I say this not to get you to applaud some more, but to point out that in the Ice Ages, there were no tuition classes to speak of. That last year, I went to school, yawned through the classes there, studied at home with some energetic encouragement from my mother, did the exams at the end of the year. Most of my classmates spent the year in more or less the same way. That description sounds almost laughable today. Two weeks ago, a teenager in Ahmedabad called Chirag told me how he is getting ready for his 12th standard exams.
Nobody attends any classes there.
In the afternoons, he heads for tuition classes. They go on till 8 pm, covering every subject in his curriculum. This afternoon and evening regimen wends its martial way through the year, vacation or no vacation, until the exams come around. And after he's done with them, Chirag will probably want to sign up for more tuition classes, this time for various college entrance exams. There have been two great changes since the Ice Ages.