Admission to the temples of learning

It’s a cold day in the Madras winter, well, at least what passes for ‘cold’ and ‘winter’ in these parts, but you get the mood I’m trying to set. The queue snakes its way from a small window on a tastelessly designed cube of a building to a large, foreboding gate and out into the chaotic street where cars and two-wheelers are not ‘parked’ as much as being generally ‘stacked’ like clothes in a teenager’s closet.

The middle-aged folk in the queue are twitchy and nervous, and could collectively make a year’s worth of housing loan EMI payments for a doctor who specialised in reducing blood pressure. They keep looking anxiously at their watches (and mobile phones) and soon enough, a huge pile of nails liberated from fingers forms a snake like skin around the queue.

To add more drama to this already volatile mix, a watchman hovers around, and taking inspiration from the spiritual calmness of those good folks at Tirumala, suddenly screams the Tamil equivalent of “Jaragandi” at this queue.

The crowd is visibly flustered, and some attempt to politely ask the watchman how they are supposed to move when the small window at the mouth of the queue still remains stubbornly closed.

The watchman does not seem to pay attention. It is only once a year, on this particular day, that he gets to treat adult humans like children and he is not going to be swayed by some trivial logic about closed windows.

Then all of a sudden, the small window creaks open and the crowd gets agitated. All semblance of a queue disappear as people madly rush to the window to receive their manna from heaven, an admission form to a “prestigious” school in Madras.

The clerk at the window, who has been carefully chosen for his ability to transfer anger arising from domestic troubles at his home to the hapless person currently on the other side of the grilled window, now demands to know the parents’ antecedents. A 10-generation family tree and affidavits from the Shankaracharya (or the Pope) are apparently mandatory.

The parent must also produce a letter from their employer to the effect that their jobs are transferrable. They must also personally connect with GPS satellites and estimate the distance from the footstep of their home to the gate of the school within a nanometre margin of error.

Some of the more ‘prestigious’ schools will even have TV media stationed outside, to advertise to the rest of the world that, even more so than proving Fermat’s last theorem, which kids graduating from these schools will likely not be able to do, the most difficult thing in the world is getting an application form to admit one’s kid in one of these (Tirumala like) temples of learning. My suggestion — if schools are taking the Tirupathi approach, they might as well learn the art of managing queues from them.

The real irony is the schools that now charge for ‘Computer classes’ from LKG

onwards apparently do not possess the common sense to make admission forms available on a website, you know, on that thing we now call the Internet?