All's well that ends well

By H

The author wrote this essay for The Stop Ragging Campaign in July 2004 on the condition that we do not reveal his identity. His account is of the years 2002-03, when he often visited his friend in the hostel of Kirori Mal College at the University of Delhi's North Campus.

Day scholars complaining about ragging is like the Prime Minister complaining about bad traffic. What do they know of these things? Asli ragging to hostel mein hoti hai.

Whenever I went to Delhi I used to stay with my friend in Kirori Mal College (KMC) Hostel, in the Delhi University North Campus. My friend was this Rajput guy from Lucknow whom the politically powerful Rajput seniors in the hostel had quickly admitted into their coterie and issued the writ that nobody would rag him. So my friend was drinking alcohol with the ‘student leaders’ right from the beginning, was ragging his own batch mates, and had acquired a considerable political clout.

Some of his clout rubbed automatically on me as well, and I would find myself being met with deference, and a certain amount of fear and suspicion. And I found myself joining the seniors, people who had passed out, and rank outsiders, into screwing the hell out of the fachchas.

There was a code of conduct for all freshers. They had to wear formal clothes 24 hours a day, full sleeve shirts buttoned at the wrist and till the neck, pleated trousers and polished shoes, and all of them were sent to get their hair ‘crew-cut’, army style. They had to make an exaggerated bow, waist coming right down to ninety degrees each time they saw a senior, and had to address seniors as ‘Sir’ for the rest of their lives. Anything the senior commanded had to be done. For the most time it meant fetching cigarettes or samosas from Kamala Nagar, and parathas Ghanta Ghar, often at odd hours of night; bringing drinking water from the water cooler and tap water for the room cooler; and of course cleaning the senior’s room, usually at late night.

Evening onwards was the time when freshers would be called into the seniors’ rooms, and the rest of the night they would spend, standing, in the same room or flitting between different ones. It generally began with asking each fachcha to give his ‘intro’, which would be continuously interrupted with insulting comments. There were some standard questions, like “If your mother, sister and wife were being fucked in separate rooms and you could save only one of them, whom would you save?” The answer to this question was innocent enough: You saved your wife because your mother and sister would be getting fucked by their husbands! These questions were meant only as a tease, only to start making the guy uncomfortable.

Fachchas were forced to recite loudly obscene songs, speak imaginatively constructed abuses at each other, and act out such characters as a pimp or a gigolo. Then it inevitably came to stripping, though the Full Monty wasn’t prescribed at all sessions. The ‘baniyan’ - vest - was tied around like a bra and the boys danced to cabaret numbers, seduced the seniors and were threatened to masturbate. We did not make the freshers masturbate but there were cases where they were forced to do so. Two rooms away to ours, a boy had jumped down the first floor balcony to escape having to smoke marijuana.

Every Saturday night the freshers were taken to the terrace and ragged by drunk seniors. They were made to shout at the top of their voices the filthiest of abuses at the principal and the hostel warden. They were made to strip all the way, and sometimes they were slapped if they expressed reservations about doing certain things, like holding another guy’s dick!

I heard of instances where freshers were told to piss on an electric heater, and pulled away only when the trembling boy, sometimes after hours of frustrated pleading, had in abject surrender set himself to be released on the heater.

These things however got over in about two months and soon these very freshers were being treated in canteens and K Nags food joints by these very seniors. The lack of resentment towards the seniors was surprising. And since hostellers dominated the college politics, the fachchas in hostels would act superior over the day-schi [day scholar] fachchas, and would also be treated as such. I know from friends’ accounts that ragging in engineering and medical colleges, and at the NDA [National Defence Academy], is far more physical and traumatic than at KMC, which is not at all the worst case scenario even among the North Campus colleges. The students at KMC quickly learn to adapt, forget and laugh about the whole thing.

firsthand@stopragging.org