The Day I Was Ragged

The issue of ragging has again come into the spotlight with the incident at Gwalior’s Scindia School. While the boarding school ecosystem may encourage such practices due to its residential status (Vikram Seth has spoken of how sad he was through his stay at Doon), ragging, make no mistake, is a significant problem after school as well.

When I went to Indore to do a program in Electronic Engineering in 2001, it was the first time I had lived away from home. I was not staying in the hostel though. My paternal uncle lives in the city so I stayed with him. I had heard tales of ragging from classmates but had foolishly thought that living away from campus would protect me.

No such luck! The first-years were made to wear uniforms that comprised of white shirts and black trousers. The third button of the shirt had to be kept blue for easy identification. I used to ride a cycle to college, and would often come across seniors on my way back. One day, a senior accosted me and told me to meet him at an apartment in another part of town. “And stay in your uniform,” he ordered. There was no way I was going to refuse. I got home, dumped my cycle, and ran.

When I reached, I could hear faint music playing inside. I knocked on the door and another senior let me in. There was already a first-year there, naked except for his underwear, and he was simulating masturbation. A bevy of seniors sat on the bed opposite him, howling with laughter. The apartment was strewn with underwear and male vests and a ripe smell emanated from another room. On seeing me, the seniors bade me come closer and asked me, in what must be the most inappropriate non-sequitur ever, how often I masturbated and whether I knew the Hindi term for it. I did, but I was too embarrassed to say it. A senior stood up and slapped me so hard that my specs fell to the other end of the room. On the verge of tears, I said: “mutt marna.”

I don’t remember how long I stayed there. The evening is a blur. I remember that I was taken to another room where I was asked to take off my shirt and swing it in the air, while shouting that I masturbated three times everyday. I had been told that seniors would ask me the full form of the college name and a little bit about the history of Indore. I had prepared these things to a T, but they did not seem interested in anything apart from my sexual habits. When I finally left with a senior, the other first-year was still in the hall, now completely naked.

Later, the senior who had stopped me on my way home took me out for a “samosa treat”. Seeing me badly shaken, he said ragging had earned a bad name due to some nincompoops who could not see that it was only a way to welcome juniors into college life. Then, he placed a hand on my shoulders and whispered conspiratorially: “Of course, whatever happened today will remain between us, right?”

I stayed on in that college only for a year. During the first semester seniors would routinely come to our classroom during lunch break and slap us or hurl abuses at us. We were told not to make eye contact while this happened. When they left, they would go saying that we would thank them one day for this “character-building” exercise. Needless to say, for the rest of my stay in Indore, I avoided like a plague the seniors who had ragged me in the dingy apartment.

I was under the impression that these things only happened at undergraduate colleges. But when I went for my MBA to an IIM, I was aghast, to put it mildly, to see seniors putting on the same reckless, abominable show during first trimester. The funny thing was they were not even seniors in the strictest sense of the term. Unlike undergraduate colleges, where seniors are actually older than you, in an IIM, like in other post grad programs, you might have seniors who are younger.

But the expectations are no different. One night, we were asked to assemble in the common room in a tie and half-pants only. We looked stupid, and perhaps this would have turned out to be fun, but soon the conversation in the common room turned to sex and porn. We were asked to introduce ourselves, while strewing what we said with random Hindi cuss words. At the end of the introduction which was supposed to mention our hometown, college and place of work, we were expected to do the Auro dance from Paa while, you guessed it, enumerating our daily masturbatory routine.

I should count myself lucky for I was not made to suck dick or “deflowered” by my seniors, which evidence suggests is a common enough experience. Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap,who also did his schooling at Scindia, describes his time thus: “Scindia was hell for me. The sexual abuse continued there for years. I hated myself. I couldn’t understand why it was happening to me. I was often picked out, beaten, then taken to the toilets. To save myself from the beatings, I’d give in to the abuse. Once I saw a senior abuse another junior. I spoke up about it. The repercussion was terrible. When I was in Class VII, I felt suicidal.”

There is no other way to say it. Ragging is a deeply inhuman, soul-crushing enterprise which has, for whatever reasons, not received the kind of attention it deserves because of the mistaken belief that it helps “break the ice” between seniors and juniors. It does no such thing. In the worst case, it inflicts serious psychological harm on young people who are not ready to bear the verbal and often physical assaults of strangers with whom they are expected to bond just because they attend the same educational institute.

That it takes place even in the most hallowed of our institutions speaks to something wretched in our system. Horror stories of frat house misdemeanours in the US routinely make headlines, but the grim consolation is that admission to frats is voluntary, unlike the universal ragging Indian students are subjected to. Yes, there are anti-ragging helplines and, especially after AmanKachroo’s death at a medical college in Himachal Pradesh in 2009, the issue received national attention. But no amount of scrutiny can change the mindset that makes ragging so pervasive in Indian educational institutes.

Until we as a nation see ragging for what it is – a depraved, self-perpetuating exercise of power – we are in danger of coming across many more Scindias at all levels of education.