Indian Private School

I spent the other night chilling out with the high society of India at "The Doon School Founders Day 2008" I swear I have never seen a more impressive school. They had huge steel gates painted black "donated by the Hyderabad Society," with guards sitting on duty. Inside were loads of tall, grand buildings surrounding cricket pitches and the like. It's a boarding school and the boarding houses are sort of Roman villa style. It's good for once to see signs that some Indians are given opportunities like that.
So there was this huge boarding school like a walled garden in the middle of the city. They had a big show with speeches and dancing. Despite the school's elite reputation the music was dismal, but I liked the dancing. As if they knew I would be visiting the guitar and piano ensemble played a Celtic jig to remind me of home, which was nice, but like I said it was dismal.
I then went and had a small chat with Chris Patten who was the guest speaker which was fun.
All the private school operatings sort of reminded me of home, back at Dundee High. It was all very familiar, except it was the first time I had really seen it from the outside. It's funny that it happened to be in India.
In the corner of the school grounds was a 50m x 50m settlement of slum houses, with tin roofs and plasic bags for doors. It was the view from the balcony of the boy's room I was in. I asked the one of the boarders why they were there. Apparently the workers who had built the new boarding house which I was sitting in had set up camp there while they were on the job, and never really left. So the grime of the city had somehow made its way inside the school walls, just so we didn't forget where we really stood.