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Culture

Not in Indian schools you can’t.

By: Karthik :+: Under: Culture, Education, It Happens Only in India, Opinion
On: ⋅ June 19, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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Naah aah! You can’t hold hands, not any more, not in Indian Schools.

Picture from si_si_ay.

Having been a proponent of antiquated rules in the Indian school system for a long time, the latest news comes as no surprise to me.

Two high schools in Mumbai have banned pupils from holding hands, kissing or touching on campus, warning that they will face disciplinary action if caught, officials said Monday.

The schools justified the move by saying that these acts, which are increasingly being shown by the local entertainment industry and emulated by the students, were contrary to traditional Indian values.

Although uniforms are a hot button issue in the west, it had my support from the day I understood why. And as much as my friends would like to believe, I am not talking of the adult film industry getting a lot of mileage from it, but the fact that in a uniform you could not identify the social class of a person. Insanely rich or otherwise.

Every single school I went to, be it my Kindergarten convent that had a disproportionate Anglo Indian teaching community, where teachers wore these beautiful dresses or my high school that enforced Hindus to wear some kind of sacred ash on their forehead, there was never a time when I attended a school that did not require a uniform.

Coming back to the topic, One of the items that was added to the list of contraband in my high school was wrist watches. The reasoning was simple, students kept looking at their watches, which was construed as students indicating “when will this class be over”, which pissed the teachers off and the next day morning, a blanket ban on wrist watches.

The parents did not care, but the students found ways to circumvent the rule. One of my brothers friends began brining his old book bag back to school to fight the ban. How you ask, it had a HUGE clock on the back. Another student, who happened to be the top scorer in the class, decided to wear this watch on his arm under his shirt. He got patted by the teacher and ended up getting suspended for a week.

The point I am trying to make is that when you institute rules and take things away, students will always find loopholes, some even if they are academically strong (students who people assume would seldom break rules).

Besides all this, I think the schools are approaching this the wrong way. Kids will try to emulate people on screen. The smoking ban would not make sense if this were not true. So if the schools really have a problem with students holding hands or kissing, they should approach the problem the right way or get with the program.

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