half, for the sole purpose of not "falling behind." Because that whole culture is certainly not the answer - I've had my share of it as well in the U.S.. But, as my host mom, would say, "what to do."