R2I - School and Appartment Hunt

We went to India with no idea of which school to put M into. A lot of people, when they R2I, are in constant touch with a school (or two) and also fill out online applications, etc. Some even make a trip to India, prior to the move, to check out schools, talk to staff, etc. These are all good things to do IMHO. However we did not have the time to do this kind of follow up from Seattle. We did speak to a few folks who had moved to Bangalore recently. However they were all in south Bangalore (on the outskirts of the city). For those not familiar with Bangalore, the south side is where the IT area is and hence has a lot of NRI crowd. So a lot of things are taken care of over there - good schools (international or otherwise), good appt complexes, after schools classes/activities, big malls and grocery shops, etc. For reasons not known to us, Amazon was in the process of moving to North Bangalore (Malleswaram). Malleswaram is the 1st township in Bangalore and so is the real old bangalore with narrow lanes, local kannada crowd, small mom and pop shops, etc. The big question for us was - where do we stay and subsequently in which areas do we look for schools? Staying in south bangalore, meant a minimum of 1 hr drive for Arti (one way). Also there were certain areas in South Bangalore which were automatically ruled out for us due to Arti's work location. However staying in South Bangalore was a very attractive proposition - most of our friends and friend's friends were in south bangalore. So initially we decided to check out schools all over bangalore within 1 hr driving distance from Arti's work.
After about 1 week of landing in India, we decided to start touring schools for M. After talking to a few folks, we had the following categorization for schools
- International schools. These schools charged big bucks (2Lacs - 5Lacs per year), were located on the outskirts of the city since they had big campuses, offered International Baccalaureate (IB) program and followed Sept - June school year. Like the schools in US, there was is lot of focus on extracurricular activities and subsequently less focus on technical education. The main crowd is foreign nationals and expats who are here for a few years and want to subsequently go back. They want international syllabus and continuity for their kids above anything else. These schools would be good to ease the transition for our kids and after a couple of years we could move them to other schools if we decided to stay in India for a longer time.
- ICSE/CBSE Board schools. Both the ICSE and CBSE boards are uniform across India and hence are the preferred boards for a lot of people who are not tied to a place/state for a lifetime. From my limited knowledge, CBSE has higher focus on technical education while ICSE has more focus on languages. Both of these boards have extracurricular activities built in (though the implementation is upto the schools). There are chains of schools called National Public Schools (NPS) and Delhi Public Schools (DPS) there are all over Bangalore. They offer either the CBSE or the ICSE board education. NPS is focused solely on education (with little to no extra curricular activities) and is the favored school for most of Indians. DPS has decent emphasis on extra curricular activities as well. Then there were the catholic schools which were rated to be among the best and oldest in Bangalore. Most of these were in central Bangalore.
- State board schools. We did not consider these since Kannada would be the primary medium of communication.

After 5 days of landing in India, Arti started going to work. She would leave around 8:30 am and the driver would be back around 10 am. Till then, I would finish the kids breakfast and get M ready for school tours. N would stay behind with my parents. We would leave around 10:30 am. On the first day, we went to Greenwood International School. It was a very small school and had classes only till UKG (upper kindergarten). For higher classes they had a bigger school in Sarjapur that is about 17 kms from central bangalore. For a fairly modest school they were charging about Rs 80K per year with a one time admission fee of Rs 70K. Wow!! I think I might have finished my whole schooling till 10th grade in that amount. Anyway, this school was not going to work for us since going to Sarjapur was not feasible.
Next we toured a school on Bannerghatta road called Sherwood High. There were lot of good appt complexes on the way and so staying fairly close to the school would not be a problem. However these places would entail at least an hours drive for Arti. The school seemed pretty good - it was new, some parts like swimming pool were still under construction, seemed spacious and airy and had a lot of US returned kids (so they knew how to transition them). The fee structure was similar to the previous school. This definitely seemed liked a school we would be interested in. They also had a few opening (mid term since the school year had started in June).
Indiranagar and Kormangala were areas we were considering staying. So next, I explored schools in these areas. There were a couple of NPS schools there. When I called the school to ask for basic info (ICSE or CBSE board, teacher to students ratio, class size, fee structure, admission process, etc) the responses were short and curt. Finally I asked when I could tour the school. From the other end came the reply - we do not allow parents to tour the school. I was shocked for a few moments and then hastily ended our conversation. However NPS schools are rated very high here and people are scrambling to get into one. So inspite of the unfavorable experience over the phone, I decided to tour the schools. Both the schools said that they did not have any free seats midterm and for next year, their admissions were going to start within a week or so. Secondly the only free seats they anticipated for next years admission were from students who transferred somewhere else. Otherwise existing students from the lower class went to the next class. So to get admission even for next year seemed a very remote prospect (hundreds of people waiting for a few seats). Also the school did not have a fixed admission process - no website to clarify when the admissions would start. All they gave was a phone number and you have to call every few days to get the date for collecting form. Then you had to fill and submit the form ASAP and hope that you are among the first few to submit the application. Even if we were diligent enough to do this (there was really no hope of this ever happening since we were about 10% as proactive and knowledgeable as the local crowd), forum feedback indicated they the seats were given to people who paid higher donations or were influential. Some people even advised us to flaunt our NRI status and ability to pay a lot of money when we would meet the school principal. That way we would have a better prospect of being selected. This whole state of affairs is really really sad. We then visited a couple of other schools in those areas. They looked pretty ordinary from the outside and inside but had fees close to 1 Lac per year. Forum feedback was that they were just after money and were pretty ordinary schools even though they portrayed themselves as NPS equivalent. They were for people who didn't get into NPS and so had a huge demand as well. Even over there, there were no free seats for the current year and a trending to zero probability top getting into next year. After a few of such school visits (no need for a tour) we came to the conclusion that it was just not possible for us to get admission for Mihir in any school in these areas even if we were inclined to apply. The only good that came out of this was that it ruled out a few areas for us to stay. Next I concentrated on central bangalore schools (catholic schools) that were rated as the top schools in bangalore. These are really old schools with the old school discipline and ways of imparting education. At the 1st couple of schools I couldn't even get past the receptionist. Obviously there were no free seats for the current year and they told me to come back in Jan for next years admission. We had an interesting experience at the 3rd and final school (Baldwins High School). We reached there at a time when the school was done and so all the 1000+ students were getting out of school - in buses, overpacked rickshaws, on narrow alleys, etc. Seeing this mass chaos, M was petrified and tightly held my hand as I waded through the crowd to get to the admission office. This school was fairly receptive in hearing me out and there was even an possibility that we might get into the current year. There were about 50 students in each class and it was a huge school. It was an overtly catholic school with Jesus and his preachings reaching out to you from every free space on the walls. Seeing how vastly different this was to his school in Seattle and seeing how intimidated he was, there was no way we could have considered putting him here. This ruled out another area for us to stay. So after a couple of weeks of school hunt there was only this one far away school (Sherwood High) where we would consider putting M in. Poor M was in jet lag when we started the school tours and he would invariably sleep in the car. I would wake him up when we reached the school and he would then see different schools. Most of the schools were huge and I don't think he felt very comfortable there. But he was very patient and we would also have fun on the way - make some silly stories, read his favorrite books, play fruit ninja on ipad, etc. After this sorry state of affairs, we next toured schools in north bangalore (even north of malleswaram about 30 - 45 mins drive). Most of these were international schools. A couple of schools that I went to (Canadian International and StoneHill International) were true international schools and had tuition in excess of 4 Lacs per year. They were on the outskirts of the city and had sprawling campuses with huge cricket, soccer, tennis fields, etc. Also they were all single storied building spread out in the campus. So even though the schools were huge (much much bigger than the schools I had been to before), they were very inviting with lots of open spaces. We were not too thrilled about the price and the location (if I were to find a job in central or south bangalore the commute would be at least 2 hrs one way). So we didn't pursue these. Another one called Ryan International only had international in its name (there was nothing that we liked about the school during the 5 mins I spent talking to receptionist) and its fees. Another highly rated school - Vidyasagar, had us on a wait list (number 272) for next year when they were expecting about 5 free seats. I then visited Mallya Aditi school and we liked it a lot. It was a good blend between a true international school and offered ICSE board. The fees were about 2 Lacs per year, high but not overly exorbitant. One big problem was the location. It was a good 45 mins north of Malleswaram. Since their next years admission process was starting in Jan we decided to keep this as a backup option. In the meanwhile, Arti had looked at Brigade school in Malleswaram. It was in the same complex as her work place and had the ultimate convenience of being at 2 mins walking distance. The school was very new and Brigade schools at 2 different locations in Bangalore had decently good reviews. The fee was about 1.5 Kacs for the 1st year and about 80K for subsequent years. And they had openings for the current year!! Just for the heck of it we also looked at one more school near Malleswaram called NAFL. It looked so rundown from the outside that we did not bother going in. So finally we had 3 potential schools for M -
1) Sherwood high. We could get in current year. However it was very far from Arti's workplace.
2) Brigade school. We could get in current year and it was very close to Arti's workplace.
3) Mallya Aditi school. Not for current year. May get in next year. North of Arti's work and so a potential problem when I started looking out for job.

In the meanwhile, we were doing apartment hunt in parallel. We were focusing on areas near the schools that we liked as well as areas that we liked (or had resemblance to bombay/pune). Through Amazon, Arti had the services of Global adjustment folks who could help us with appt hunt for 3 days. She first decided to check out some appt complexes closer to work. We were only going to look at big apt complexes with gate community. This was one of the things suggested by folks who had moved to India. There are a number of advantages to this :
- Its self enclosed, secure and a place away from the hustle bustle of the outside world.
- Most facilities like Gym, play area for kids, electricity backup, swimming pool, etc are part of the enclave.
- Getting services (like kamwali bai, cook, carpenter, plumber, etc) is handled by the central office and folks are screened before they can work in the community.
- there would be other people with similar income range, kids and hopefully similar wavelength to mingle with.
Another thing was that we wanted newer appts (less than 5 yrs old) so that there wouldn't be many maintenance issues.
There are a few good areas closer to Malleswaram - Dollars Colony, Sadashiv Nagar, etc. However the rents in some of the nice complexes were 70K+. This was well above our range. Arti did look at a few complexes in Dollars Colony that were in the 40 - 50K range, but none of them impressed her. We were looking at 4 Bedroom (or 3 BD + Den) appts which were ideally greater than 2000 sq ft in size. In India, the advertised size is not the actual livable area (it is approx 80% of the total size). So when we looked at some 1800 sq ft appts, they seemed very small since the livable area was just under 1500 sq ft. Most apts that we saw had many balconies and restrooms (some had 4 bathrooms for a 3 bedroom appt). Consequently the room size as well as kitchen size was very small. Also most bathroom had barely enuf space to accommodate a sink, commode and shower. Nothing like the master bathroom in our
US house.
Seeing apts in India is very different than seeing apts in US. In US, you are used to seeing well kept and very clean apts. Here, the apts are dirty since they may have been on the market for a few weeks and are not cleaned. 1 week of no cleaning in India, and the appt is covered with dust, bird poop, etc. So it is kind of impractical to maintain a clean appt when no one is staying.
We then looked at appts in Brigade Gateway. This residential complex was in the same complex as Arti's workplace and Mihir's school. So staying here would be very very convenient. We looked at a few apts in Brigade Gateway and found a bedroom plan that would work for us (and the stuff that was being shipped from US). In the meanwhile we also looked at appt complexes on Bannerghatta Rd and near Aditi School. The appt on Banerghatta rd was just awesome from inside. However it was surrounded by 4 mosques and 4 different call to prayers were heard at 5 am everyday. Not hte best of starts everyday. I would think. Once we went to the appt in evening and decided that it was not going to work since the traffic was really bad and it would have taken Arti 1.5 hrs + to get back from office.
Finally we settled on the school as well as the appt in the same complex as Arti's workplace. Settling on the appt was just a small part of moving in. But more on that fun stuff later ....