Growing a Thinner Skin

Ragging – that initiation ‘ritual’ that triggers perverse imagination in the ragger and cold sweat in the victim. Why does it exist?

When I made the transition from schoolgirl to undergrad, my father made an appointment with one of the nuns at the college to tour the premises. It must have helped that her surname too was Grant. We were taken around the classrooms, the library, the dorms and I remember fish tanks with goldfish. All through the tour, my father gently probed and Mother Grant responded with a running commentary. Then my father asked about ragging. He had been a boarder - school and college – and had received his fair share. He did not want me to experience a similar fate.

What my father did not know was that I was no stranger to being ragged. A new school and a new girl in the class, I had to ‘prove’ that I fitted in. It started with little things – an exercise book extracted from the bag and ‘lost’, being locked in the toilet and made late for class, ink splashed on the uniform - and then graduated to being suspended over the parapet on the second floor above ground level. I was eleven years old. I sobbed my way through the year but I did not tell. Ratting was one degree worse than cowardice.

College was a romp. We were all new girls together and being day students, the seniors were not interested in us. The hostelites had a different story to tell. The sensitive ones suffered; the tougher ones laughed it off – it could not be cured so had to be endured.

Then came the working world. Once again, one was the new girl in a set environment and one had to run the gauntlet of the subtle and not so subtle ‘initiation rites’. You remained the outsider until the insiders decided to let you in. After I got over feeling sorry for myself, I decided to get on with the job and never realised that I had become an insider till I left the organization and my ‘worst enemies’ expressed regret! Did my earlier experience of being ragged come in handy? I think not. Every such encounter hurts in its own way.

The insider-outsider attitude is not new. It is generations old. The tribal world has some of the most cruel, life threatening initiation rites – the passage to adulthood is an act of survival. And the civilized world is no better. Scratch the surface and you’ll find out; public transport is a good place to start! Till you become an accepted ‘regular’ in the compartment, you will know the sharp elbow, the not so subtle insult and the very edge of the fourth seat!

But I digress. Ragging is deliberate, premeditated, planned and considered a privilege by its perpetrators. But is it a rite of passage? A time honoured tradition? Does it make or break character? And are the ragged entitled to wear a badge of honour?

I would have to state my answer as a resounding NO. It may be a tradition but there is certainly no honour and I do not think there is any merit in being a victim either. I cringe when I now remember the abject obsession to be an insider at school. Thankfully, the past is over and I have moved on.

No one should have to face humiliation for the sake of another’s amusement. And no decent human being should expect to be so amused.

Time and maturity bring us to the realisation that we are all included; no one is an outsider in God’s perfect plan for our great universe and we are ‘fitted in’ exactly where we are meant to be. By being inclusive we learn to be sensitive to the other; there should really be no need for a thicker skin. If only time did not take so long to teach us so. And if only those who rag could realise that they are really wasting their time.