3 April 1995.

The plane touched down at London, Heathrow.  My Mum, sister, brother and I were finally in England after a seemingly endless flight from Madras.  I was excited.  We were reunited with our father, a doctor who had just started a job in Wigan.  Everything seemed so perfect and like a dream come true.  We stepped out of the plane into a different world. Britain was this wonderful place, the weather was lovely and cool, the buildings were beautiful, the streets were clean.  We were amazed by the huge supermarkets and shops.  We had never really seen anything quite like this before.  It was such a huge contrast to what we were used to in India.

I knew the culture was different but I didn't realize just how different till I started school.  I was twelve years old and in Year 8 at the Deanery, the largest secondary school in Wigan. I had no idea just how different the school would be from what I expected.  There were differences in everything. Firstly, the school was much bigger than the school I went to back in Kochi, in Kerala.  The notebooks and textbooks and pens and pencil cases and schoolbags  my classmates had were different.  We had to move to different rooms in the school for our lessons rather than have the various teachers come to our class.  Pupils were placed in different groups according to their ability. These differences were not difficult to get used to but the social aspects of school life in Wigan and Kochi were a world apart.

The whole ethos was completely different to schools in Kerala. Over here working hard was seen as 'uncool'.  It was bad to be good and good to be bad.  This didn't really make sense.

The first thing I noticed was that people were not really bothered about their education.  They did not put much effort into studying and doing their homework. I was amazed at the facilities these students had available to them and equally amazed to find just how much they took these facilities for granted.  Computers, art materials, musical instruments and laboratory equipment consisted of things the school I went to in India just didn't have.  I remember my excitement on seeing a drinks machine just outside my classroom. Cans of Coke, Pepsi, Fanta and Sprite! Wow!

I found it quite disturbing to see students being wasteful and ungrateful for these things.  Some would just take a sip of coke out of a can, a bite out of an apple and throw perfectly good chicken sandwiches in the bin because they weren't really hungry.  I found seemingly little things like this quite disturbing.  I would imagine how excited my friends back in India would be to have such facilities available to them and wished I was back in India with them.

Students also showed a lack of respect for teachers and would frequently answer back and be downright rude and disobedient.  Discipline problems I remembered in my school in India seemed small and trivial compared to the bad behavior of pupils here.  Any kind of disgraceful behavior towards teachers would have been unthinkable in my school in Kochi. Swearing and hand gestures behind the teachers back were all quite common place here.

Appearances had never mattered this much back in Kerala. It took a while to get used to all these differences though it seems quite funny now that I was completely unaware of all these things. Pupils tended to hang around in groups and there was very little mixing between students in different groups.  In lessons you would only be friendly, sit next to and talk to people who were in your little circle of friends.  Fights broke out between groups quite often and students would crowd around to watch these 'exciting events' which would just make me feel upset. I would be so glad when a day at school was over. Weekends were such a treat.  At times I felt like I just wanted to go back to India and to the life I was used to. But I learned to adapt...