Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls

My cousin and her son came to say hi to us.  After a few minutes, he got ready to bike down to his coaching class.  "Plus, I have an exam coming up on the 26th" he said.

"On Boxing Day?  On the day after Christmas?"  I am sure everybody there understood how shocked I was.

He nodded a yes.

"But, what about the students who are Christians?  I mean, there is no way they will come prepared."

"Oh, I think we have only one Christian student in all the sections together" he replied.

"Only one Christian?"  I was even more shocked, recalling my own experience in high school. I can easily recall quite a few Christian names from my class: Gigi, Sarah, Joy, Alex, Mariamma, Willy, Thomas, ... and more if I paused to list them all.

Further, so what if there is only one Christian.  Does it matter?  Would the school have made any special arrangement for that student to take the exam another day?  If there are no Christians, would the school hold classes on Christmas day?

I talked about this with a couple more.  One other cousin's daughter thought there was no Christan student at all in her class.  It is a school run by a Hindu religious organization.

But then, the city has quite a few old schools that are run by Christian missionaries and not only have they been favored even by Hindus, I know of at least two Hindus who taught at those Christian schools.  In contrast, no Christians at Hindu schools?

This kept bugging me.  When I sought clarification, the typical explanation was that it is difficult anymore to gain admission to good schools and the pattern that has evolved is very much religion based.  As one person put it, "Hindu children mostly go to Hindu schools, and Muslim children mostly go to Muslim schools."

If that is indeed the case, then it is an awful development.  Kids not even having an opportunity to spontaneously interact with classmates from religious backgrounds that are different from theirs!  If that kind of socialization does not happen when young, wouldn't cross-cultural understanding become even more difficult when older?

Was it always like this in India and I hadn't known about it only because I grew up in a bubble that my town was?  Just because I had Christian and Muslim classmates, I assumed it was the same everywhere?  All of us did not come from Tamil-speaking families either.  My world when I was young was way more cosmopolitan than I ever knew?

After the undergraduate years, I moved to California, which was even more diverse than the old world that I knew.  For the first time in my life, I met a Pakistani in flesh and blood.  Siddiqui. We were so much alike in the way we thought.  He was also the first to ever taste my cooking.  I became friends with Chinese, Greeks, Koreans, Syrians, .... The diversity at my university was so wonderful that when I moved to Oregon, it felt like I had moved into a very parochial world!

Perhaps all these are also reminders that I am way too disconnected from the reality of India anymore?  There is no more a "mera" in "Mera Bharat Mahan Hai" and nor is "mahan" anymore in that phrase?