January 9, 2008

The Shri Ram Vatika School, New Delhi - Interaction at it's best

Adding to the pain that parents are going through, this school (read The Shri Ram Vatika School, New Delhi) has asked parents not to bring their child/ward to school during interaction.

Wondering how single monther, or say in the era of nucleus families where parents should be dropping child? Why these schools don't think on these rules, instructions practically. I hope the guards would not stop parents who will take their child along on interaction day.

I remeber the case of Birla Vidya Niketan, where they asked parents not to bring child along, but they did allow child enter to the interaction room. I remember, some parents left their 3+yrs, 4+ yrs olds, on benches outside the interaction rooms just to avoid that "not so happy look" of interviwers.

What are we heading to? Is this the face of new India? A developing country? Do we have rights to file PL against such foolish invitations/rules? Probably delhi Govt. is least interested in answering such questions. I am happy parent, I have filled 18 odd admissions forms all around south delhi and I trust Mr. Lovely as he assured to public that no child will be left this year...

12 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

You can call me Spyder, I love this name ;)

I am deleting "advertising" sort of "shouting to be called spam" comments that are posted just to divert traffic from one site to another from this blog.

Cheers
Spyder

Anonymous said...

Dear Spyder,

Well, For your information we are not running a commercial venture. We started this initiative as a Parents for Parents initiative as we could not find any information about admissions on one place apart from your blog which we used to read everyday and still do..

We ourselves have a 4 year old Son and face the same scenario as faced by other parents.

When even the Pre School our Son goes to "Eurokids" gave up on our suggestion for having a page on their website giving all information on admissions on a daily basis.. We had to take this up...As we told them, if you will not do this for us..then We will do this for everyone.

Ours is a Social Initiative, in whatever time we get running around daily for admissions etc, we try to update it and ask other parents to share information.

Infact, Till now we have spent a good amount of money ourselves to get the service up and running.

Many parents suggested that we should not spend any money and infact try to get some one to sponsor the site...But we don't have any time for such and this was never the objective.

The Objective of NurseryAdmissions.com is to only have all the parents sharing whatever information or questions they have with the community.

We had to start this website as no one else took the pain or initiative..

We have our interaction at The Shri Ram School tomorrow and you can very well guess, what will be going through our minds.

We expect full support from your blog in making NurseryAdmissions.com a more helpful community.

We were expecting that you would have infact covered our site yourself in your blog when we started it..

Its not about the Traffic, Its about the community and the future of the Children of all of us..

Thanks and Regards,
Parents

Anonymous said...

Thanks for providing the clarity. This blog is also not a commercial venture and like your site. The intend is to provide/share information that we have with rest of thw world.

We also going thru the same pain and probably everyone out there too.

When we started blog, had some tie-up offer from Adidiot.com (some indian advertising people) and they offered us platform to host forums, mailing list and we did so, but no one turned up to help us. So we dropped the ideas and I am continuing on this blog as much as I can do.

As you never contacted me for any assistance, everyone else was in the same impression that you are commercial venture.

I am receiving so many venture calls every month for this initiative but all commercial ones which I am not going to take up.

Sole purpose of this blog is not to blame, but help.

I would have cevered your site on my blog but since I was never sure the real person behind this I could not do so.

Hope our efforts will pay off.

Cheers
Spyder

Anonymous said...

Whole process takes 4 hours ... pack food & go there !!

Anonymous said...

To Everybody:

Please do read my entry under "Need help from peer parents" for what is happening at Sri Ram School interactions. Bunty is SO right. Four hours is min. time taken!!!

Anonymous said...

Jai Sri Ram! Did anyone go to the cattle aka parents' fair held at the abovesaid school today? this is for real, just read on. Here's what happened at The Sri Ram school, vasant vihar:

the cattle had dressed to impress :) for the farmers were to buy only the best breed. a stage was set up complete with flash lights. a circle of chairs initiated the bidding. as soon as the "self professed qualified" bidders rang the bell, a selected herd (ie table a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, or j) was shifted to the stage while the rest of us looked on anxiously. the deal? well, sell yourself as hard as you can in 2 minutes for a maximum potential of 20 points, which could make or break or your child's future here. some didnt even wait for the round of introduction or the question to be asked...they started off with the imaginary flashy baits thrown to delight the customer. they say less is more but here clearly, more was less: the more you spoke, the less you made sense. anyway,
as climax approached, all the cattle within the herd screamed and shouted to catch the bidders' attention (i think those middle aged ladies never got as many smiles from men as today). the gori chamdis were the sure shot winners though. you dont get that breed easily, you see. the rest of us, well...after an enduring wait of four hours, i was left wondering. do i really want my child to study (read, suffer) here? is there a spelling error in the school's name? is it sri ram or hai ram?

CBSE News said...

Latest from Sri Ram Vatika school - one of the parents reported that he had to wait outside for about 30 mins, and then it took another 30-40 minutes to complete the rest (document verification - 5 mins, group discussion - 25-35 mins)

Anonymous said...

Not one smiling face among the parents at the Shri Ram School gates today morning. With so many chairs lying around the auditorium inside, the School Authorities thought it fit to make all parents stand outside the gate with a cold blustery wind blowing outside while various teachers twittered and flitted to and fro inside. Finally, they let parents in at 0930. To be fair, the teachers were courteous and not at all like "self professed bidders" (as one parent reported in this blog). But the questions were cliched and the answers, banal.

By the way, were those names of children called in alphabetical order or by their zodiac sign ?

But we were not "cattle" there today, dressed in our Sunday best. We were anxious parents trying to get the best out of life for our children, even if it meant slightly crumpled mismatched suits and ties brought out from storage for this interview. I don't think anyone should criticise us for not having access to Savile Row level of sartorial elegance. OTOH, pity us that we have to suffer this process of sending our child to school instead of enjoying it.

From the day I held him in my arms at the delivery room, my journey as a father with my child has been one of blinding joy, one for which I would go down on my knees to a God if I believed in one.

I must hold the Govt and the schools for making the process of entering school such a sad one. This brief period of sadness, too, shall pass.

GOTHILLA, the Visigoth ;) still smiling and on my feet

Anonymous said...

i definitely do not agree with the last comment. the above one regarding cattle still makes sense. good if you believe in a god and are prepared to go down on knees wearing crumpled suit for the sake of your child, but think deep and you will understand that god would not categorize you or "mark" you points for making speeches about why you chose that particular god to believe in. also, you said that anxious parents were trying to get the best out of life for their children...but if you look at the really best schools...they dont do this to anxious parents. what sri ram school did was highly derogatory. at least 70% of parents had to wait for a minimum of 2-3 hours for the interactions. and this is when better schools with more applicants have made parents wait for just 10 minutes. i do agree with the post above where a parent has cleverly and truly mentioned that the scene was nothing short of a cattle fair. however hard it strikes my ego as well (i hate being called cattle too), somewhere inside i feel that person is true.

Anonymous said...

a post from ashis in another category which i felt belonged here:

(2) Shri Ram:
We were invited for an informal discussion from 4-5 pm yesterday (10 Jan). We reached sharp at 4 pm, but had to wait outside the school gate for almost an hour, b'cos the interaction for the "slot 1-2 pm" was going on. Then original documents were verified (against the court law). Then we waited for another hour. At 6.15 pm, we were fed up as the group discussion of slot 2-3 was going on. After that, there would be 3-4 pm slot & then 4-5 pm slot. For each slot there are as many as 6-7 tables/groups. Utter mismanagement, no respect towards parents time schedule, still they talk boldly about their enforcement of punctuality towards the small children. No transparency about fee structure, no planning for the awaiting parents. We heard the fee is around 6000 pm (God knows why?). No transport available for nursery children. We already wasted lot of time, didn't want to waste more .. so left the school at 6.30 pm w/o appearing in the interaction.

Arun said...

I don't know, why people are rushing for Shri Ram Vatika School. Is there anything special in that school?