We’re Just Joking!!!!

There’s so much been said on this topic, I doubt if anyone remembers anything at all.

To some, its sick.
To some, its revenge.
To some, its fun.
To some its tradition.

The irony is, all these ‘some’s are mostly the same group of people, separated by a year. These are the interpretations of ragging you would hear in the Universities from first year, second year, third year and fourth year respectively. Years and batches go by, but these interpretations never change.
It may be unfortunate, it may be subhuman and it may be despicable.
But above all, I believe its amazing!!!

Well, till the revenge part, I can still understand.
Its common human nature to always try and make others suffer more than one has himself. There is no point arguing with that, since like most of the eternal truths about human nature, it cannot be justified.

But……….. after that? How can it become “fun” at one point of time?
When it is revenge, one can draw pleasure by torturing the other party, but that’s because his/her own memory of the same torture burns him. But, if torturing others gives someone pleasure just for the sake of that, especially when the torturer has gone through the same thing, then there’s something terribly wrong with his thinking process.
He is a psycho.

That is why, I don’t think its possible to solve the ragging problem by banning. There is no point leaving a group of rabbits in a jungle full of tigers and banning the tigers to eat the rabbits. The tiger would always try to do it. Its their natural instinct.
Similarly, the senior students in the university hostel cannot help but make a fresher strip whenever they see one. It has become as normal as breathing to them.
I really cannot say what goes so drastically wrong with these students ‘en masse’. Maybe, the ‘revenge’ becomes an obsession, an addiction and finally……they lose it. Still, even that doesn’t explain why the first batches of the newly spawning engineering colleges rag their juniors.
Their eyes glow, their mouths water, their nostrils flare at the prospect of surrounding a fresher and see him crying, screaming and paining in shame.

There are incidents like seniors being expelled for ragging, freshers grouping to beat up seniors and a lot more, but I don’t think it’s a permanent remedy. It may give the freshers all over the country some sense of satisfaction, but that is again the same feeling that sows the seed of revenge, when they start ‘joking’, from being the ‘jokers’.

Still I agree, that is perhaps the quickest and most instantly effective way to some extent. If not anything else, it at least shows the murderers the firing squad. But, the problem is, in course of time, with a painful certainty, the firing squad become the murderers.

Now, about the self-defence the raggers put up. The original concept of ‘ragging’, befriending the juniors and all the crap they site to justify ragging are really so ridiculous, I can’t imagine how a well grown, normally intelligent person believes that it will make any sense to others. Maybe, it just goes on to show what they have become.

So, ragging, other than being a social problem, is every bit as much a psychological problem with a generation.
I have seen friends of mine actually feeling righteous for not beating up any juniors that year. I wish I could tell them how sorry I felt for them. If they could really understand what they have become, probably they would be a lot more worried about themselves, than the parents are about sending their son/daughter to colleges.

This post is essentially an act of concern for the raggers. I really feel for them. I wish I had a permanent solution for their maladies, but I’m afraid I don’t.
Counseling is obviously in order, but really how one can counsel a complete generation beats me.

So finally, I just want to tell my ragger friends, “I feel for you. I know you’re as helpless as a snake with a frog in front of it. But since I do not have a remedy, I don’t have a choice but to stand aside and let the firing squad get into action."