In America, parents threaten truant kids with military school. Or so I learned from an excellent documentary called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. 
But in desi America, the Hindustan Times informs me, they threaten them with banishment to dude ranches in the motherland:
The fees are exorbitant compared to regular schools, ranging from… $700 to $6,000 a year for Indian kids. NRIs pay almost double the amount. Some schools demand hefty down payments for admission in addition to the tuition charges… JIRS, constructed over 125 acres at a cost of Rs 72 crore, offers virtually every sports and games facility including cricket, astro-turf hockey fields, football fields, mini golf course, six tennis courts, a roller-skating rink, horse riding and compulsory micro-flight flying lessons…Indian professionals abroad want their children to benefit from the same educational system that enabled them to compete with the best in world… “I don’t want snooty kids who think they are above the rest. I want them to learn about humanity, Gandhi and non-violence, about learning to create peace and harmony in the world…”
And horse riding, calculus by first grade, and getting beaten with a heavy ruler 
Keval, Ankur and Raj are enrolled into the athletic, academic program at JIRS. Their day begins at five thirty in the morning with meditation and yoga and ends at ten in the night with prayers. One of them even told his mother, “We pray so many times through the day, there is hardly time to talk…”
It’s a Hindu madrassa!
Both his children, Sumit Munjal, 15 and Ronika Nirankari, 16 are in residential schools in Deheradoon and Missouri. Pal is very happy with the way his kids are turning out, “away from the bad influence of American classrooms, drugs, obscene clothes and unmanageable independence…” A beaming Pal declares that his daughter plays the harmonium, sings beautiful bhajans and learns Indian classical dance.
I know a few drill sergeant aunties who turn out kids exactly the same way. You can tell because their kids’ twitchy eyes are tapping out an S.O.S. They have a haunted look as if their souls are silently mouthing the words, ‘Get me out of here!’
How do their parents feel about boarding school?
“Their father still goes into the back yard to cry…”
You can count on the HT to provide an accurate, non-stereotyped view of desi Americans, like most Bollywood movies: ‘Mary’ is desi, wears a bob and a micro-mini, smokes, drinks and cusses out her parents (but only in language acceptable on Bollywood screen). Mary is Zeenat from Hare Rama Hare Krishna, or Mary is a flapper. If Mary actually stepped out on a Friday night, she’d get her skinny ass beat for being an anachronistic freak.
Indian Americans love the unfettered freedom of America, but when their kids start loving it too, they panic. The nightmare begins when the son comes home drunk with a tittering blonde on his arm.
Yeah, right. Desi kid comes home reeking of alcohol and takes a girl into his bedroom? Sala, that’s a nightmare all right, but not for the parents. Son would have to sit down to go wee-wee for the rest of his life. The HT provides a metaphor:
There is a constant tug of war between Indian-American parents brought up on curry and cricket, and their children born unto beacon and baseball.
All these beacon-eaters really get on my nerves, but crickets sure go down easy with curry.
Here are more bad Indian girls and bad Indian boys.
do they mean mussourie?
I think they mean Misspelling.
Seems to me these “parents” do not want to do any parenting themselves.
Although, I would certainly would not call these schools madarasas simply because they have Hindu prayers many times a day. Madarsas don’t have modern science labs, sports, economics, math and other subjects on par with the best of Swiss schools.
I don’t mind these schools in later years(16+), but early childhood has to be with the parents.
M. Nam
With all the amenities these schools seem to have? They are absolutely going to end up with “snooty” kids who have no sense of reality. Where does all this “learning compassion” come in?
why? I don’t get it.
5:30am-10pm!!! Dude, I never even SAW 10pm until I was probably 12 or so, and probably not 5:30 til late high school. Do these kiddies get naps in between rote memorization or what?
I agree, it’s an excellent way of avoiding doing any actual parenting. Rich Brits sent their kids to boarding schools for generations, now they abuse each other on the playgrounds for not breast-feeding long enough.
However, someone once sneered at my parents (who drained all their spare pennies on our excellent, secular private education) “Don’t you think you’re depriving your children by not exposing them to reality, like drug use and teen pregnancy?” My bewildered mother said “I don’t think they NEED to be exposed to those things during the school day.” My dad, who actually taught at a disgusting inner-city public school, just laughed.
Bobbitt will explain it for you.
The other side of it is, I’ve seen quite a few Americans sending their kids to Indian schools to embrace and embibe the Indian culture. A few years ago I was at the Hare Krishna Temple in Vrindaban and at 430 am in the morning there were these cute children (mostly white), reciting shlokas and matras. Locals standing around stood proud on how non-Indians were embracing the culture..but yeah from your point of view what about the children?
The parents are trying to have the best of all worlds – escaping what they see as the bad points of both India and America, taking as much as they can from each country without giving back to either. They are a privileged class, creating an even more privileged class of people who don’t feel responsibility to anyone but themselves.
“Don’t you think you’re depriving your children by not exposing them to reality, like drug use and teen pregnancy?”
this kind of stuff kills me about American folks. Even though I’m an ABCD and did tons of things my parents wouldn’t be proud of, I eventually learned that those values were instrumental and that I want my younger sisters to try to adhere to those as best they can, and that I as their older brother should promote those values, such as no pre-marital sex, no drugs, not just bringing home your latest boyfriend to meet the folks and understanding the difference between dating and dating responsibly.
At work, a co-worker to great offense to me not being ok w/ my 25 and 22 yr old sister dating whomever whenever. I told her I understand that they will date and I am not going to go mullah on them, but as an older sibling I’m not going to just welcome any random fool guy into their lives and pretend to be ok w/ it unless I know that said guy is a good person and might have a future w/ my sister and not just trying to sleep w/ her. This co-worker went off on me for being a hypocrite bcuz i dated in college and early 20s and had my fun, so why shouldn’t they. I tried to impress on her that I made mistakes and I’m not proud of them and at the same time, I’m not stopping my sisters but that my parents get stressed out by ‘serial dating’, that is dating a new guy per month/ per months etc. I told her my parents are ok w/ long term relationships, but I’m not going to pretend that my sisters can just do as they please w/o respecting the values of our house. That means no guy comes over to hang out randomly unless he and my sister have shown they’re somewhat serious. And that as an older bro, if I emphasize certain values, it will impress upon my sisters to be more careful and to respect our traditions and most importantly, themselves. This co-worker went haywire, stating that I was going to get my sister pregnant bcuz i’m not ok w/ the times, and that it’s wrong of me to prefer an Indian guy for them bcuz ‘you live here (the US)”. I could’ve smacked her. When I countered that not every taboo thing in life needs to have a middle ground, some things are not acceptable, and in my house, pregnancy, sex, drugs and non-self respecting behavior is not tolerable or negotiable, that there is a standard to live up to. This person just went on and on about how by trying to keep these ‘outdated’ values i was in fact encouraging them to go that route and I should be more a friend than a role model, blah blah blah. Turns out her sister got knocked up at 17, her bro is on drugs, and all this despite her parents being ‘friends’ w/ them. nice.
End rant.
What about Bad Indian Girls?
Don’t they get drunk and bring guys called Tyrone home to make animal love on the chikan bedspreads?
“Don’t they get drunk and bring guys called Tyrone home to make animal love on the chikan bedspreads?”
You have seen Mississippi Masala, right?
I’ve also seen Gadar, from which I learned that a single Punjabi truck driver can singlehandedly decimate the Pakistani army 😉
D-D-I-A,
Big Indian Girls is awesome :-). Thanks for sharing.
More bad Indian girls and bad Indian boys.
Please come again. Thank you.
Is this blog R rated?
Fortunately, my parents didn’t get too caught up in “Our kids will become too Americanized and lose every ounce of culture” and send my sister and me off to some boot camp to sing, dance, or play the harmonium.
I was born and raised here till age 8, spent the next eight years in India (with my parents), and then made my way back. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. My family recognized that I am an American after all, and forcing that identity out would do injustice to my future. The school that I was sent to was very progressive and modern by Indian standards, and focused more on individual development and education rather than cultural indoctrination. Plenty of temples, mosques, parents, extended family, extended extended family, friends of family-battalion members, and Brahmins showing up to your door for food in return of blessings to do that.
Their main goal for us was to ensure that we understand where they culturally came from, in hopes of creating a common ground where the little indian culture we knew, and the little American cultural they understood would help us communicate better. We did what other normal Indian kids did. Kids have an amazing capacity to grow and IMHO forcing one identity out under the guise of incompatability is selfish. There are plenty of people around that have grown to accomodate knowledge, culture, and a deep understanding of both.
Want your kids to stay away from drugs and evils of society? Teach them how to critically think and build their self esteem/strength up.
But I like cricket, curry, bacon, baseball, khichdi, dal, In’N Out, etc.
I tried a beacon once, but got mildly electrocuted when I bit in, and targeted by a Maverick when the IR got switched on. Damn those beacons, never knew they’d be so deceptively bland and dangerous.
The best thing about the DVD cover for the Hindi film Puraab aur Paachim that Manish uses to illustrate this story (apart from the actresses legs and funky beehive) is that the movie is set in London – but they have the twin towers on the front cover to represent vilaayt – so beautiful in its innocent cluelessnes – New York, London – whats the difference?
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