Author: Kedar Posted under:
"I saw you walking out shaftesbury avenue
Excuse me for talking I wanna marry you
This is the seventh heaven street to me"

- Wild West End (Dire Straits)


There are times when I wish we was married. Marriage... Somehow the whole concept has amazed me! For two people, to bond in the manner they do, they must really love each other!

But, the commitment scares the shit out of me. If I screw up, it's her life that I'm screwing too. It is not tough to pack my bags and run, but will I ever forgive myself for running? Will I ever forgive myself for ruining the life of one person who had promised her life to me? For when I run, I won't just be running away with my life, but will be sucking the life out of her too, and dragging it with me as I run...

I just hope that one day, I'll figure things out.. Have the courage to walk up to her and ask her to marry me..
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Author: Kedar Posted under: , ,
RAGGING

Ragging, I would suppose, is one of the most important words in every college-goers vocabulary. Everyone talks about it. The Dean is obsessed with the word ragging and every semester, we are religiously sent a circular in which we pledge not to rag the freshers. Personally, I would rate filling that form as one of the most useless and mindless things I have done all vacation, but considering my admission depends on it, I do it anyway.

The very word strikes terror in the minds, the hearts and every cell in the body of every first year student. Well, I too was like one of those first years, before I got to IIT. I was terrified of ragging. The happiness of getting into IIT was peppered with the fear of being ragged. What would they make me do, I thought to myself all day. Weird and crazy ideas floated around in my head - they will make me take my clothes off, they might make me dance naked, they might make me run an unimaginably long distance, and the list goes on and on.
Then, I spoke to a teacher of mine. What he said totally changed my views on ragging, and I think, changed the way I looked at my seniors and now, the way I look at my juniors.

Now, before I start, I'd like to clarify my stance on ragging. I am not of the opinion that ragging should be made legal, or that we should turn a blind eye towards ragging. I do believe that driving freshers to acts like suicide and quitting college is something terrible and should not go unpunished. But, what does happen is that only these heinous criminal acts are brought to public attention, and lot of constructive interaction between juniors and seniors goes unnoticed.
What follows is a very personal observation of the 'ragging' I have seen around me, heard about from my friends, seniors and juniors. The following might not be applicable to all colleges all over the country, and I'd prefer it that this blog be viewed as a very personal account of what I have seen around me at one of India's most criticised technical institutes - IIT.

Let me explain the kind of people coming into a place like this. Most of us here slog our asses of during our 11th and 12th grade. We burn midnight oil and often work well into the day. We count bed sores as we mutter equations (Nikhila, sorry for plagiarising the line!), and when we
finally do make it into the portals of the best technical institute in the country, our heads are swollen up like a hot-air balloon.
This is where I believe ragging is like a little pin-prick to that balloon. When you are made to do the most embarrassing things, it's a little reminder that you aren't as great as you think you are! Also, it's a wonderful way to start your life at IIT because ragging is one thing that brings everyone to the same equal footing.

Somehow, what ragging did to me and my friends is that it served as an ice pick - it broke the ice between us! Seeing us thoroughly embarrassed on the very first day in the finest institute in the country left us with very little to hide from one another.

Ragging, as a culture, is going to the dogs. The classic ragging, the one when the juniors and seniors look back and smile, has vanished. All we have left is perverted seniors trying to ascertain their dominance through physical and mental torture, coupled with a battalion of paranoid parents and media terrorising kids with horror ragging stories.

I guess the education system is going to the dogs. And the words of a music great start making sense - "I wanna have my kids before this whole shit-house blows up!"
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