Tuesday 4 August 2009

Ragging

Different people have different opinions on ragging. I not only have an opinion, I also have a question - Why?? Why would any educated person indulge in such sadistic activities? (I assume that the person is educated since he has cleared first year of college). What motivates him/her to go to such lengths? How can a person feel pleasure while torturing another, especially someone junior, belonging to the same college and who has not harmed the person in any way!

I guess it all boils down to insecurity and frustration. Insecurity leads people to stamp their authority over others to get a false feeling of power. Frustration combined with insecurity leads to sadism. Such insecure nutcases deserve nothing less than being arrested by the police. I prefer not to describe the extremes these raggers can go to, especially in hostels. However, they are such extremes that only a supreme sadist can carry them out and that person has gone so far ahead in sadism that rehabilitating him/her is out of question. Heavy punishment will not only act as a deterrent but it will also make other raggers come out of their complacent beliefs that what they do can be called socially acceptable. They need to be made to realize that what they do is abnormal, very abnormal behaviour.

I studied pharmacy in the famous chemical engineering institute UDCT in September 2000. I left it after a month to pursue engineering. I was ragged there and it was pretty harmless, non-physical ragging: not the types you hear in the news. Some people are of the opinion that such ragging is fun. But I do not agree, simply because I could see the madness in my seniors' eyes. I could tell that they were frustrated souls looking for an outlet. Now that I think about it, even such an activity was wrong, since that too reeks of sadism.

Very often the news focuses on victims of ragging or the college authorities. However, the perpetrators are treated as faceless entities. In my opinion, there should me more focus on those culprits and more examples of arrests need to be presented: similar to the recent news of the arrest of students from a Delhi college. If there is regulatory and political will, hostels will become much safer for juniors to live in.

What unnerves me is that such people do exist in civil society. Most of the raggers go scot free when they pass out of college and I shudder to think how they live their lives. I'm sure they make horrible husbands, bosses, fathers, etc. What should society do with such twisted losers?

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