A fresher at MNREC (now known as the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology), Allahabad is asked to ride a buffalo. The seniors gleefully look on as a visibly tense boy mounts the buffalo. The buffalo, not willing to be a part of the act, shrugs and the young boy falls on his head and dies of haemorrhage. That’s how fatal ragging can become. And often it is too late to realise that ragging is not fun anymore.

I was a part of the same institution from 1988 to 1992 as a student of mechanical engineering. MNREC had a very ‘strong tradition’ of ragging. It all started on day one – with boys wearing white shirts, white trousers and black shoes. The sheer ‘maturity’ of this tradition can be seen in the details – the third button, from the top, of the white shirt was red so that a fresher always looked at it, walking or talking. A forced mark of respect! The girls wore white salwar kameez and black shoes. Their well oiled hair adored red ribbons. And all of this for three long months – of endless days and nights! And in this entire period whenever we met a senior, anywhere, we had to bend down at 90 degrees as a mark of respect. Not doing so conveyed that we were being rude and were rewarded with slaps and kicks. Throughout this period ragging continued, day in and night out. Walking towards the classes or returning back was always a terrifying experience.

Our regional, caste and class affiliations added another dimension to the ragging saga. A year before I joined college, the boys from the hills had some conflict with the folks from the Meerut region. I belonged to the hills so any senior from Meerut who walked past me simply slapped me as a chore. This happened with most of us from the hills. Likewise, the hill seniors bashed juniors from Meerut. Boys from lower caste, tribals and minorities too got a raw deal. This was my first encounter with ‘India’ that I was not exposed too. For me, caste and class till then had existed only in the textbooks.

Stripping, enacting vulgar postures, dirty talks about female members of one’s family, slapping, kicking, beating… it was all so commonplace and I hated every moment of it. But I did not know that the worse was yet to come.

The end of this obscene three months period was marked by something called ‘mass ragging’. On a chosen day, the second year students, all masked, would suddenly raid the junior hostel with iron rods and hockey sticks. In the riot that followed, they would randomly bang the doors and kick them open and then beat up the juniors black and blue. It was not so random though as selective targets were mercilessly assaulted. Seniors from our hometown had forewarned us about this event, so we struggled tooth and nail to keep the door closed. Many others did the same but not all were so lucky.

Time passed and we were soon second year students. The first decision we made was not to mass rag, thankfully! As we did not do it to our juniors, they in turn did not do the same to their juniors. But when we were in our final year, we had a surprise in store for us. The then second year students, out of the blue, had decided to reinstate the horrifying tradition of mass ragging. A small group of 15-20 students stormed the junior hostel. Caught unawares, and completely blank about this legendary MNREC tradition, the juniors panicked. They had no idea where these masked men descended from. While some were getting beaten up ruthlessly, others ran for cover. In this chaos, few of them jumped from the first floor and broke their bones. The saddest case was that of a boy from Assam who jumped from the second floor and broke his neck.

The guys who conducted the inhuman raid, unaware of injuries, collected all the juniors, got them to strip and walked them over to the main hostel area. In the silence of the night we were alarmed by the sound of hundreds of hesitant and scared footsteps, as they passed by the final year hostel. We were aghast. Shocked, we ran for rescue. Meanwhile, some sane second year students rushed towards the junior hostel to calm down the panicking juniors only to find this guy with a broken neck. While some took the boy to the hospital, others started searching for the guys responsible for this incident. We had a tough time but eventually we caught hold of a lot of them, except for perhaps the kingpin and some smart ones who had good friends to help them wriggle out of this mess.

The criminal night was followed by sickening and pathetic arguments of the college professors who wanted to sweep the incident under the carpet. ‘Lets save the college reputation’ was their one line argument. I wonder if they would have toed the same line if the victim was their own. But this was their habit perhaps as I saw a similar reaction from them when a police cop tried to rape a college student. The faculty simply refused to act. And to top it all, they virtually defended the act by saying something as stupid and derogatory as – “The ants will come where there is sugar.” The enraged students had then taken the law in their own hands and forced the college and the police to take action. In fact few radical ones had even planned to eliminate the principal who was supposedly close to the family of the culprit.

The boy who broke his neck in mass ragging died after a few days. His devastated parents stood, with folded hands, thanking us students for helping them out at the hospital. It was a shocking moment of truth and no one knew how to react. Meanwhile, after pressure from the students, the college authorities had hesitatingly initiated disciplinary action and lodged an FIR with the police. One boy was expelled from college while two others were rusticated for two years. Some five more were thrown out from the hostel. But that’s about it! A murder was committed and the murderers virtually walked away free, without any punishment from the law.

I guess the rusticated students would have joined some other college, finished graduation and may be working somewhere now – as government officials, businessmen or private sector executives. The irony would be to find one of them serving as a cop! Forget feeling guilty about it, I wonder if they still remember this. Or they, in their drunken spell, wear the memories of this incident as some sort of war decoration!

While a slap in a metropolitan college gets reported in the media, murders in smaller cities go unnoticed. I have heard of numerous such incidents in the engineering colleges spread across the country.

To look back is not easy and to forget, impossible! The ghosts linger on. As a first year student I had vowed never to rag anyone. As a second year student, I avoided ragging in general. I sat with few freshers and quizzed them for half an hour or so, only to befriend them. I guess I was acting more as a helping hand.

But it is rightly said – power corrupts!

I was quizzing a young boy from my native area and found him slow in his responses. My biased perspective of good, right and smart slowly rode over my sanity and before I could realise, my hand landed on his cheeks. Suddenly I was cold to the sound of the slap which I had hated as a ‘victim’. As a tormentor, I did not feel the pain. I thought I was right thing because I had a reason. And I felt the same, a few times more. But little did I know that a murder with a reason still remains a murder.

Before I could realise and tie the up the loose ends of my sanity, the ragging period was over. An irreparable ridge had been created which I too did not try to bridge, mainly because of my own feeling of guilt. I hardly interacted with the boys in question and later in life, got to know that they disliked me and also cherished a dream of bashing me up. I don’t know if it’s too late to say sorry! I don’t know if the ‘sorry’ makes any sense now. ‘Better late than never’ somehow does not seem to be fitting in and I sit wondering – what if we met again!