Ragging

Ragging in educational institutions is an abuse prevalent in some commonwealth countries. Hence, my guess about its original roots is as good as yours. There are numerous forms of ragging, but in the present post, we shall confine to most notorious form viz., senior students ragging their juniors (usually freshers). Hereinafter, we shall use the word raggee to represent the person who got ragged and ragger to represent the person who is ragging. Your blogger intends to study history and current state of raggee-ragger relationship, as a true historian would do, by not indulging in taking sides, to make Toynbee proud.

In the ancient Indian educational methodology, this practice is non-existent. This practice must have started taking its roots in India with the advent of British occupation and gradually picked up. This has made most of its present day progress in post-independence era and particularly accelerated in last couple of decades. In the last few years it is coming to limelight for various reasons like i) omnipresence of media ii) awareness which dawned on the government in recent years and some of the ordinances promulgamated and so on iii) increasing judicial activism to curb this perceived menace and iv) considerable progress ragging has made both as a form of an art and science. It is always difficult to emulate the good practices of someone but easy to cultivate, emulate and institutionalize the bad ones. Ragging is no exception to this general rule.

Just as every dad is once a son, every ragger is a raggee once. They are two sides of the same coin. That is a law of nature. Raggee, having learnt the process through practical experience, perpetuates it with added innovations in the forthcoming years. He sets the bar to higher level. If a student is a raggee in his first year, he is a ragger for remaining years. This points to stages of a life cycle and certain genetic predisposition in the relationship between raggee and ragger.

No raggee ever wastes time thinking of the abuse he/she is going through for long. Past is past; he/she dreams of new era - there is always light at the end of the tunnel; awaits the privileges to come. One hears many complaints from raggees while they are passing through the process period of ragging. As soon as this process ends and is celebrated in the form of a Fresher’s Day or its equivalent, as the case may be, raggees of this year eagerly wait for the next year which comes with an automatic promotion to ragger class irrespective of their academic performance in the preceding year. This promotion does not have any qualifying requirements like minimum cut-off marks or CGPA. Metamorphosis takes place. Thus, the life goes on. It is an eternal cycle. Life's Truth (jeevansathy).

Parents complain about ragging when their ward is a fresher. How many parents have taught their children not to do the same unto their juniors? If anything, parents encourage the system, albeit in due course, with their silence. If all parents of freshers forbid their children from ragging their juniors in subsequent years, this institution would have been extint, as dead as a dodo, in three years flat! For an example, if you take an educational institute offering a four-year degree or a diploma, a fresher undergoes ragging in his first year but gets privileges for the remaining three years. Thrice blessed! If he/she manages to spend, more years in the same degree program, merrier are his/her days as someone said “the more the merrier”. In fact, raggee-ragger relationship, may not be as divine, but is so real and as eternal as devotee-God or student-teacher relationships.

There are some common misconceptions and we expose and explode them now: a) this process of ragging is masculine; Nope – it is gender-free. Girls do engage in this process as much as boys do; genetic predispositions have no gender barriers b) Girls do not rag boys; Wrong again. Only this form of ragging does not make news, as any raggee would suffer it silently for obvious reasons, rather than allowing anyone to know about it c) This is non-existent in institutes of higher learning (Post-graduate institutions as Indians call them or Graduate School in US parlance); Wrong again - IIMs have an entire week - dedicated right from the date of registration for the freshers, which is known as orientation week. They manage to keep this culture/tradition a secret and perpetuate with aplomb - there lie their management skills.