THE FANCY NAME WAS ‘EQUATOR CROSSING CEREMONY’… IT WAS ACTUALLY ‘RAGGING’!
The bald boy, seemingly smiling, with that placard in his hand ,saying ‘Equator Crossed’, is Debajyoti Chakraborty, a Marine Engineer, before he became Bobby Chakraborty the actor , 22 years ago.
With another tragic loss of life recently, due to the latent perversion of ‘ragging’ in a human mind…many a times, ‘a brilliant, well brought up, educated’ human mind , Bobby revokes his thoughts and his experiences of ragging, with a deep mourning for late Swapnadeep Kundu, the hapless victim from Jadavapur University!
“The course of my ship was set to Saipan from Hongkong, then to Guam and onwards to Whangharei, New Zealand. I was brimming with excitement inside, on the context of visiting uncharted territories, as a budding 5th engineer would usually feel.
But deep inside I could sense a sinister plan brewing all around me and two deck cadets, in the name of a ritual of sailors called ‘Equator Crossing Ceremony’! Those weren’t the times of cellphones, through which I could call home for help or this wasn’t me in another place in Kolkata or may be another state in India, from where I could escape and come home! It was Pacific Ocean! I could assume, the previous day, by the body language of the seniors,that a mockery of the three of us was going to happen, but couldn’t guage the extent of it. I had gone through whole lot of it ,ragging as we call it, during my training days as a Marine Engineering Apprentice and I thought that it had toughened me up! So I summoned all my courage to face the inevitable, from which there was nowhere to run!
I will try to give a moderate and censored account of what happened in that ‘ceremony’ that day and the days after. Firstly I was asked if I had a camera with me. I said I did. It was brought up, along with other cameras. The engine was put in UMS mode(Unmanned Ship Mode). All the crew, officers and engineers gathered up, in a merry making mood on the deck, as we were crossing the equator that day.
First our heads were shaved off in the most careless ways, causing a lot of bloodshed and pain. Then we were made to drink something that was ‘specially’ made for us, the ingredients of which were not disclosed to us, but it tasted absolutely gross! You wouldn’t want to know what the ingredients were, (which were later disclosed to us)as you might puke too! One of us did puke, while we were on the verge of it, as we gulped the drink on God’s name! A lot of slapping and abusing went on as we were reluctant at first to ingest it or perform as ordered. Then we were thrown in the swimming pool, which had an insane amount of chlorine in the water I guess because as we were asked to do unmentionable things in the water, our skin burnt and we virtually couldn’t see a thing through our red eyes, after we came up from the pool, trying to hide our modesty. This went on for hours…and days on…till all of us were crying in pain and shame and thankfully one of the seniors thought it was enough and admonished the most brutal member of that highly educated ragging gang, from well to do families and with brilliant minds!
I am still in tears as I see the innocent face of Swapnadeep, who was killed in the latest ragging brutality in JU. I can’t hold my tears whenever the videos of his parents are emerging! I am so numb inside, where I can feel my wounds deep down, which are still raw and fresh.
Ragging is an latent animalistic perversion in a humanbeing that feeds on power and domination. These tendencies have grown many folds due the pornographic boom, celebration of violence on gaming/streaming platforms and dark web, along with the glorification of rude and offensive behavior online!
In a society where obscenity, vulgarity,violence, abusive language, insulting others and other prohibited things are normalized infront of a child, such heinous acts of perversion and sadism are bound to happen more in the days to come.
I have taken it up as an oath, through my social awareness program for the children, where a big part of that session is dedicated against ‘disrespecting’ others…dedicated against pornography…dedicated against violence…dedicated towards building a healthy society on the basis of sympathy,empathy, brotherhood and coexistence, right from their school life.
We can’t bring Swapnadeep back. But we can definitely join hands together to save more Swapnadeeps and Debajyotis from being humiliated ,abused and killed, all in the name of fun ,only if we educate our child not only through academics but with proper human values! “
(This story has not been edited by News Mania staff and is published from a Media Release)
