The title that you just glanced through is intentionally over-emphasized to grab eye-balls into making you read yet another articulation of the annual notorious showdown ritual that happens between freshies, administration and seniors at IIT Gandhinagar on the issue of ragging, and ice-breaking.
We are the “TV Generation” and Albert Bandura was fascinatingly vindicated in the recent turmoil of ragging issues on campus. For those who are new to psychology Albert Bandura is a psychologist who was the pioneer of observational learning theory. Two facts will make it clear. Firstly, we have now seen our very own ‘Tehelka’ style sting operation.
This has resulted in humorous occurrences of the rare possibilities of threats being acknowledged by some of my heavy weight friends. Jokes like the dialogue below are also a part of daily “verbiage”.
‘Dimaag na kharab kar !@#$%^…I will switch the recorder on’ and immediately sniggers follow.
Many seniors freshie are now wary of n ways he could be doomed by initiating a liberal chat with a freshie. God help him if he is ignorant of the n+1 th rule freshly introduced at the 11th hour.
Secondly, the Anna movement coinciding with the Facebook backlash, one that happened back here seems to suggest the theory.
The most disturbing feature of the entire ruckus that was created was that it was blown out of proportions multifold. Now that the point of anti-ragging policies is being well taken, it is important to realise whether or not the sudden increase in punishment-to-violation ratio proved to be pernicious to the natural fabric of interaction that is evolving at the institute. It is imperative to draw a line between what sorts of “interaction” is detrimental, unacceptable and what kind of it is essential. This distinction has to be clear in the minds of students as well as administration.
More psychology…at this juncture I would like to bring to light a theory I stumbled across based on ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ which is being propagated about the psychology of ragging.
In August 1973, two bank robbers, in Stockholm held 3 women and a man hostage for a period of 6 days. In those six days the hostages developed emotional bonds with their captors and exhibited shocking attitude. They not only resisted the attempt made by the police to rescue them but one of the woman hostages later got engaged to one of the kidnappers and another arranged fund for the legal defence of the kidnappers. This incident baffled many across the world.
Psychologists named the paradox as Stockholm Syndrome and said anyone that can become a victim of Stockholm Syndrome if the certain conditions are met: (i) Perceived threat (ii) The victim’s perception of small kindnesses from the perpetrator (iii) Isolation from perspectives other than those of the perpetrator (iv) Perceived inability to escape. And it is said that it takes as little as 3-4 days for this psychology to take hold of the victim.
Whenever students indulged in some very indignant and unbearable acts of ragging at various colleges in lieu of social bonding they were perhaps unknowingly applying the same psychological technique.
I would make an assumption that most of us are of the view that the purpose of ragging must be ice-breaking and not making anyone feel humiliated or uncomfortable. I hope each one of us will rethink the tradition that we want to establish. Whatever happened is past and as someone rightly pointed out that it was important that we came out stronger from the ‘all time low’ moment of the student ecosystem at IIT Gandhinagar.
