In America, parents threaten truant kids with military school. Or so I learned from an excellent documentary called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. 
But in desi America, the Hindustan Times informs me, they threaten them with banishment to dude ranches in the motherland:
The fees are exorbitant compared to regular schools, ranging from… $700 to $6,000 a year for Indian kids. NRIs pay almost double the amount. Some schools demand hefty down payments for admission in addition to the tuition charges… JIRS, constructed over 125 acres at a cost of Rs 72 crore, offers virtually every sports and games facility including cricket, astro-turf hockey fields, football fields, mini golf course, six tennis courts, a roller-skating rink, horse riding and compulsory micro-flight flying lessons…Indian professionals abroad want their children to benefit from the same educational system that enabled them to compete with the best in world… “I don’t want snooty kids who think they are above the rest. I want them to learn about humanity, Gandhi and non-violence, about learning to create peace and harmony in the world…”
And horse riding, calculus by first grade, and getting beaten with a heavy ruler 
Keval, Ankur and Raj are enrolled into the athletic, academic program at JIRS. Their day begins at five thirty in the morning with meditation and yoga and ends at ten in the night with prayers. One of them even told his mother, “We pray so many times through the day, there is hardly time to talk…”
It’s a Hindu madrassa!
Both his children, Sumit Munjal, 15 and Ronika Nirankari, 16 are in residential schools in Deheradoon and Missouri. Pal is very happy with the way his kids are turning out, “away from the bad influence of American classrooms, drugs, obscene clothes and unmanageable independence…” A beaming Pal declares that his daughter plays the harmonium, sings beautiful bhajans and learns Indian classical dance.
I know a few drill sergeant aunties who turn out kids exactly the same way. You can tell because their kids’ twitchy eyes are tapping out an S.O.S. They have a haunted look as if their souls are silently mouthing the words, ‘Get me out of here!’
How do their parents feel about boarding school?
“Their father still goes into the back yard to cry…”
You can count on the HT to provide an accurate, non-stereotyped view of desi Americans, like most Bollywood movies: ‘Mary’ is desi, wears a bob and a micro-mini, smokes, drinks and cusses out her parents (but only in language acceptable on Bollywood screen). Mary is Zeenat from Hare Rama Hare Krishna, or Mary is a flapper. If Mary actually stepped out on a Friday night, she’d get her skinny ass beat for being an anachronistic freak.
Indian Americans love the unfettered freedom of America, but when their kids start loving it too, they panic. The nightmare begins when the son comes home drunk with a tittering blonde on his arm.
Yeah, right. Desi kid comes home reeking of alcohol and takes a girl into his bedroom? Sala, that’s a nightmare all right, but not for the parents. Son would have to sit down to go wee-wee for the rest of his life. The HT provides a metaphor:
There is a constant tug of war between Indian-American parents brought up on curry and cricket, and their children born unto beacon and baseball.
All these beacon-eaters really get on my nerves, but crickets sure go down easy with curry.
Here are more bad Indian girls and bad Indian boys.
