Bangalore: The Government and the university may have "banned" ragging, but it prevails in one form or other in most colleges in the city.

Interestingly, while it was once more prevalent in professional colleges, it has spread to the arts, commerce and science colleges in the past few years, college faculty and students say.

Once this initiation process ends, seniors and freshers have different views about it.

Orientation

Typically on a campus, there is an "official" orientation process for getting newcomers familiar with those already there and college traditions. While the faculty supervises this, there is a lot more happening once it is over.

For the first week or two, till Freshers' Day marked in many colleges, the ragging process continues.

Tradition

Why the tradition is continued by students year after year? John Patrick Ojwando of Kenyan origin, now teaching in a city college, said, "Those who went through the ragging process have suppressed emotions and want to take revenge and end up taking it out on next year's juniors. Arts, commerce and science students obviously don't want to feel they are any lesser than medical and engineering students and have introduced ragging in their colleges.''

To get respect?

Some institutions have anti-ragging squads that monitor the process and make sure there is no harassment or violence. When a senior student of that college was asked about ragging, she said, "It is make the juniors respect us, this is one way of getting it.'' Junior students, of course, feel respect should be earned and not forced.

A senior engineering college student, Rahul, said, "Ragging can help, because a junior's latent talent, for example, dancing, may be discovered by chance, and students may some day win a trophy for our college at some inter-college competition."

Punishable

A college principal pointed out ragging had become punishable under the law and felt there could be nothing like "mild ragging", and it needed to be banned altogether.

Of course, most students would not agree with it.

For some juniors, the ragging process can be emotionally traumatic. Some become depressed if they are in the hostel and start feeling insecure.

While gory stories of ragging leading to suicide may be rare, most students and faculty agree that it has to be good natured and with good intentions such as breaking the ice between seniors and freshers.

Dividing line

The dividing line should not be crossed, is the consensus. The rougher type of ragging is more prevalent in some professional colleges.

Whether ragging creates a friendly atmosphere on college campuses or add to tensions will remain a big question.

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