YES I HAVE BEEN RAGGED.

(As i'm struggling through my Final semester of Architecture battling depression and anxiety i would like to dedicate this article to my seniors(11-16 batch) who have been a big help in catalyzing my problems and my classmate who have been constantly trying to get me more 'Involved' with the class. )

-By Chitra

Near every entry of TKM, there is a board describing "ragging" and every time i walk past that flux board, i look at it and think to myself yes, I've been ragged.

I dont know the political accuracy of this post and I dont know if it going to insult or put someone's reputation in jeopardy ; frankly, I dont care. So what has happened to Chitra? She got ragged? Did she get beaten up? No. Then what is this ragging she is talking about?


College first years are protected by the colleges and departments alike and under all this protection, the only  ragging activity conducted was the usual seniors calling us up to give them treats.  I refused to give them treats because this is my first ever year away from home in a hostel and i was in the initial stages of handling money and i was in no mood to spend.

So after successfully avoiding getting ragged much in the first year, I confidently made my way up to 2nd year. Maybe not very confidently because this is the point where I started wondering if architecture was a wrong choice for me. I didn't like anything about this course. I was falling back in the class. I was slipping into depression. But I would have managed alright and completed the course in peace, but that's not what happened.

Cardex : This is the first name name under which ragging hid in the department of architecture.

This is an opportunity given to the third year girls to rag second year girls in the name of making products for the architecture stall for tech fest. Products being jewellery, decorative pieces etc.

Meetings were held every week to critically analyse our products and were rejected as per the mercy of the so called seniors. Criticisms, rejections, belittling another person were the major highlights of these meetings. This was when i was battling what were the initial stages of my depression.

 I was having trouble keeping up with the academics. I was torn inside wondering whether I should drop out or not. This was when cardex submissions got to me. I couldn't make anything. I froze everytime I thought of making products.  Seniors made it a habit to use the cardex meetings as an opportunity to pick on me. they hated the way dressed, tied my hair, carried around my pouch. They made it a habit to shower down on me all their comments and their opinions. They gave me orders on how to dress how to walk and how to talk. We used to stand up when seniors used to come. not out of respect, but out of fear. I dont know why we had to fear some people who were a year older. I felt suffocated. So I started skipping meetings. I stopped avoiding this toxic environment. It was only bringing me down. Skipping the meetings were seen as the most horrible kind of sin. And I was summoned by the seniors for the next meeting.

I felt a lot of stress as I wasn't in a good place inside my head. This is when my health took a turn for the worse.Then came the medicines. For some time i blamed my medications for the mood swings, but now that i think about, i think it was just my depression that was eating my brain. Cardex supporter roommates just added more to that package.It wasn't just them most my classmates were okay with it. The seniors and their glorified ragging fest called cardex.

Submissions were scheduled for products and I always failed to meet the quality and the quantity they wanted. So I stopped going for meeting once and for all. Because I was starting to have suicidal ideations and I knew this wasn't working out well for me.

Coordinator and assistant coordinator of cardex disapproved of my behavior.They held a special cardex meeting and I was summoned. The topic of interest being "why Chitra can't make products" the mockery, belittlement,insult i don't remember what they said, I only remember what I felt. Every single word was swallowed by the monster in my head, and It ate away my brain cells, my happiness and my health. I only remember saying one word "OK" and then all hell broke loose... The next couple of weeks were followed by phone calls here and there. "did Chitra files complaint against ragging? " "she doesn't know what she is dealing with" "how dare she" "she will get a payback" I was floating. I was crying, the only thing I wanted to was to seize existing. 

My ok was to quitting cardex. But I failed to realize that was my och to loosing my friends, my position in class.

I was isolated by my classmates and my roommates alike,they were scared. Too scared to support me. I always wanted to be alone, but not this alone. I felt like killing myself.

There isn't any messenger of god in this story that saved me from my depression. There was only me, the little girl who sat in a corner and got sicker and sicker and more depressed and more depressed until cardex got over.

I guess they let me be after that day, after they heard I was filing a ragging complaint against the seniors. It was a false news. I guess should have complained back then. Against all of them.

You see the main trick to execute is to make the person being ragged believe they deserve what they are getting, and make them believe they are not being ragged.

Days went by.

I was outcast from the class.

Then came LIK, a trophy work.trophy mean a "competition" and it is the seniors that make us do the sheets for these competitions. The seniors again  were in charge of making us do LIK. It was a trophy were all sheets were done manually. This means countless hours on top of a drafting board.
One thing our teachers always did was to pretend that no one is working for NASA. (nasa is the organisation that conducts such competitions.) but its a silent rule that Second year students of architecture department were the ones who would do sheets for LIK. Under the guidance of seniors.


And these were the unwritten rules that were told to us by our seniors.

If you are a junior, you are pathetic by default.

Trophy works shall be dealt with at most secrecy

You are wrong until the seniors say so

Going home is for the week.

You should be Bitter, Critical and Under no circumstances should appreciate the juniors- that could make the slack off

Everyone should attend LIK meetings and everyone should listen to uni-directional
Dictator talk by seniors every day till the sheets are sent.

Seniors have the last say in everything, from information to composition of sheets.

Sheets will be torn up and spit at and burnt by.

No one should stand up for themselves.

You cannot quit.

Somehow along the way I have regained strength enough to fight for my acceptance so I started working in LIK.

This is when I saw drama like this in real life. This time the guys of their class were involved too...

I still remember all the torn sheets, the bruised ego, the mockery, blackmail statements, harassment.I Still remember the  the loud cries I made after coming back to my room, the cursing, how fast my heart was beating and how helpless I felt. And I wanted to die again. Seize existing or kill one or two of the seniors. I wasn't allowed to speak out.

I regret every single apology I made to a senior for being me, for being passionate and sensible. I never meant a single apology. And I still hate you all, and I hope all those who got my apology, I hope you all go to hell for all the things you have put me through. 

I actually wanted to kill myself back then. My question is, will you be able to forgive yourself if I had killed myself? Maybe my depression exaggerated my fall but that doesn't make it alright to push a person further down into depression.

Everyone is different. You don't know their journey. A bad word from your mouth is probably the last nail in someone's coffin. So stop ✋ 

Yes. I was ragged. Harassed. I was insulted, I was put under a lot of pressure, stress and I wanted to kill myself. I resent my seniors.

Yes I've been ragged, and I'd never want to feel the way I felt back then.  So please TKM Architecture department, stop glorifying ragging. And start taking it seriously. Never do what you did to me to another person. They may not survive it. And you'll have to carry the  pain of killing a person in your heart.

Hurdles of Excellence

(Written By : Chitra)

From birth, one is asked to aspire for excellence, and nothing else. Maybe that is why when you are in your late teens and nearing the point of choosing a degree, you end up feeling puzzled. 'What am I excellent at?' 'What is my calling?' 'Where do i belong?' 

So you end up picking a professional course because normal college majors are mediocre. And you find yourself sitting in the orientation program for architecture, aspiring for excellence, with a picture in your head that depicts you standing in a podium accepting the best Young Architect of the year award; because, that is excellence. That is what you are conditioned to aspire for.

However the one thing they forgot to mention was that, not everyone can be excellent at everything.

So in your head, you are winning the Pritzker price or receiving the RIBA gold medal, but in life you always fall a few steps short of being the best. The hurdles always seem a bit too high.

Since you have always been taught to strive for being excellent, you just cannot handle being not enough.

Why aren’t you the best ‘ student architect’ in the class ?

Then you start feeling a lot of emotions; from anger and frustration, to feelings of worthlessness and incompetence, to transferring blame to whoever is around you, and hating the people who are jumping the hurdle you set for yourself. Then the cycle slowly changes to self-blame and self-accusation. Then absolute depression sets in. and before you know it, you are tumbling down into an abyss of darkness, and there, you will be sitting in the darkest corner unable to love yourself.

The world is so busy teaching us to be excellent, it often forgets to teach us the important things in life; simple things like happiness and self-love.

What are your pre-set ideas of excellence, if your soul is not at peace? What is excellence if you are not able to go to sleep without regrets? What is your life for, if you are not in complete sync with your vibrations?

So when you are mediocre and struggling, here are a few points to keep in mind.

Be your own best friend; after all, no one can crack you up when you are down and no one can keep you grounded like yourself.

Keep in mind that, you don't have to pretend to be anything you are not.

Excellence is relative, and the pursuit of something so variable isn't actually the best thing you can do with your life.

Take it slow. Take a deep breath and stop running. You might see and learn a lot more when you walk, than when you run.

Don't weigh yourself against the scale of someone else's achievements. They are not you, and your priorities are different.

Try to see whatever you do as an opportunity to learn and not as a test to examine your competence. After all, there is no harm in learning a thing or two.

And at last, realize that the only person you can try to better than, is yourself. So grow a bit every day and keep making progress at your own pace.

The moral of all this ranting being, in a world that constantly asks you to strive to be excellent, it’s hard to unlearn and relearn the goals you’re expected to live up to. But once you unlearn and relearn those basics, no-one will be able to beat you at being an excellent version of yourself.

And my dears’, if that's not excellence, what else is?

THE FABLE OF A BICYCLE QUEEN

(Written By, Suhaila )

I saw my heart brimming with joy when I got selected to do my internship at an architectural firm in Cochin. Overwhelmed to live amidst a lively city like Cochin, I was eagerly looking forward for the internship to get started. 

                 

City life was something I always wanted to have, for I believe even the setting sun amidst the city lights is a beautiful scene to enjoy. As the internship is a 'break' from the regular architecture course, I decided to make the most out of it. A bucketful of activities were put on the list, like sight-seeing, yoga classes, rediscovering of long lost hobbies and much more.

It is then the opportunity to revive my cycling thrills dawned on me as my accommodation place  and my office are only a few meters apart, which is more of a cycling distance than a walking distance. I began owning a brand new ladybird bicycle the very same day I reached the city. My heart raced and I flushed with joy when I peddled my new bicycle for the first time.

The wind blew  all over me when the wheels of my bicycle starts speeding.I had every reason to be nostalgic. It reminded me of my childhood days when I was the 'bicycle princess' of my village. There wasn’t a single place left in my village where this princess and her bicycle didn’t reach. But things have changed a lot when it comes to cycling in a 'to-be-metro' city.

Let me elicit  a few pieces of my thought  which makes my nose out of joint while enjoying the eco-friendly, self-efficient mode of transport and I would like to convey these to all the road users .

One, I hold true knowledge about  myself that I was not being insane or juvenile  when I use this zero-fuel vehicle at this point of my life.

Two, age, gender, religion or profession has nothing to do with the mode of transport you use and hence no laurels in the means of staring or prejudices are required for a 21-year old hijabi-architect on a bicycle.

Three, riding a bicycle on heavy/non heavy traffic roads does not imply that I failed driving tests and has a blind spot towards ' traffic etiquette' like most of the road users. So all my dear engine -enabled drivers, I hereby request to stop acknowledging me with your beautiful staccato horns and let’s hold hands in reducing noise pollution.

Four, bicycles too require a small portion the road surface to ride on like every other vehicle. I apologies for my inability to pretend to be invisible while on the road or spread my wings and fly over the potholes or the open drainage canals and make way for everyone.

I think all other cyclists on Indian roads experiences 'the excerpts of my thought' in one kind or the other. I don’t want to call them issues or racial discrimination to the cyclist section. I would rather be happy thinking to myself about how healthy it is to ride a bicycle and burn out all the unwanted calories and how proud would be our Prime Minister about me as I tried to lend a hand in reducing fuel usage and environmental pollution in India.

(Admin's note : A special apology to Suhaila for taking so much time in updating this article. PS : HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  )