so, what’s this blogpost about? well, sometime ago, I heard that a former classmate of mine had gotten engaged. so, you may ask..everyone’s getting engaged nowadays. that’s true but this person was someone special….in a negative sense.

He was the class bully…the ringleader…the one everyone feared, no one dared to raise there voice against him. I remember… I had joined a new school along with some other 5-6 children. This dude and his gang ragged the living daylights out of all of us. it never fully got over…i felt really bad for the new boys..the ragging was intense for them and never stopped till we graduated. there is one sentence I remember vividly even to this day. In the tenth, when I was being transferred to his section, I was in such despair, such anger that I warned my parents that I could not be held responsible if I turned violent against him.

That was the only time in my life that I have made any threat of violence.

After I graduated, the mere mention of his name would be enough to bring back a flood of emotions.

But this time around, my reaction was quite different…

December 2007, Gurgaon India. A simmering feud between two eighth graders resulted in a rare student shooting that left one dead.

The incident shocked India. Student shootings, a common feature in the US had finally found its way to India.

I was however not surprised at all. I could see this coming for a long time. The description of Euro international School sounded eerily similar to Vidyaniketan, where I completed my high school. Affluent, allegiance to foreign educational systems, catering to the noveau riche…

Something I had predicted a decade earlier finally took place.

It was interesting to see the discussion that took place after the shootout. The general consesnsus blamed the shooter..and again I was not surprised. This is the way the system operates. You never blame the bully, but you always berate the victim. You were not strong enough, you did not fight enough..this is a lesson for you…life is like this.

To some extent, I agree with that. Life is like that and you will meet bullies at every turn but to categorize life as completely filled with bullies is an overstatement. I have traveled far and wide since the day I graduated from VNS and I have never seen a concentration of such bullies under one roof as I saw in VNS.

Telling the child to become strong and to face it is just one side of the coin. And a coin has two sides….

I remember that this guy was super arrogant in school-he would brag about the fact that he could do anything because the teachers were too scared to touch him Which was true, btw. I never saw him being upbraided, except for probably once (and that too indirectly). Imagine out of the 3 years that I studied there, he was pulled up only once…after playing havoc with children’s lives every single day!!

I knew that they were scared of him. He committed wrong after wrong in front of their eyes and they said nothing. They preferred to come and tell the victim-it’s obvious why. The victim is not aggressive and spiteful like the bully so the discussion will be smooth and they will be in control and won’t lose face which was not the case with the bully who could scream and shout, make the situation ugly and correspondingly lower their status in front of the children. And it always easier to lecture the weak…very difficult to reason with the strong.

So they took the easy way out and heaped scorn on those being bullied laying the fault squarely at their doorstep.

this fact did not escape the bully’s eyes. He grew more and more emboldened day by day. more victims fell prey to his spiteful ways. I was here in that school only for 3 years but i saw so many children change in that small quantum of time..simply cannot describe, such was the malefic environment in that school.

They carry the cross to this day. Their personalities have been changed irrevocably and in consequence so have their lives.

When this incident came to light, I observed the reactions of society. They did the same as themanagement in my school had done. They blamed the shooter ( there is an interesting article by a columnist at Sify: Antara Dev Sen, I believe her name is. I generally like her articles but the article she gave in this regard had me laughing….i have a lot of interesting thoughts about intellectuals….her article just confirmed my views on them..all ivory tower nonsense.)

when anything happens-one must go to the root of the problem and eradicate the cause there otherwise the problem is doomed to repeat again. What frustrated the boy so much that he and his friend shot that boy? what kind of behavior was the victim in this case exhibiting? The principal of the school had apparently called the parents and recommended meditation- i laughed. don’t get me wrong, I am all for meditation. but when you are dealing with children, you must come down and live in their world and solve their problems in a way that works in their world.

Adults have just never got that.

What will happen to those guys now: they will go to juvenile houses and we know how those are and they will be forever lost to society…a society that thought they were never worth protecting in the first case. They will harbour anger against this world and that is how criminals are born.

Yes, the child died. And he did not deserve to die just because he was a bully. Maybe he could have changed if he grew up, who knows. But when do crimes happen? Just like in mob justice, when one party feels that they cannot expect justice from the prevailing authorities..that’s when they take the law into their own hands.

In VNS as well none of us went to the school authorities. Observing their behavior, speeches and thoughts, I knew and so did the others-there was no way in the world that I would get justice or even a fair hearing from them.

If that child had to be saved, then there had to be a fair an equitable system in place that would inspire trust in the hearts of children. Sounds idealistic, doesn’t it? I know. I am not sure that it is possible. But this idealistic thought could have saved the child’s life. If the bully’s victim had seen justice dspensed in one case at least, they would have thought of another recourse other than the one they ultimately took. Ultimately, the idealistic avenue is the most practical one in this case.

Society is in a race right now. How much do I have versus you. I remember our”Gita classes” in VNS would consist of the principal asking industrialists’ daughters to come up to the front of the class and tell the rest of us mere mortals how they would run their companies. Imagine the message that it sends out. Imagine the effect that it would have on those who did not have those kind of opportunities in their lives. And the effect on those who knew that they had an upper hand as compared to their classmates.

Schools like this thrive on those things considered prized in Indian society: Money , Status, Prestige, Beauty and so on.

god help you if you did not fall into anyone of these categories. You would immediately singled out for ridicule. You see, it has long been the practice of society to decry what it considers strange and out of the way. We all have to fit in categories. So what if we don’t have a say in deciding them. If we don’t fit in those categories, we are treated as outcastes.

I can wager you anything that the child that died made fun of those 2 because they probably in some area or the other did not fit into categories that were considered important in that school. another point to be made here is that you learn from your environment. In this case your teachers, elders and family. If all of them follow the same idealogy, how will you know that what you are doing is wrong? If the culture has become so superficial where belittling others just because they don’t all into certain stereotypes has become the norm, then a child that’s growing up will just assume that’s they way to be.

That’s why that poor kid thought he was in the right. everybody behaves like this, what’s wrong ? My teachers never pull me up, so it must be okay. And anyways, these kids are weird, they deserve it.

who is to tell this child his thought process is wrong? It takes a lot to to go against the strong, like I said before and it’s easier to berate the weak. With no justice, understanding and compassion in sight, the individual breaks down an commits a fatal mistake that will haunt him forever.

oh just before i forget, there is one more idealistic solution: teach your children to be nice to whomever they come across.Maybe the most effective solution of them all. simple- be a good human being. kar bhala tho ho bhala..

It’s so ironic that childhood, the most innocent and idyllic stage of our lives has now come to be characterized with such superficiality and ruthlessness- a hallmark of adulthood.

so who’s the mythological character of the day?

Rishyasringa.

I love the look right now on your face.

So this dude has such an interesting story behind him that I was lost in dreams ever since I came to know about it.

Rishyasringa was a sage who had the power to produce rain to parched lands (he would be handy for Indian governments :)-imp point since Rishyas’s (his name is too long:) mother was a deer(some say Menaka), he was born with a horn in the middle of his forehead. After his birth, the deer or Menaka left the father and went back to wherever she came from, igniting hatred for womenfolk in the fathers heart. Thus angered, he raised his, lovely Rishyasringa (come on say it with me, i know you love the name :)) in an isolated forest against the prying eyes of the world.

In due course of time the kingdom of Anga suffers from a drought and Rishyasringa’s (are you saying it with me?:)) services are required. the king of this kingdom is told that only a brahmin that has observed total chastity will be able to do the needful. since our dude has never seen any women, he fulfills that criteria. But how to get him out of the dratted forest?

aah….that’s where women are so very useful….one day when no one is looking, Rishyas’ s little hut is beset by beautiful women, all sent by the king( modern day arranged marriage anyone ?) Our dude with the super hot name is absolutely floored. who wouldn’t be.

surprise, surprise, he gets “persuaded” to come to Anga and help the poor king with his rain issues (who’s helping whom i wonder) and anyway to cut a long story short, all’s well that ends well and little Rishyas (who btw is a man right now) gets the princess. yay! so how is this related to this terrible incident that i talked about before?

well, when our man Rishyas sees women for the first time-he does not know what they are…in his innocence, he assumes them to be sages of a different type, hermits of different kind just like he is…so unaware he was of sexual distinction.

anyways, I could go on and on but this blog post like always has gone on for too long…the man with the awesome name has come to be known in Indian mythology as a symbol of innocence and a lot has been written about how he felt when he saw women for the same time- all pointing to one of the most wonderful virtues in life-innocence. wonder.

Though Rishyas is no longer with us (sniff, sniff), children from time immemorial are found to be embodiments of this beautiful quality that was the hallmark of his character- here’s to them and the hope that that may never change.

Let this only be an aberration. Let all children ,in India or otherwise, be mirrors of Rishyasringa till the end of time.

p.s here’s some stuff about him i case u want to know more

slightly A so don’t tell ur mom n dad

http://aashraya.blogspot.com/2005/08/rishyasringa-part-one.html

http://aashraya.blogspot.com/2005/08/rishyasringa-part-two.html

http://aashraya.blogspot.com/2005/08/rishyasringa-part-three.html

http://aashraya.blogspot.com/2005/08/rishyasringa-part-four.html

http://aashraya.blogspot.com/2005/08/rishyasringa-part-five.html

http://aashraya.blogspot.com/2005/09/rishyasringa-conclusion.html

this woman is so freakingly talented-it’s awesome!!these kind of posts just make my day!

for U certified info:

http://www.sringeri.net/history/legend_of_rishyashringa.php

so what was my reaction this time around- coming back to the classmate’s engagement? Like I have said with all the spirituality and the buddhist philosophy( which entails praying for those who caused you the most harm- i didn’t get that first but now I understand its immense value) that I have been involved in right now, I was filled with a deep desire for the first time in my life to figure out why he would behave in that fashion. i did a lot of reading online and realized that one of the reasons why children become bullies is because they feel inferior in some aspect or the other, so to cover up they create a wall, become defensive and those negative feelings are transformed into aggression against others.

the dude in my class- was 4 feet 5 inches tall.

For the first time since i left the hallowed halls of VNS, I prayed for his happiness and felt again for the first time a strange sort of,yet much awaited for peace.