Suddenly...School Admissions for a 3.5 year old

It is an absolute certainty that something unexpected will rear its ugly head from behind you and knock you flat on your bonce.  Like that word can be confusing and seemingly out of nowhere, a defining aspect of the unexpected that it's almost always sudden.  And since there is no guarantee in knowing what will happen all of the time, it is certain that something unexpected will happen to you at any given time.  Hence, bad things happen suddenly.

I don't like things that happen suddenly.  They don't give you time to plan.  If we didn't have a word for sudden, would we notice the sudden things that so plainly come into our lives and screw things up so totally?  Or would we just ignore them and say, well we didn't plan for that so we're just going to ignore it and pretend sudden should schedule a meeting?  Sadly, even if the word didn't exist, it would be invented.  And maybe they would call it spanner.  I hate it when things happen spannerly.  They throw a suddenly into the works and all your hard work comes out looking like the dog ate it.

Like school admissions have happened suddenly.  My son is 3 and a half.  When we came to Delhi and took him around playschools for admission (for the uninitiated this is a place with lots of chart paper, crayons, singing and arts and crafts materials are kept for little ones to develop some creative, cognitive and social skills) - essentially organised play time.  The first question we were asked was, 'What was your son doing before this?'

Now I've had questions like this before.  Like when I've walked into an emergency ward with a hand cut by glass and the nurse asked, 'Does that hurt?' or when I call phone customer services for the tenth time on a referred number and they ask whether I've registered my problem with the referring department to begin with.  Like the Nirula's guy taking my dessert order over the phone, all my personal details, my address, the size of my buttocks and my body mass index to ask me if I knew there was another number to call for desserts.  These questions are there to suddenly send your mind into a '100 sarcastic answers I could spit out...' loop, that if unchecked leads to homicidal tendencies.  These questions make my heart pound and my brain go to a very dark place. Kind of like when the hulk sees that someone hasn't replaced the toilet paper.  It can get ugly.

Honestly?  What was my son doing before he applied for playschool?  Well, aside from the eating, drinking, defacating and generally bringing incredible joy to our lives with a few garbled words here, some somersaults headfirst into walls there and redecorating carpets with bodily or Crayola matter later, my son has mostly been doing bugger all from the ages of 0-3 that are of note.  What were they expecting?  A CV with his past employers, academic qualifications, nascent architectural drawings, archaeological finds and the beginnings of a book on Quantum Pooing?  And this is for playschool.  I wasn't aware that the minute he'd popped out we were supposed to stick him in front of a tutor and replace his mother's milk with Bournvita-Chavanprash formula for a better chance of growing the right brain.

And now we're at the pre-school admissions stage (confused yet?  happened suddenly didn't it?). Pick up any daily paper or speak to any working parent about what this charade is like.  Even with the internet, SMS capability, completely unnecessary flash mobs and phones that do everything but make breakfast, Indian schools are making parents queue up for hours to get an application form for the school.  And that too with reams of papers, affidavits and attestations to prove we are who we say we are. Seriously?  Aren't we in the middle of a global warming crisis to save paper?  Oh I forgot - even that's not proven...on paper.

And to add to the fun - you have a better chance of getting called back for an interview if you are handicapped, economically weaker, have parents who are from the armed forces or were athletes in national games (if your 3 year old canhandle a rifle or was a national athlete ages 1 to 2 I'm sure that wouldn't hurt either) or if you live closer to the school...rather than in the heart of the city where you're paying a higher rent so you can get to work quicker.  In light of this, schools and hospitals should consider exchanging notes.  New parents could be given admissions criteria with their new born's innoculation booklet.  This way suddenly wouldn't be so sudden come admission time.

All this paperwork, heartache, rat-in-a-cage frenzying for a seat for my 3 and a half year old has led me to one all-engulfing, mindblowing, undeniable ubiquitous truth; that if anyone had a few million dollars, they should open a school and watch the till explode.  The first order of business at my school would be that if anyone asked what a kid was doing up until the age of 3 and a half, you as a prospective/could be/maybe parent of a child there could fire that employee on the spot, with a bonus of throwing in a humiliating diss about said employee's choice in sartorial colour coordination and maybe a short, sharp slap across the chops for asking such a patently stupid question.  Education starts with not employing morons to set the admission process.

And we're sending our children to these schools.  God help us.  Since we believe in God and destiny so much, perhaps the school admission officers will suddenly get brainwashed into doing things sensibly, in a manner where our animal instincts don't come to the fore for getting admission to schools and where vasta wouldn't be the only guaranteed recourse to getting a child into a school.  However, looking at the record on how suddenly and Sod's Law seem to interact, I'm expecting the process to suddenly and catastrophically get worse and worse as time goes on.  It is destiny.  It is fate.  It is the nature of suddenly.

I don't think anyone likes suddenly.  How often do you hear the words, 'Suddenly I was rich,' or 'Suddenly, my son got a seat at that preschool.'  Yeah, that old adage is true.  Life's a b**** and then you die, suddenly.