Colombo cam- pus alumni dutifully held a seminar on ragging, while the Hardy Institute freshman and rag-victim lay dying in a Kandy hospital. Probably, the ivory tower location for the meeting (a top floor room of the college house tower) was appropriate for what took place.
For civilised people, the two ragging deaths in the last year have been agonising.
Some theories that have been advanced us reasons for ragging have been almost self-flagellating, some going to the extent of suggesting that society has to take the entire blame for the recent rag torture in the campuses.
Dr. Dianath Samarasinghe who was keynote speaker at the alumni seminar took the dispassionate position when he pointed out that half the youthful thrill in doing something was 'breaking the law'. So, his prediction that to outlaw ragging is to invite more of the behaviour goes quite counter to the prevailing mood.
Dr. Dianath was reminded by a Colombo campus dean at the seminar that ragging is a highly organised affair on campus.
This years raggers would identify the next years rag leaders, and officially pass on the tradition. Dr. Samarasinghe whose hands on experience of ragging is probably zero, was probably unaware that ragging is an organised pursuit, that there is no ordinary thrill seeking pleasure principle that drives students to rag the freshmen.
One thing about ragging is that in its dark and virulent form the practise has succeeded in considerably damaging the reputations of the higher educational institutions to which the perpetrators also belong.
Seen in that light, ragging is a form of self abuse, which questions the core values and intelligence of the perpetrators.
That's why it makes sense to see ragging as part of a larger malaise. Professor Samarasinghe probably displays his detachment from the reality of what passes off for ragging, when he insists on laying emphasis on what he calls the 'fun and games' segment of the raggers.
It is his theory that this segment makes ragging look the done thing, which makes the others want to aspire to be raggers.
Ragging on the ground (or in the hostel toilet or wherever) is however altogether a different kettle of fish.
Organised raggers with attitudes have made the fun and games raggers almost totally irrelevant. These blokes (organised raggers) don't ape anyone because they think they are the force on campus.
As one gentlemen observed reliving his own on campus experiences, ragging is done with an ostensible mission of levelling the crowds on campus, and is therefore not seen as fun and games.
It's part of the vast corpus of warped thinking that goes on in a student ethos that has been stripped of its values.
In both recent incidents, for instance, there is too much evidence to ignore the fact that the ragging was directed towards the deceased students because there was a good deal of jealousy and envy involved.
Varapragash particularly was a over-achiever, juggling several difficult academic pursuits at the same time.
To bring a good man down, in this context, seems to be part of the value system of the country's higher educational institutions. There is a good deal of plain envy driven hypocrisy in that scheme of things.
For example, it is easy to associate campuses with rebellion and anoint students with the status of the respected renegades.
Society is ridden with so many ills that it has become easy for campus students to play rebel by cultivating an air of righteousness, against what's seen as a sick society on the outside.
For a while, this hypocrisy and righteousness looks attractive, but as it usually happens, with time the real situation surfaces.
Students resented allowing police inside campuses for example because like all righteous people they began to harbour the illusion that their position was always unassailable. Therefore, the myth was born in many campuses that contentious issues can only be solved through violence because there can be only one correct position which makes any negotiation meaningless.
Its righteousness as an excuse for arrogance.
To call this bluff, it is necessary to call a spade a spade, which is why rather abstruse but well meaning arguments by persons such as Dianath Samarasinghe have to be necessarily treated as the thinking of uninvolved outsiders, at best.
If two students died, in one year, due to ragging, and if the reaction is that banning ragging altogether gives them an added dare, that's an under reaction. And if there is anything worse than an over reaction, it is an under reaction.
The two deaths have to drive home the point that it's a desperate situation that is being talked about, and in that kind of desperate situation banning ragging is a novel and innovative solution because almost everything else has been already tried.
In a way, those who advocate laissez faire and say that laws make it more chic to rag, are mimicking the psyche of the undergrad. Undergrads think any conventional thinking is boring, and therefore they tend to justify themselves in any action simply because they think they are right and the system is rotten.
Those who don't want laws to curb ragging think the system is rotten too, which is why they recoil at the idea of invoking the system (i.e. legislation) even when the situation is desperate.
Now that the laws have been drafted, let the issue no longer be in the realm of hypothesis. Even laws are not written in stone, and if its a bad idea, certainly the laws could be repealed later.
Civil society lives on the faith that the endangered will have some recourse if they are victimised, and if we are to deny them any recourse on the fairly hypothetical notion that 'laws will give raggers a bigger dare', it appears that we will be sacrificing the correct option for fear of being orthodox.
The worst thing about ragging and deadly ragging is the notion that some can decide what's right on behalf of the others
In many higher educational institutions, sadists and boors give morals a twist to position themselves as the right, and the righteous.
For example, the going explanation for ragging is that society is unequal, unjustly so, therefore a ragging, even if its cruel and unjust is fine because it redresses the balance.
Such excuses for boorishness are common in higher educational institutions as devices to perpetrate all finds of mental and physical acts of cruelty on other students.
The quicker the hypocrites and sadists are exposed the better, because the discourse is already becoming weaker due to those who want rationalise the sadists.
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