“….Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it. For, to define true madness
What is`t but to be nothing else but mad…”
William Shakespeare – Hamlet
A new batch has arrived, the rag season has commenced, and the raggers are having a rip-roaring time. I remember a former student leader defining the term ragging, saying that ‘RAG’ stood for ‘Royal Academic Game.’ I also remember him narrating some anecdote about its origin. Whether he was telling the truth or whether it was some fancy false definition he himself had been gulled into believing previously or whether it was his own personal definition about ragging I do not know, however. Whatsoever might be the origin of the term ‘rag’, I must say, ragging has never appealed to me. For me it was never a pleasure to be ragged; whether it gives one joy to rag others I really do not know, because I have never ragged anyone myself( maybe I am boasting a little too much about my own virtues!)
Let me tell you a little about our rag season. During it, though I hated to get ragged, I remember, there were some guys (my batch-mates) who told me themselves that they enjoyed being ragged. They told me that they found it so absolutely funny that they looked on it as a wonderful source of amusement and that they really beguiled their time by getting ragged. There were also others who endured it simply because they believed it was sort of compulsory for them to experience it and that rag season itself was their induction into the university culture and the initiation of their university career. The majority of my batch-mates were of this opinion. Some others were, however, diametrically opposed to ragging like I myself was, but were scarcely brave enough to stand up to the raggers, those boisterous bullying seniors.
There was, however, one guy who flaunted his opposition and boldly fought with the seniors who tried to daunt him with their awful blusters. He alone refused to be ragged and to march in a line into the canteen where the process of ragging took place. So he earned the opprobrium of the seniors and the objectionable nickname ‘alaya’ (potato) and came to be regarded as an outcast, a sort of pariah. After the rag season, however, the batch decided to oust him from it as a potato. His cronies raised objections, but they were literally drowned in the collective cacophonous dissent of the (malicious) majority so to speak. Because he refused to be ragged and fought with those foul-mouthed bullies like a man, or because it was decided that he should be disowned, or because he happened to find a better education opportunity than what a government university could offer him, or because of all these reasons, or because of some other reason, he left the university.
The story I narrated is a true one. And I still believe that he was cruelly deprived of his rightful inalienable privilege for university education owing to an obtuse practice introduced into our university system by some scoundrels with parochial political intentions. On another occasion, when we were the second year students running the ragging process, a girl frightened by the harsh treatments she received at the incipience of the rag season decided to quit her university education. After the rag season, a deputation of students paid her a visit at her home and tried to persuade her to return to the university. But she flatly refused to step into what she had felt as hell in the first place. Incidents like this superfluously reflect the deleterious consequences of this asinine primitive practice called ‘ragging.’ Also, they show that ragging is not always about getting some innocent fun as some people say. Undoubtedly, it is necessary that we preclude recurrence of such tragic happenings like these.
Seeking revenge
If you asked a ragger, ’Why do you harass your juniors who are like your own sisters and brothers?’ his first answer would be, ’Look! I don’t mean any harm to them…it’s just fun to tease them a bit…’But if you are sharp enough to penetrate that plausible answer you will see that it is not an honest answer. Maybe you are also clever enough to see the real reason driving most raggers to do what they do. As I believe, most raggers think more or less in the same way as does Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“…I’m very proud, revengeful, ambitious
With more offences at my back
Than I have thoughts to put them in
imagination to give them shape,
Or time to act them in…”
Understandably, their desire to take revenge, for the ordeals they have had to suffer during their own rag season, on their juniors (because they cannot avenge themselves on their seniors) is the primary motivator for most students to engage in ragging. Because they themselves have been teased, harassed and maltreated in the past out of pure spite or for some other reason by their seniors, they seem to me to be in the persistent belief that their juniors too must suffer the physical and mental anguish they themelves have experienced over their rag season. The protraction of rag season up to two or three months is a clear unmistakable demonstration of their motive.
The responsibility for the effective and smooth running of this cycle of revenge is often entrusted with the students` union that comes to rescue the raggers when they are charged with indiscipline and offensive behaviour and have to face disciplinary actions. There is no denying that the students` union renders an invaluable service to the whole community of students in ensuring and protecting their rights and privileges by leading them to remonstrate against the corrupt practices of those engaged in the university administration or any measures, taken by the university authorities and posing a threat to the rights and privileges they are entitled to. But in its sphere of operations, students` union is one of the main forces, rightly or wrongly protecting the raggers against the disciplinary actions taken by the university authorities with a view to deterring potential raggers.
Here, it must be stressed that some university authorities are not objective in the prescription of punishments and that they sometimes punish students on trumped up charges based on their personal prejudices without an impartial investigation into the alleged breaches of discipline. On such occasions students` union is obliged to intervene on behalf of the culprits.
Finding a partner
Another important motivator for guys to take part in ragging is to find a girl from the junior batch. Tradition requires that the man should be older than his wife. So the senior guys, possessing this conventional wisdom, have their eyes upon the junior girls. Clearly, there are instances where this traditional rule is simply thrown to the wind by some juniors forming love relationships with their own batch-mates and also by those deviants who dare woo their own senior girls (even during the rag season itself!) and form relationships with them. In the university parlance this second phenomenon is known as getting ‘lambet’, but how and from where this term originated is beyond my knowledge.
Likewise, courting or wooing a girl is called ‘washing’ in the jargon of university students. So amid all the cacophony, din and tumult taking place in the scene of ragging, many senior guys are busy wooing the junior girls, many of whom look to be extraordinarily pliable and are constantly smiling. Maybe they are practising one out of the sixty four spells they are known to possess and these poor doltish seniors have not a clue as to what their intentions are! There are some lucky fellows who succeed in their courtships, but the majority gets rejected once the rag season is over. In the university, however, getting rejected is considered as normal a thing as earning a ‘D’ pass at the exam (I learnt this after I had entered the university on the rebound with a broken heart!) In moat cases, a guy may mope for a day or two and will be his normal self soon enough. Unlike some teenagers, they will not want to kill themselves over a girl’s rejection.
I see I have digressed a little from the theme; but the point I want to make is that if finding a girl is their sole solitary concern, they can do that in a more pleasant, more effective way than teasing, harassing, bulling and yelling obscenities at the freshers who have just entered a milieu completely new and totally different from the school where they have been studying for the past 13 years. The question I want to ask them is: can’t these senior guys be a little more romantic and affectionate in dealing with the juniors?
Slippers, cheap frocks and cardboard files
In our university, during the rag season, the junior guys and girls should wear their respective uniforms as recommended to them by their seniors. A guy should wear only one pair of trousers and one short sleeved shirt over the entire rag season while a girl has to wear the same cheeththa frock throughout the rag season and tie their hair with pieces of black ribbon. They should both wear only rubber slippers themselves. They should each bring with them the same cardboard file no matter how battered it is as long as the rag season exists.
Their most noble seniors use the most abusive, most obnoxious terms in the Sinahala language (I had better left them for your imagination!) to address them. No matter how indecent their seniors are, they have to respect them and address them in Sinhala as ‘jeshta uttamaya’(noble sir) When they enjoin them (junior guys) to crawl around the canteen floor sometimes under the tables and over the chairs, they should follow their orders; they should stop as soon as they are asked to stop. No matter how prim and proper they are, their seniors constantly find fault with them. They have a knack for carping. If there is nothing else, they blame one for the way one looks at them. Sometimes they punish you for your mistakes.
One such punishment is that they ask you to play the heater (hetare gesema). You go to a wall and stand with your back to it, place your both elbows on the wall behind you and stretch your legs forward at an angle without bending your knees. The whole exercise puts intense pressure on your elbows as they press into the hard wall, which causes you to feel the sensation of getting heated in a few seconds. In fact, few seniors will be so inhumane as to force you to remain in the same posture for a long time. If my dear readers want to experiment this themselves, they may do it without breaking their backbones!
In addition to this, seniors ask new comers to do physical exercises-those that you used to do at the school in the Physical Education period. If you are too sick to exercise yourself, you can excuse yourself from it. But for that you will have to wear a paper on your shirt or frock displaying the name of some fancy vulgar disease from which you are believed to suffer. It can be a little embarrassing because seniors may question you about the origin and the symptoms of your disease. But it may be far better than over-exercising yourself according to the instructions by those whose knowledge about exercises can be no more than a donkey’s knowledge about the theory of Relativity!
In the lunch-time, girls have to feed the guys standing next to them and vice versa. Sometimes, a few lunch packets are unpacked and the contents are cast onto one big dollop .Then you mix it using your hand like a spade. And you feed your neighbour with that wholesome, highly nutritious food! Egg-sucking is an even more horrible practice and can make you spew up specially if you are over-squeamish. A boiled egg (with its shell peeled off) is passed around a table; each sucks it passes it to his or her neighbour who does the same and passes it to the next person and so on and on. And just imagine the plight of the one who has to eat it in the end!
Conclusion
Rag leaders often argue that the process of ragging helps make bold self-confident undergraduates, that it creates unity and solidarity among the batch mates despite their gender, social status, religion and race or language differences, that it awakens their latent creativity, that they learn to respect their seniors as they go through it, and that, through all these, it makes them more perfect men and women; this argument, however, is not without some element of truth in it. But they deliberately leave out the element of hypocrisy inherent in the ragging.
And I am deeply opposed to ragging because it is totally discordant with the libertarian aspects of university culture, which I most admire, even if the rag season lasts only for two or three months. In my opinion (maybe I am wrong and a little too egalitarian!) no senior student, be he a batch rep, a student leader or a self-appointed rag leader has any right whatsoever to dictate a dress-code to the juniors even if it is only for the ease of identification and for a relatively short period of time; no dull-witted rag leader has any right whatsoever force any new-comer to participate in the ragging against his or her free-will; no senior student has any right whatsoever to marginalize any junior student just because he or she refuses to be ragged.
There is another thing which I should disclose in spite of the embarrassment it may cause to certain parties. After the rag season, these more perfect, more creative junior students go to administrative offices and faculty offices only to address peons therein as ‘Sir’ much to the embarrassment of the lecturers who sometimes happen to overhear such conversations!
The process of ragging certainly has some funny aspects; that may be why some students exclaim, ‘Ragging is loads of fun!’ and enjoy getting ragged. Some others opine that it is wonderful in retrospect. To a certain extent, I have felt this myself. But in retrospect, very few things can be disturbing or horrible. Personally I hail ragging as primitive, barbaric, inhumane, cruel, mean, and degrading and firmly believe that it should be deracinated as soon as possible. If the total extirpation of ragging is out of the question, then I suggest that the degrading aspects of it be totally eliminated while ensuring that no student, male or female, gets ragged against his or her will.
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