Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Choosing a school in New Delhi

Mukul Kesavan in his new book, The Ugliness of the Indian Male:

When I went looking for a school for my son a decade ago, I used to stroll up to noticeboards outside classrooms and school offices hoping to find class lists. If I found them I’d browse through the names looking for clues. If there were no Muslim names (and there were schools where there weren’t any) my enthusiasm for the school would wane. Was this an excess of political correctness? No, not at all. If a good school in Delhi could get by without Muslim students despite the city’s substantial Muslim population, it either meant that Muslims didn’t apply to it or the school didn’t care to do what the NGOs like to call ‘outreach’, and both implications, as far as I was concerned, were bad signs.” (from “Good Omens”) If more parents of privileged children — and the middle class is privileged, even if we moan a hell of a lot about bearing the burden of taxation — did that, we would not be faced with the ghettoisation of the Muslim child, which naturally continues into adulthood.

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