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Racism and Ragging(Bullying)

posted on Monday, January 29, 2007 04:41 PM

Racism and Ragging

A few days back we all came across an incident of racism in which our bollywood queen Shilpa Shetty was ridiculed by Jade Goody in a TV show called Big Brother, which has now become one of the most popular TV show in the world. The incident sparked off a controversy and made the headlines of print and electronic media all across the world and helped channel 4 and the show reach its new heights. The Indian media also missed no opportunity to provoke the sesitive Indian sentiments and earn their TRP points by highlighting this controversy as much as they could. For that whole week it seemed as if it is only white people who are discriminating against the blacks and browns and that no other form of discrimination exists in the world. I don't know how many of us learned anything from this incident and took out time to look within ourselves to find how much discrimination we do in our own lives and where it actually begins.

Watching that endless number of debates on discrimination, running on every other news channel all through the day reminded me of my ugly ragging days. It was during my ragging in Medical College in the state of Uttar Pradesh that I first ever came across any sort of discrimination in my life. Most of us might not be aware of the fact that most explicit forms of discrimination takes place during ragging in colleges and it perhaps sows the seeds of discrimination in the young minds forever.
I come from a liberal family where caste and community issues are never taken seriously. It was during my ragging that for the first time I became so much conscious of the fact that I belong to " Baniya community" like never before. My seniors who never knew me used to catch me and beat me just because I come from one community and they were from the other communities. There was another group of seniors who used to rag me simply because I come from different region or I had a different kind of schooling. Similarly there were many other groups of seniors divided on the lines of regions, language, caste, community, economic background etc. each using ragging as a tool to torture the fresher from the rival background.

Many people from big cities like Delhi , Mumbai etc. may not be fortunate to be familiar with this kind of discrimination common in small cities and might be finding it vague. Likewise when I quit the medical college and took admission in one of the colleges of Delhi University , I saw a new sort of discrimination very much different from the earlier one. It was not caste or community based but here the students were classified either into a North Eastern, Bihari or a Delhite and also discrimination based on class. By and large ragging was merely based on ridiculing the fresher from a different background. Here also ragging was just a tool to vent out the feelings of discriminations that exists in our society.

Though one can't call these sorts of discrimination as racism but it is certainly none the less than examples of sub-racism. These kinds of discriminations are rampant in the Indian campus and have taken lives and ruined careers of many young students. Even in the west ragging called as hazing or bullying was the result of discrimination between the blacks and whites.

Ragging is simply a manifestation of different forms of discriminations that we see in our society but it has always been showcased and misunderstood as a healthy personality boosting exercise or something like a friendship catalyst because of which the discriminatory factor hidden in it has never really been identified or analysed.

I would be happy if people spend a bit of their time to go into the roots of discrimination and think about ragging/hazing/ bullying taking place in schools and colleges in different forms with the young students all around the world and find out the answer to a more serious question.... Is this the possible start to what Jade Goody did on Big Brother?

Harsh Agarwal
Founder Member CURE
www.noragging.com

Comments

Kim Tha Hay

Friday, February 09, 2007 05:12 PM

Harsh, I'm so pleased to see you on the site; its fantastic that you joined! Need to get some of the other WYSErs involved now too! And I was really interested to find out about your company - sounds an incredible initiative. Thanks for blogging too - keep up the good work! Keep in touch Jo x