Most people like to reminisce about the good old days. It may come naturally to the old fogies, and it is not uncommon among the 'young' too. May be, in a young country, there is this relative age, and hence normal people, who would be termed young in any normal population, are some what old with respect to the population. On the other hand, it may be this culture of ours that expects unquestioned obedience of the elderly that entices people to grey up at an accelerated pace. I am digressing - I just wanted to say that many of my classmates and colleagues review, with rose tinted devices, their school days, and their college days - especially the 'fun' they had when they were ragged (hazed, for my non existent American readers). It may not really matter that it might have been only 10 years at most since they have left school, and 8-9 years since their ragging period - they'd speak about it as if they went to school during the War. I thought I was one of the rationalists, for I remembered how insecure a school student really is. Hood may say,
Set in the sylvan outskirts of a royal city, the College does not look like a sad place to begin with. In fact, it isn't. Since it is the home for my own cadre, I have spent some really good moments here. The accommodation and the works here are top-notch, especially for some one who has been exposed to the crumbling D-wing of Jwalamukhi hostel. Our sessions are held in a real palace of the erstwhile ruling house of the city. The schedule is hectic, but contained, and after a good class session, one has almost all major sports to choose from - I personally prefer swimming. Hearty meals, and nice strolls around the campus, and one is good for bed - life's good. However, in the midst, periodically, like the floods of Damodar, come things like the Programme. Ostensibly, it is supposed to make raw young recruits into 'gentlemen and lady Officers' - by 'improving their personality' and 'giving multidimensional inputs'. I have no trouble with the latter - these might not be the best classes I have ever attended, but they are generally amongst the better ones. However, I do have serious doubts about the efficacy of, and for that matter, the intention behind a lot of meaningless pageantry we have been witness to. I shall write, at some length, on both, taking up the issue of efficacy first, and giving people the benefit of doubt with regards to intentions. After all, it has been said, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
So, we are to become officers, and to develop (magically sprout) 'officer like qualities' in these 10 weeks. Good. So what is a good Service Officer like? Coming from a Service family, and a Service School, I have seen many Service officers. Barring one or two dandies, no one I have seen was as straitlaced as the ideal that has been set up in front of us. Even the dandies got their comeuppance - I have heared the case where a visiting principal HOD was so enraged to find a new assistant officer in suit that he fired him in front of all, and then made him run around the works for the whole day, till the time the suit met it's untimely demise! This service is field service, and for God's sake, it is not the Army - howsoever much some of our senior officers would like to believe. It does not need the glamour and pomp of the Army Cantonment life. It is good to take pride in being one of the Raj's legacies, but for heaven's sake, let's not actually try to relive the Raj (this one coming from a Raj history enthusiast). As a field service which is not the Army, the organisation needs to develop it's sartorial sense and identity accordingly - which in my opinion, includes sober T-shirts, lycra enmeshed jeans and Woodland shoes. Okay, if the guys want to live their suits and ties fantasies in here, there is a proper place for that - strictly office hours. But dinner? Come on! Are we really expected to go to the fields and the gym, sweat it out and come back and don all those formals again for supper, or one is supposed to remain in the formals till supper, and swim after that? Of the two stupidities, I've chosen the latter, and hence this piece has materialised, after a drought of more than two years. The 'lace and velvet' dinner wardrobe was developed when 'lace and velvet' was the only 'presentable' dress. The rolling wheel of time has given us many acceptable 'dinner wear' options. Let's evolve. The fashion policing has been reminding us of the days when one could get into trouble for losing the school tie or belt. My roommate was asking whether we could stroll in slippers. Really, is this what we are trying to make here - diffident wrecks and overgrown school boys? Apart from this assault on our wardrobes, many other PDP type activities look quite useless to be frank. For most of the skills that we are supposed to develop, the ship has already sailed. The mean age of the group is 28 years - these are not college kids, who can be converted, that too in 10 weeks, into Ivy League's dream students. It's clear to us - crystal clear. It would be a reasonable assumption that it is so clear to the powers that be too. That brings us to the question of intention.
Of all the things that stand out on the basis of sheer oddity, the PT is the most 'outstanding', if I may use the word in an ironic sense. The basic idea peddled here is that one has to be 'fit' in the service of the lifeline of the nation. So noble a motive, you might say. However, barring a few persons, yours truly included, most of the new batch is quite fit, and almost all, again yours truly included (at least till the fashion policing made it difficult), participate in some sort of physical activity, whenever the powers that be are benevolent enough to leave our evenings free. If this is a health and fitness thing, why doesn't the older resident population follow through, since they must be in the need of fitness much more - handling work pressure of elevated posts and battling ageing all at once. Why this insistence on shorts in cold December morning? I think the answer is that it is an exercise simply to show a person 'his place'. Looked at from this angle, it all starts falling into place. I mean, what can show a person that he is worth a piece of festering turd in a more emphatic manner than calling him in half nudity in wee hours of the morning to gyrate his hips at the command of his supposed subordinate. All the other inanities of this Programme, all the useless pageantry that we are supposed to do but others aren't, are, in sum, a big bird flipped in one's face. It's a triumphant, "Yes, We can! (make you do all this, and there isn't a goddamned thing you can do about it, coz we got the Bomb - bless Dennis Leary).” Can the reader notice the similarity between this and the other two experiences of the youth? This is the same life that school kids live - with separate standards for themselves and the grown ups. This is the way ragging in college happens - a bright young person is made to do things against his / her will despite there being no logically arguable reason behind that, except for the presence of absolute power and the need to exercise it with impunity, or may be the fact that the perpetrator was a victim once, as is true in this case too. Let me tell the readers, it wasn't pretty 10 years back, and it isn't pretty now. I hope this blog and this service survives to the day when one is able to have a say in the way the show is conducted, so that one is reminded that the old, romantic days were not so romantic, and one can make the changes that need to be made without being nostalgic. Many who know me know that I never forget any injury inflicted on me by anyone - and they attribute it to some 'hit list' I am keeping for exacting retribution in the future. While that is an interesting idea, it is not true. I just try to keep these negative experiences alive in my mind (unsuccessful, to a large extent I may be) in order to take my own decisions in their light, so that someone else’s life may not contain them. Let’s hope so, because, as Andy Dufresne said to Red in The Shawshank Redemption, “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
"But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from heav'n
Than when I was a boy."
However, I'd like to argue with the poet. Losing the heaven on the penthouse might have been a big loss, but that's nothing compared to the joys of adulthood - being able to go and take a leak without an embarrassing 'Miss, may I go to the toilet' and not being worried to death because one has lost one's pencil or eraser. The other thing was 'ragging' - don't even get me started on that one - to those who remember it fondly, I have one word to describe you - sick perverts (wait, that's two words - but then, they are used as one, just like ‘time and tide’). That may be a harsh judgement, but then, if your idea of fun includes holding a person's wee-wee, and having someone hold yours, all the while marching in a file as 'Nagla Express', that's what you are. So, I was thinking I was so much 'in touch' with the feeling of the oppressed categories of young people that I got a shock of my life when I had to relive those feelings and those insecurities once more and I felt so uncomfortable. For no one thing in the world forces one to relive all the bad school memories clubbed with the college ragging trauma the way a particular Programme in the Service does.To know I'm farther off from heav'n
Than when I was a boy."
Set in the sylvan outskirts of a royal city, the College does not look like a sad place to begin with. In fact, it isn't. Since it is the home for my own cadre, I have spent some really good moments here. The accommodation and the works here are top-notch, especially for some one who has been exposed to the crumbling D-wing of Jwalamukhi hostel. Our sessions are held in a real palace of the erstwhile ruling house of the city. The schedule is hectic, but contained, and after a good class session, one has almost all major sports to choose from - I personally prefer swimming. Hearty meals, and nice strolls around the campus, and one is good for bed - life's good. However, in the midst, periodically, like the floods of Damodar, come things like the Programme. Ostensibly, it is supposed to make raw young recruits into 'gentlemen and lady Officers' - by 'improving their personality' and 'giving multidimensional inputs'. I have no trouble with the latter - these might not be the best classes I have ever attended, but they are generally amongst the better ones. However, I do have serious doubts about the efficacy of, and for that matter, the intention behind a lot of meaningless pageantry we have been witness to. I shall write, at some length, on both, taking up the issue of efficacy first, and giving people the benefit of doubt with regards to intentions. After all, it has been said, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
So, we are to become officers, and to develop (magically sprout) 'officer like qualities' in these 10 weeks. Good. So what is a good Service Officer like? Coming from a Service family, and a Service School, I have seen many Service officers. Barring one or two dandies, no one I have seen was as straitlaced as the ideal that has been set up in front of us. Even the dandies got their comeuppance - I have heared the case where a visiting principal HOD was so enraged to find a new assistant officer in suit that he fired him in front of all, and then made him run around the works for the whole day, till the time the suit met it's untimely demise! This service is field service, and for God's sake, it is not the Army - howsoever much some of our senior officers would like to believe. It does not need the glamour and pomp of the Army Cantonment life. It is good to take pride in being one of the Raj's legacies, but for heaven's sake, let's not actually try to relive the Raj (this one coming from a Raj history enthusiast). As a field service which is not the Army, the organisation needs to develop it's sartorial sense and identity accordingly - which in my opinion, includes sober T-shirts, lycra enmeshed jeans and Woodland shoes. Okay, if the guys want to live their suits and ties fantasies in here, there is a proper place for that - strictly office hours. But dinner? Come on! Are we really expected to go to the fields and the gym, sweat it out and come back and don all those formals again for supper, or one is supposed to remain in the formals till supper, and swim after that? Of the two stupidities, I've chosen the latter, and hence this piece has materialised, after a drought of more than two years. The 'lace and velvet' dinner wardrobe was developed when 'lace and velvet' was the only 'presentable' dress. The rolling wheel of time has given us many acceptable 'dinner wear' options. Let's evolve. The fashion policing has been reminding us of the days when one could get into trouble for losing the school tie or belt. My roommate was asking whether we could stroll in slippers. Really, is this what we are trying to make here - diffident wrecks and overgrown school boys? Apart from this assault on our wardrobes, many other PDP type activities look quite useless to be frank. For most of the skills that we are supposed to develop, the ship has already sailed. The mean age of the group is 28 years - these are not college kids, who can be converted, that too in 10 weeks, into Ivy League's dream students. It's clear to us - crystal clear. It would be a reasonable assumption that it is so clear to the powers that be too. That brings us to the question of intention.
Of all the things that stand out on the basis of sheer oddity, the PT is the most 'outstanding', if I may use the word in an ironic sense. The basic idea peddled here is that one has to be 'fit' in the service of the lifeline of the nation. So noble a motive, you might say. However, barring a few persons, yours truly included, most of the new batch is quite fit, and almost all, again yours truly included (at least till the fashion policing made it difficult), participate in some sort of physical activity, whenever the powers that be are benevolent enough to leave our evenings free. If this is a health and fitness thing, why doesn't the older resident population follow through, since they must be in the need of fitness much more - handling work pressure of elevated posts and battling ageing all at once. Why this insistence on shorts in cold December morning? I think the answer is that it is an exercise simply to show a person 'his place'. Looked at from this angle, it all starts falling into place. I mean, what can show a person that he is worth a piece of festering turd in a more emphatic manner than calling him in half nudity in wee hours of the morning to gyrate his hips at the command of his supposed subordinate. All the other inanities of this Programme, all the useless pageantry that we are supposed to do but others aren't, are, in sum, a big bird flipped in one's face. It's a triumphant, "Yes, We can! (make you do all this, and there isn't a goddamned thing you can do about it, coz we got the Bomb - bless Dennis Leary).” Can the reader notice the similarity between this and the other two experiences of the youth? This is the same life that school kids live - with separate standards for themselves and the grown ups. This is the way ragging in college happens - a bright young person is made to do things against his / her will despite there being no logically arguable reason behind that, except for the presence of absolute power and the need to exercise it with impunity, or may be the fact that the perpetrator was a victim once, as is true in this case too. Let me tell the readers, it wasn't pretty 10 years back, and it isn't pretty now. I hope this blog and this service survives to the day when one is able to have a say in the way the show is conducted, so that one is reminded that the old, romantic days were not so romantic, and one can make the changes that need to be made without being nostalgic. Many who know me know that I never forget any injury inflicted on me by anyone - and they attribute it to some 'hit list' I am keeping for exacting retribution in the future. While that is an interesting idea, it is not true. I just try to keep these negative experiences alive in my mind (unsuccessful, to a large extent I may be) in order to take my own decisions in their light, so that someone else’s life may not contain them. Let’s hope so, because, as Andy Dufresne said to Red in The Shawshank Redemption, “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
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