Unfinished business ... I want to meet with those who ragged me!

The friend remarked a few days ago about unfinished business in one's life.  I have always known that there is one in my life that I would like to square away.

It is from a particular incident, from years ago in the old country.

I was as an excited seventeen-year old who headed out all the way from Neyveli to Nagpur, to join the Visvesvaraya Regional College of Engineering (VRCE) as it was called then, which is now the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology.

(Source)

The college had a lovely, spacious campus with trees and buildings woven together into a pleasing landscape.  Tea shops outside the college walls where students were hanging out was exactly the kind of ambiance I had pictured in my mind. 

A group of senior students, also from Tamil Nadu, treated my much older cousin—who was to help me with the travel and transition—and me very well, and I was confident that I had come to the right place.  I was having such a good time that all I could think was how friendly people were. 

My cousin had barely left for the railway station to return to Madras when one of the seniors suggested that I go with him.  He led me into a hostel room.  There were about seven or eight students sitting around an empty space in the middle.

Before I knew it, the seniors, who only about an hour earlier had been joking with me, turned out to be the dreaded raggers that I had often been warned about.  It was one of those “et tu, Brute” situations—I had no idea about the devils inside all the friendliness they displayed when my cousin was there. 

But, I had no time to analyze the situation as I was led to that empty space in the middle of the room.  I knelt down, as per the instructions, quite dazed, trying to figure out how to extricate myself from this situation.

Meanwhile, the group was getting impatient with me.  The guy who was closest to me--was his name Asokan?--slapped me hard over my left ear and repeated the instruction.  I was now even more shocked that I was being slapped for no fault of my own.   

There was no way I was going to carry out the orders--after all, I was the same guy who had tried, and continues to try, his best to resist authority.

Before I could process the instructions coming from all around, more slaps and more bizarre questions followed.  I was also made to understand that this was only the initial session and that there were quite a few more to follow. 

I endured one more day of this and then I packed up my stuff and left the college for good. 

After I returned home, a schoolmate, who even until today has no idea of the details, remarked that I could have easily handled the ragging, given that I was an avid reader of spy and war novels.   I wondered if the implicit understanding was that boys were expected to toughen up by reading stories where physical and mental tortures were the norm.  Or, was this remark a pathetic example of how our senses get dulled to such an extent that we fail to recognize acts of violence?

I have often wondered why I did not protest at the first minute itself.  Should I be ashamed that I did not stand up to them?  But then I remind myself that I was, after all, only seventeen.  Yes, way closer to seventeen than to eighteen. 

Every once in a while I think about those raggers.  Did they feel bad after I packed up and left?  Or did they laugh at how much a wimp I was, and that they were merely training me to be tough?  Did at least one among them feel a sense of remorse that they messed up my life?

I suppose there will always be a few humans who delight in causing misery to others.  It will be truly wonderful if the world were otherwise—where people exist not to harm but to help others.

That wonderful world surely did exist, in my mind, when I was a naïve and idealistic seventeen-year old.  And then it was slapped to pieces.  "All the king's horses and all the king's men | Couldn't put Humpty together again."

At the reunion, one of the classmates, Kishan, who was also at the same college for a brief while--a little longer than my stay--remarked, with laughter, to a few others who were standing around "ரகின்க்ல அவன் செம்ம அடி வாங்கினான்" (he was beaten up badly during the ragging) ... oddly enough, it was comforting to know that there was at least one person who knew about the violence.  But, it was, and is, absolutely creepy that he laughed about it :(

The reality is also that it does not take much to remind me about my experience.  Every minute of the day I feel the effect of ragging; the sharp stinging slap across my left ear apparently damaged the hearing mechanism.  A few years ago I started hearing chirping sounds from within my ear, and my physician said that those sounds are normally the first signs of hearing loss.  Now, my left ear is only about a third effective, and I can no longer locate the origin of the sound by triangulation, which means I sometimes end up looking in the wrong direction--a problem that, until now, I have been able to successfully camouflage in the classroom.

My doctor recommends that I consider wearing a hearing aid if I want to overcome that hearing loss, and I guess it is my vanity that prevents me from doing that.  I ask myself, well, if I can wear glasses for my eyes, then why not a device for my left ear, more so when the hearing loss was inflicted by somebody else? 

I would like to meet with those few, who will be middle-aged parents of children perhaps about the age that I was when they beat and tortured me.
I don't want them to apologize--I don't care for that, and never have.
I want to find out from them what they were thinking when they did what they did.
I want to know what they were thinking when they were informed that I had quit the college because of their actions.
I want to know whether they continued to rag students during the rest of their college lives.
I want to know whether they have thought about these in the decades since then.

A very strange piece of unfinished business, yes.