Kendriya Vidyalaya - Hopefully the complete story this time...

I recently watched a wonderful TED talk* in which Chimamanda Adichie, an acclaimed writer, shared her views on how single stories create prejudices, stereotypes and false perceptions. I was deeply moved by what she said and it set me thinking about how many such single stories have skewed my perspective of things or worse still - how many such single stories I must have told!

In the recent past, I had joked in a large gathering about how my son, despite being born to Indian parents, rolls his "R"s and only speaks English; whereas I wouldn't speak in English until I was forced to do so in college and then later at work place. My self deprecating humor about having studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya schools being the main source of this difference in my son and me was grossly misunderstood and I now hear that its become a notion among some people here that KVites can't speak English.

My attempt at poking fun at myself misfired; and a misconception became their only story about KVs. And of course its all my fault!

Unlike most good (read expensive) private schools, KVs have students from all walks of life, their economic standing cutting across the entire cross section, multi-cultural and of course multi-lingual. In this setting, I was the "officer's daughter" since my father was one of the higher ranking government employees by the time I started going to school. Most other students were children of "factory workers" or "admin staff" and were naturally lesser mortals in the scheme of things. Our family and a few other classmates' families lived in better government houses classified as Type 5 (they have five rooms!) while the lesser mortals lived in much smaller Type 1, 2 and 3 houses. Overall I was much better off than most growing up around me. Though mostly unspoken, yet a great divide existed between the two kinds.

KV definitely taught me all the subjects that the Indian education boards regulate - science, math, history, geography, Hindi and of course English! In fact, it taught us quite well. It is no surprise that a lot of my friends, both my brothers, their batch mates and many more I get to know of are doing well in their lives. They are successful in their professions, financially stable and are certainly in the main stream of society. This despite their very humble start in some seemingly run down KV, in a satellite town of a Tier II Indian city, in the mid eighties. Education at a KV is good (certainly not the best!) and serves well to those it caters to. But, more importantly the aforementioned unique setting of a KV teaches you lessons about life. Lessons which private schools will never teach you. Here are some -

Play It Down - If I had to make friends in school I had to very self consciously play down my fathers' designation and all the tangible/intangible perks that came with being his daughter. And since I was the minority, breaking ice and building bridges in relationships always had to be my prerogative.

Fair Play - Much to my dismay and others' delight, we learned that fair play existed. Despite being an officer's daughter (oh! how I hated the tag), I never qualified for any event on Sport Day in all my school life. I was bad at it and that's all that mattered.

Relative Misery - While I always wanted my own girlie bike and hated my brother's hand-me-down boy bicycle, I realized I had classmates who would walk 4-5 km one way to school everyday, in all seasons. In fact, very often they would stop to fill water at our house (which was just a km from school) since they knew it was a long journey back home, under the scorching sun, at 3 PM. If you look around carefully, you'll see that your misery is always relatively smaller when compared to some others'.

Depreciation is Overrated - Not everything you own depreciates with the passage of time. I valued every single hand-me-down book and never fussed for crisp brand new ones because I had friends whose parents couldn't afford them all the books in one go at the start of the academic year.

Early Prudence - You don't have a school canteen. You don't have fancy vendors with kiosks, like the ones my city bred cousins boasted of. You don't have friends who can afford even the street vendors very often. What are you supposed to do? Well, I had a super-mom who happily packed a tiffin everyday. And for the most part I appreciated every bit(e) of it!

Defining Basics & Extravagance - I had just one pair of these boring brown shoes (Bata of course!) for all occasions. I really felt like my basics were not being met - until I noticed some school friends wearing our school uniform shoes when I ran into them at the market-place in the evening, or at b'day parties and even during the once a year community festivals.

These moments of truth were in my face and were too glaring to be denied. However, I would like to clarify that these haven't made me a pseudo-socialist. What a Kendriya Vidyalaya does to you is something more basic. Something much simpler. It genuinely prepares you for life ahead and in turn gives the world thousands of it's students that are level headed, value driven and sensitive to its environment.

*Here's the link to the TED talk -http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html