It seems like a thing of the past now but ragging was on all our minds the moment we stepped into the campus and even my grandmother had read the newspaper to warn me of those 'kolaku makada hudugiyaru'. :)
But that year was a peculiar one; thanks to some mismanagement, the students from Karnataka, who constitute 50% of the student population joined the classes only sometime in December while other state students were almost at the end of the first semester! This was terrible from the point of view of exams; we got only about one and a half months to learn the entire syllabus. But it spared us from the brunt of ragging. By the time we entered the scene, seniors had long finished harassing our peers from other states and our ragging was more or less merely obligatory.
Girls in our college were a very small percentage of the total - our batch had 27 out of the total 350+. So unlike boys, we had a single girls' hostel block and also, unlike them we didn't have state-wise ragging. We were one-for-all. Freshers were in a separate section along with the PG girls who never bothered us but this wasn't much of a relief as the common mess and the telephone were both in our wing. But the first few days passed off quietly and our wing was half-empty as the other-state girls had mostly gone home for holidays. So one afternoon I just sauntered outside my room and glanced at the corridor. There were two girls waiting at the telephone table. They were the smallest I had ever seen and at my height, they certainly didn't look like seniors. Probably some of my batchmates who'd returned from home I thought and gave them a friendly smile. They didn't smile. I got a stare back and after an eternity, one of them gave me a faint nod. This hadn't gone well so I quietly retreated to my den. I told my roomie Pal. She's my height too but definitely more circumspect; she suspected they were seniors. It had dawned on me too by now but it was too late. So we nervously waited for the consequences which happened as soon as the girls finished with their calls. For the next half an hour they reduced us to their height and gave us a sermon on how to respect the seniors. This had such an effect on me that for the next few months I hardly smiled at anybody unless I was inside the safety of my room or with others who were 100% my friends.
Anyway subsequently I had less trouble recognizing danger as our experienced peers returned from holidays and gave us heads-up on the seniors. TN and Kerala seniors were a terror; one of them was called bulldog and moved around like one. But for the aforesaid reasons, she didn't bite us much. Only thing we had to do for them was to enact Lord Rama and Seeta's romance and I remember L was Rama and Pal and I were butterflies in the park. It was fun without being allowed to smile or laugh.
There was another notorious gang of what they called 'hi-fi' seniors. Two girls from Bangalore, two from Mumbai and one from Raipur, some of the things they did to our other-state peers was damn scandalous. We diligently tried to avoid them, changing our routes if we spotted them anywhere in the horizon etc and for long, didn't get noticed. But one day one of them caught me bragging in the mess that Maths was my favourite subject. That's it; they barraged me with questions for what seemed like an eternity and sent me to the room crying and having no illusions about my abilities in computing.
Others were mostly kind, especially our immediate seniors and it was hard to be afraid of them. Once a senior made us stand in a line and when it came to my turn she asked me, "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to hell. Where do you want to go?" I guess if I had thought about it, I would've chosen heaven and would've been grilled to hell but I was tired and hungry. I said, "Ma'am, I want to go to my room". Thankfully she saw some humour in it and laughed and sent me on my way. And another thing that saved me was my hair. Most seniors would get smitten with it and end up asking tips to grow such hair and I guess I campaigned well enough for coconut oil in those days.
But that year was a peculiar one; thanks to some mismanagement, the students from Karnataka, who constitute 50% of the student population joined the classes only sometime in December while other state students were almost at the end of the first semester! This was terrible from the point of view of exams; we got only about one and a half months to learn the entire syllabus. But it spared us from the brunt of ragging. By the time we entered the scene, seniors had long finished harassing our peers from other states and our ragging was more or less merely obligatory.
Girls in our college were a very small percentage of the total - our batch had 27 out of the total 350+. So unlike boys, we had a single girls' hostel block and also, unlike them we didn't have state-wise ragging. We were one-for-all. Freshers were in a separate section along with the PG girls who never bothered us but this wasn't much of a relief as the common mess and the telephone were both in our wing. But the first few days passed off quietly and our wing was half-empty as the other-state girls had mostly gone home for holidays. So one afternoon I just sauntered outside my room and glanced at the corridor. There were two girls waiting at the telephone table. They were the smallest I had ever seen and at my height, they certainly didn't look like seniors. Probably some of my batchmates who'd returned from home I thought and gave them a friendly smile. They didn't smile. I got a stare back and after an eternity, one of them gave me a faint nod. This hadn't gone well so I quietly retreated to my den. I told my roomie Pal. She's my height too but definitely more circumspect; she suspected they were seniors. It had dawned on me too by now but it was too late. So we nervously waited for the consequences which happened as soon as the girls finished with their calls. For the next half an hour they reduced us to their height and gave us a sermon on how to respect the seniors. This had such an effect on me that for the next few months I hardly smiled at anybody unless I was inside the safety of my room or with others who were 100% my friends.
Anyway subsequently I had less trouble recognizing danger as our experienced peers returned from holidays and gave us heads-up on the seniors. TN and Kerala seniors were a terror; one of them was called bulldog and moved around like one. But for the aforesaid reasons, she didn't bite us much. Only thing we had to do for them was to enact Lord Rama and Seeta's romance and I remember L was Rama and Pal and I were butterflies in the park. It was fun without being allowed to smile or laugh.
There was another notorious gang of what they called 'hi-fi' seniors. Two girls from Bangalore, two from Mumbai and one from Raipur, some of the things they did to our other-state peers was damn scandalous. We diligently tried to avoid them, changing our routes if we spotted them anywhere in the horizon etc and for long, didn't get noticed. But one day one of them caught me bragging in the mess that Maths was my favourite subject. That's it; they barraged me with questions for what seemed like an eternity and sent me to the room crying and having no illusions about my abilities in computing.
Others were mostly kind, especially our immediate seniors and it was hard to be afraid of them. Once a senior made us stand in a line and when it came to my turn she asked me, "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to hell. Where do you want to go?" I guess if I had thought about it, I would've chosen heaven and would've been grilled to hell but I was tired and hungry. I said, "Ma'am, I want to go to my room". Thankfully she saw some humour in it and laughed and sent me on my way. And another thing that saved me was my hair. Most seniors would get smitten with it and end up asking tips to grow such hair and I guess I campaigned well enough for coconut oil in those days.
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