Ragging

The motivation for me to write this post comes from the movie "Table No 21". First of all let this post not be a spoiler to the movie. So you may still watch the movie with it's full glamour even after reading this post.

Here are some facts that I took from the movie itself. These were displayed within the last few minutes of the movie along with the gratitude.

 

And there's lot more.

Without going ahead with the movie let me move on. To start with, let's see what is ragging and how it is done. Ragging is the procedure where senior students (in most cases) force the freshers or juniors on some kind of an act. These activities depend on the nature of the institution and so on. In some worst scenarios these could even go up to sexual harassment. But most common scenarios takes place by forcefully engaging another student in an activity such as a role play, vulgar speeches, mockery and etc. These might sound silly yet the impact on mentality is significant and may last the shock many years to come. This is because these acts affect one's personality once they get involved. Imagine a student acting some fooling role in front of many others while a set of poor minded set of another students enjoy seeing it. 

The affected student looses his confidence to face the society and looses his/her ego to face society. This impose a backward nature on the affected students. Sometimes after going through these hard times people tend to loose interest in studies and the institution itself. This has a huge impact on education, especially in countries like Sri Lanka where education is offered for free. In an era where education has become a right, it's fair that we talk ragging as a crime. This is because ragging may but not always can eliminate one's right for education, and sometimes even right to live.

In the case of Sri Lanka, which is considered to be a developing country ragging mostly taken place at institutions where academic work load is accepted to be low. It is clearly seen by not having ragging environments in medical colleges and engineering campuses.

In most of those where ragging takes place and initial fear is fed to freshers by means of vulgar and rude language. This has been never lighter on female party. Thus they are scared in front of their seniors and tend to do whatever they may ask to do. In Sri Lanka we hardly hear any sexual harassment yet they happen in other countries.

I was lucky enough to be in University of Moratuwa where we didn't see a single situation of ragging, especially within the Engineering Faculty. Even the most minute case has been taken place among students who can be thought of those who had hard times during their childhood and with family. This itself explains a lot. This might be because an underprivileged student might see others in a different mindset which needs immediate change.

To conclude it is clear that no one has any right to raise a word on someone else for any reason. No one has any right to force someone to do something. Thus ragging indeed is a crime and shall be punished.