Category Archives: Published Stuff

An unnecessary tradition

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Ragging. A word spelling fear for freshers in college. Entertainment for their senior counterparts.

The Oxford Student’s Dictionary defines rag harmlessly as: play practical jokes upon. The American Random House comes closer to its actual use in India: To torment with jokes. (Torment: noun, (something that causes) severe bodily or mental pain or suffering)

When a student first enters college life, he is apprehensive of the new set-up. School and colleges might be both institutions of learning, but there is a great difference between the two. In a school, a student’s field of thought is fenced by his teachers, parents and numerous other factors and hence under greater scrutiny. In a college, on the other hand, the same pasture is wide open to the influences of the outside world.

So most people taste their truths of life here. Moreover, in college hostels, one is more or less alone and free to do whatever one likes and the good, the bad and the ugly all surface.

To the new student, a college is an unfamiliar place and ragging was introduced to ‘familiarize’ the new atmosphere. On the first day of college, seniors would play harmless jokes on newcomers to put them ‘at ease’ and laugh together. It does work in a way as there is some sort of interaction between the seniors and juniors. Otherwise a junior might have spent his entire college life with any senior. Ragging is supposed to be a very good method of breaking ice on the very first day of college. One is acquainted with one’s seniors and is a companion in being ragged with his classmates. It is good clean fun if practiced in the right spirit.

However as power corrupts, students can’t be trusted with such an originally harmless thing in their hand. The jokes become rougher and continue throughout the year instead of the first few days. The net result is that ragging has ended up a nightmare for its victims and is merely another form of harassment.

‘Pretend to be a motorcycle’, ‘imitate a bird’ and ‘how would you propose to your girlfriend’ might sound harmless and even fun. But what is definitely not funny is ‘walk on the narrow railing’, ‘murga bano’ for long durations and troubling some poor student all night or multitudes ganging around him. Physical abuse has to be totally out. Ragging now propagates goondagiri and dadagiri. More violence to the youth. Distractions for both the violator and victim. In most institutions atrocities go unchecked as seniors commit several excesses. Victims who show resistance are in for more trouble.

Some reason that all this toughens the student, but it might also break him forever. Certain scars have lasting impacts on tender lives as cases of suicide are not uncommon. What is much worse is sexual abuse which is reported now and then. This leaves lasting mental agonies and many a times, unrepairable psychological damage.

So ragging, far from familiarizing the student and putting him at ease, makes him uncomfortable and afraid of the system. It also makes oppressors out of some who are encouraged to pursue such activities after passing out. From a harmless word, ‘rag’ is now quite ugly.

Ragging today is an irrelevant college tradition and should be done away with. Senior students would have been ragged by their seniors who would have been ragged by their seniors. So they rag their juniors who rag their juniors. It’s high time we came out of this vicious circle.

Merely passing laws against ragging will not be enough. The concerned authorities everywhere have to deal with the matter firmly. Even minor cases shouldn’t be left off the hook. A sincere effort is needed from the Education Ministry down to the heads of the institutions, teachers and hostel staff. It is finally the students themselves who can bring about a real change.

Or maybe the Indian Dictionary should define ragging as:

Senior students tormenting their juniors in educational institutions

(This appeared in a student’s publication called Cheel in Jodhpur in July 1993)

A career in India

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Do you want to pursue a serious career in India? You might need nearly a decade of specialized study.

In most countries, a matriculate is assured of being at least a clerk and a BA a handsome teacher’s post. In our country even a doctorate is uncertain of something of his choice.

In the good old days, schooling used to begin at the ages of 4-5 years and a person would start earning before the age of 20. Not anymore. Today schooling starts at the age of two and nobody knows when the process of education will end.

Do you want to become a lawyer? It’s three years of graduation plus three years of LLB, which is six years. The total is eight years after matriculation, and a matric was ‘really educated’ once upon the time. A doctor? It’s four years of graduation plus a year of internship plus two years of specialization, which is 7 years. A Chartered Accountant? It’s three years of graduation plus about four years of CA, which is seven years. Then hardly anyone completes their CA on time. And with those who do, it has become a fashion to collect additional allied degrees like ICWA, CS… so God knows how much time they will spend on that. Want to be a scientist in an institution or a professor in a university? It’s three years of graduation plus two years of PG plus at least three years of doctorate studies. To those eight long plus years you can safely add a year’s delay in the form of strikes and about two years to really settle down in your respective career.

Again, an engineer today isn’t satisfied with a simple BE/BTech. He’ll either go for post graduation, doctorate or for an MBA/IAS. Now a “technocrat-bureaucrat” or a “technocrat executive” sounds good, but is practically not so. He’ll only be a hard-core bureaucrat or executive. All he has done is wasted a couple of years and at the same time blocked a seat which could have gone to somebody else.

So where are we heading? Who wants to be educated anyway? All they want is a good job which is provided by either a professional degree from a reputed institute or clearing a competitive exam. Basic education ends at matriculation, so a BA or BSc has just wasted 5 years after 10th on non-professional education, nothing which will really help him with his future job.

With the current trend, in the future a baby will start some sort of schooling soon after it is born and it’ll be an achievement if he gets a good footing in his career before the age of 30.

(This appeared in a student’s publication called Cheel in Jodhpur in July 1993)

Show and Tell

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The 38th annual Filmfare awards show on TV was a big let-down.

By conducting a Hindi film award show in English, were you trying to ape the Oscars? Their show is for English language films and shown worldwide. What you could have aped from the Oscars is the technical perfection. Simi announced that the show was being telecast live to 343 million viewers; most of them must be Hindi film viewers and would be quite familiar with the language. Some years ago at your show, Jackie Shroff was asked in English, about the Hindi film hero. And he replied, “Hindi film hero? To Hindi mein bol na, yaar!”

There was absolutely no coordination between the presenters and the award winners. At times, the winners would land up on the stage much before the presenters. A case of putting the cart before the horse? If an award-winner was absent, it was not your fault, but when presenters who’re called upon don’t appear, then that’s an unpardonable lapse on your part.

Simi hogged most of the time, even asking questions to many award-winners when it was apparent that they wanted to be left alone to express their feelings at their moment of triumph.

When you present a show on such a large scale, the mistakes get magnified. There were plenty of breaks in the telecast; major power breakdowns, shaky visuals, faulty video and ad breaks. Do take care of the glitches the next time around.

(This appeared as a Letter to the Editor in Filmfare magazine in 1993)

Bangalore Transport Service

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india-6274264_1280The students of the Bangalore University must be one of the toughest thanks to the BTS buses they travel in. With a population of more than half a crore and the prevalent birth rate, Bangalore is clearly inadequate in its Public Transport System. Forget a seat or place inside, in many a trip one doesn’t get a place on the footboard or even the ladder behind.

There is a civilized queue system in most cities, but this concept is unheard of at most bus stops in Bangalore. As soon as the bus is spotted, there is a mad scramble to get on, with everyone joining in the rushing, pushing and jostling. One is reminded of the game of rugby, where players act in a similar manner once the referee blows his whistle. One not only loses his breath on finally entering the bus, but also ends up losing a small article like a pen, hanky or some coins. Recently one poor chap lost one of his shoes, which fell off the bus and was mercilessly trampled by the cordon of vehicles behind. The number of people hanging for their dear lives makes the bus tilt at almost 45 degrees. This makes the onlooker wonder how these buses travel day after day, night after night, without overturning occasionally.

As if this isn’t bad enough, many of the trips due to some uncanny reason don’t even turn up and if they do, just whiz past your stop. This makes a tired and weary you, whose patience has already been tested to the limit, do nothing else but bang your head in frustration. To make matters worse, most conductors are far from polite, treating you like cattle and giving student bus-pass holders a ‘step-conductorly, treatment. Then the conductor is always ready with his war-cry ‘Munde hogi, Munde hogi’, as one is helplessly swung like a bar-pendulum in the suffocating atmosphere of the bus.

BTS has no further sense of time. A bus might come 15 minutes early or half an hour late. Further delays might be caused by frequent breakdowns or the whims of a driver. It may not sound true, but one bus-driver on his daily morning trip to Hessarghetta would stop the bus at a certain point, where he would meet a girl and they would chat sweet nothing for 5-10 minutes unaware of the rising frustration around them. If anyone chance objected, he would find himself speaking to a brick wall. Then one shouldn’t be surprised if one hears non-chalant remarks like: ‘No today, we are not going upto KR Market, only Majestic or ‘No, we are taking a different route today.’

Snap strikes are also nothing uncommon here. Half an hour strikes, one hour strikes, two hour strikes, morning strikes, afternoon strikes, Shivajinagar strikes, Majestic strikes, Subashnagar strikes…… The frustration of the average customer was evident in one ‘evening strike’ which occurred at Majestic last year. About 10 buses were burnt and a 100 damaged. It is to be noted that at the height of the Mandal Commission agitation, no student burnt a single bus in Bangalore, only some were painted with slogans. The problem with any strikes in this list of never ending strikes is that the cause is never genuine. In the above mentioned strike, a conductor had hit a member of the fairer sex. In another case, a drunken driver had created nuisance and was in the lock-up. This formed the pretext for a snap strike.

Even the condition of the buses is nothing to brag about, with seats not upto the mark and some of the roofs being so bad in the rainy season, at times one has to open an umbrella inside the bus! Also some of the buses have such loud screeching brakes, that you can hear them clearly if you happen to live near a bus-stop. This however works out to be an advantage as no two buses have the same screech. Say bus no. 271 has a high pitched sound and 272 a low one. If you’re late and haven’t heard the screech of your pitch, you haven’t missed the bus.

However, good buses or bad ones, happy journeys or sad ones, long waits or short waits, polite conductors or rude ones, small crowds or big crowds, sitting travel or footboard, walking to catch a bus or running, punctual trips or late ones, strikes or no strikes, all that is the lot of the common Bangalore student. One can be consoled by the fact that daily travel by BTS is nothing short of a mini-commando course and hence the student is fighting fit.

At the height of the ‘My heart Beats for India’ ad campaign of the Congress in 1989, someone rightly remarked:
‘My Heart BTS for Bangalore’.

(This essay won first prize in an essay contest and was published in The Student Mail newspaper in November 1992)

Boycott Welcome

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India’s decision to boycott Sharjah 1992 is most welcome. In Sharjah, the true glorious spirit of the game is absent. The organizers are interested only in two things: a) Making money and b) Ensuring that Pakistan wins. India has no business to be the sacrificial lamb year after year.

Sharjah, in the end proves to be a morale shatterer for the Indians. In Sharjah 1991, an excellent all-round display by the Indians ensured that we won the first three matches, but thanks to some shocking umpiring, it al came to naught in the end. In the fourth match the Indians lost under questionable light while the final really took the cake. Aquib Javed got an outrageous hat trick of LBWs making him give the greatest ever bowling performance in the history of one-day cricket. All three decisions were given when the batsman had run half way through for making a run. In a game, where even one vital wicket can change the tide of the match, handing three on a silver platter is just too much.

Also, rather than stopping playing with Pakistan, India should stop playing in Pakistan. When the Pakistani players come here, they get VIP treatment, though the converse is not true. Some time back an Indian cricket captain’s shirt was torn and in the same season, the Indian hockey captain was chased by an angry mob. Is this how captains are treated? Also, in the same season, the Indian flag was burnt. The stadiums are filled with slogans of Kashmir and politics.

(This appeared as a Letter to the Editor in The Times of India in 1992)