Off-topic, but on Theme - Page 2

Originally posted by: bleu98

@^^^

My heart goes out to your cousin and all the others who have been victims of ragging. I was lucky as a) I'm a humanities student and b) I went to a government university where the administration is very strict about UGC rules and guidelines. But I've known and heard that engineering colleges see the worst form of ragging and it happens with girls too, in the hostels. And most of the students are told to 'take it in the right spirit' but Ragging is Ragging and there is nothing right about it. Even in Bengal, prestigious institutes like JU and BESU are infamous when it comes to ragging. And of course in private colleges things are far worse.

I have a feeling that in the engineering colleges, sometimes even the faculty have a very wrong attitude towards the crime, which only fosters more ragging. I remember my cousin who studied in an engineering college in Bangalore, telling me that one of their professors made a statement like "ragging makes you stronger for your future and engineers need to be tough people". That is plain wrong. The faculty first needs to acknowledge that 'ragging' is a crime- it is not any form of training.

Happy to see many expressing their views. I myself graduated from JU, with Honours in a humanities discipline. From whatever I have seen around my college, in Arts/Humanities dept. ragging incidents hardly take place. Anything more than teasing juniors is frowned upon, physically or mentally harassing is discouraged by active anti-ragging cell and ruling student unions.

But the situation is entirely different in Engineering dept. and worse in hostels. So much so that many prefer to be paying guests in nearby apartments in stead of signing up for hostel accommodations at all! About two months ago two engineering students were punished by the JU authority for ragging juniors..

One weird thing is, if the seniors have sufficient political connections (wealthy or not) they often put the authorities and the students in a spot by so-called protests and threats to retract the complaints against the offenders.

Only when the seniors themselves will regard ragging as the worst form of 'having fun' which they can easily have by doing actual group programs, fests and fresher's welcoming programs...then it will cease to be such a menace. Fostering bullies is nothing but deliberate failure to recognize the issues of the bullies and keeping those tendencies alive for their post-college life too!