It is, in its way, the most democratic institution on campus… the only one where every single participant gets a chance to inflict what was inflicted on them, like a pyramid scheme whose only product is trauma. Well, at least we’re following a peer-reviewed methodology.

Let us be fair to the seniors. Theirs is thankless work. Consider the logistics: identifying the freshest, most disoriented first-years within exactly seventy-two hours of their arrival, making a list of them, herding them into a hall or a corridor or a hostel room at 11 pm, and then… mind you, this is the most skilled part: improvising an entire evening’s psychological curriculum on the spot, using only a plastic chair, a raised voice, and some years of pent-up resentment about their own first year. 

Nowadays, we have become more “open-minded”, so those seniors can do it in the classroom as well, in the name of “porichiti porbo”, where they tell the juniors how to add them on Facebook and what structure their message should follow while sending a friend request. It is, frankly, one of Bangladesh’s few inventions to remain gloriously non-exportable. Even the British Empire, after looting half the planet, apparently looked at this one and decided, “No, that’s a bit much.”

The pedagogical (yes, I’ve learnt this word while writing this article, and I couldn’t find any other aesthetic word to describe the pain of the beloved raggers) philosophy is elegant in its circularity: I suffered, therefore you must suffer, therefore whoever comes after you must suffer, and so on, back through the decades, an unbroken chain of some grown ‘adults’ explaining to the less-grown ‘adults’ that being made to recite made-up poems about a senior’s love life builds character. Character, in this formulation, is almost indistinguishable from the ability to nod politely while your dignity is being itemised for confiscation. It is the sort of education Kafka might have admired for its efficiency.

One admires the sheer administrative confidence of it. A hall provost who cannot get the Wi-Fi fixed in under a month, even after taking increased hall fees, will somehow have a fully staffed, self-organising shadow disciplinary system running by the second week of the semester: no budget, no office, no oversight, and yet remarkably efficient at locating which first-year boy is “too soft” or which first-year girl “thinks she’s too good for this”. 

University administrations, so slow to notice anything, develop an almost supernatural blindness specifically calibrated to the sound of screaming from the third floor or from the gonoroom. It’s impressive, really. You’d think an institution incapable of producing exam results on time would also be incapable of this particular feat of selective competence. And yet. MI6 should take notes.

The reasons for this culture are, of course, indispensable to the republic. How else is a twenty-year-old expected to know that independent thought is a dangerous luxury? Why arrive at university with political opinions of your own when several distinguished boro bhais have already prepared one for you? Democracy is all well and good, provided everyone eventually votes the same way. As for the reservation of junior girls, they exist under an unwritten zoning law suspiciously similar to medieval feudalism: reserved territories under the informal protection of senior bhais. One doesn’t have to break the rule intentionally; smiling in the wrong direction is often sufficient.

Let us also appreciate the intellectual consistency of the raggers’ worldview. They will explain, often in the same breath, that ragging (a) builds discipline, (b) is just harmless fun, (c) is necessary to “put first-years in their place”, and (d) definitely isn’t happening, officially, on the record, should anyone ask. This is how the world should work.

And what noble motives animate them! Is it insecurity, perhaps, that a boy who spent his own first year weeping quietly into a hostel pillow at 2 am should so urgently need a junior to weep too, as though grief shared is grief halved? Is it envy, that the fresher arrived with hope still intact, an emotion the senior misplaced somewhere around his own second semester and has been trying to relocate in someone else’s face ever since? Or is it simply that hierarchy, once you’ve been at the bottom of it, becomes the only shape you recognise and the fastest way to feel tall is to make someone else kneel?

Some of these institutions produce, eventually, our doctors, our engineers, our civil servants, our future department heads; men and women who will one day hold real power over real people’s real lives, having learned, at nineteen, that power is best exercised by finding whoever is smallest in the room and making them smaller. It is worth asking what kind of doctor learns bedside manner from a hostel corridor. What kind of officer learns command from a senior who taught him that obedience is extracted, not earned? We are, in effect, running a national leadership training programme whose curriculum is cruelty, and then acting surprised when the graduates go on to be cruel.

The victims, meanwhile, are asked to be grateful. This is perhaps the cruellest joke of all: that a boy who spent his first month being screamed at over nothing will, within a year, defend the practice to the next batch, insisting it “wasn’t that bad” and “toughened him up”, the way a man who’s been mugged might eventually thank the mugger for teaching him to watch his surroundings. This is not resilience. This is Stockholm syndrome with a class schedule.

One may try to speak up against the ragging culture, or just talk badly about all of the seniors. But did you forget, “not all the seniors, but always a senior”? Exactly, don’t forget that.

So let us not be too harsh on our raggers. They are, after all, only doing what was done to them, in the great tradition of every abused system that mistakes repetition for continuity, and every wounded ego that mistakes power over the powerless for healing. They ask for so little, really… just a first-year’s dignity, delivered promptly, in perpetuity, so that the cycle need never break and no one, God forbid, has to sit with the discomfort of being the one who stops it.