JOIN USFor kids' sake, a long, cold wake
The throng, of parents and relatives of children was in front of the St Francis Xavier School, Frazer Town on Friday night. Their purpose? To wait the night out till the school opened in the morning and issued the applications forms for admission of girl students.
The queue began forming soon after noon on Friday, says Saleem Ahmad, a Frazer Town resident who sought the form for his granddaughter. He arrived as early as at 2.30 pm immediately after offering the Friday prayers.
“When I came here, I was taken aback to see a couple of women already standing in the queue. More and more people started coming in as the clocked ticked away. This only explains how critical it is to obtain an application form for school admission,” Ahmad told Deccan Herald.
Ever since the St Francis Xavier School, Frazer Town announced that it would issue application forms for admission to its Pre-preparatory I course 8.30 am onwards on Saturday, parents started thronging the place to make queues as early as Friday noon.
By midnight, the stretch next to the school in front of the St John's Church was swarmed by seekers of application forms.
As the school is considered reputable, parents and relatives took no chances.
The school would issue only about 300 application forms for about 150 seats in the pre-prep course which is open to girl children aged above four years. Each form costs Rs 300. Saturday was to be the only day that the school would issue the forms.
Although securitymen of the school kept a vigil on the queue, they did not have to fret.
Aspirants, on their own, maintained discipline so that no one jumped the queue and there was no dispute. They bought about 100 tokens and distributed among themselves in order to keep the waiting line-up intact, knowing that by Saturday morning, hundreds more would join the queue. As the evening stretched into the night and the temperature dipped, family members turned up with woollies to keep them warm during the long wait.
A handful of aspirants, who found it difficult to remain in the queue for long, deputed their domestic servants. Many others, however, arranged chairs and bed sheets, etc to see through the night comfortably. They would not mind the cold, as long as they got the application form for their dear little one.
The presence of a large number of people ensured that vendors selling eatables made brisk business. By evening, the place turned into a fair with the pani poori wallah, the chai wallah, etc flocking there.