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This is a video of women students from IIM Calcutta ‘welcoming’ the XLRI Jamshedpur team.
If you’re thinking that this happens in the heat of the competition, wait up. We’re told by IIM Calcutta students, that the women students are formally coached by a stalwart from the second year in the skill of the most tasteless abusing months prior to the event. With a lot of glee, a few XLRI students and alumni tell us that they pay IIM Calcutta back in the same way. A search of Youtube.com reveals more examples of the high vocabulary passed on as ‘culture’ from second year students to first year students.
Update – Our views on why we did this story and the larger picture behind it
All of us at the PaGaLGuY office were appalled at the video. But we were aware that a lot of people will justify it using one or more of the following arguments.
“What is so shocking about it? Don’t we see it everywhere these days? Movies, TV, what have you? Sab chalta hai yaar.”
“You’re shocked because it’s women who’re abusing. Had it been men you would be okay. You clearly believe in a male dominating society.”
“Why don’t you also look at the good things these institutes do? Just because they hurl abuses at mothers doesn’t mean they’re bad people.”
We strongly felt that these arguments were heavily misplaced and speaks of complacency in a bar that has been set really low. We talked to a few students from both these institutes and came to one conclusion – B-schools with traditionally male-dominated batches originating from the IITs and NITs and other engineering colleges have created large pockets of tasteless campus culture, which hasn’t changed since the number of women increased.
In cases of videos such as this one, ordinary people from good backgrounds choose to let go of their poise to indulge in mindless crass behaviour just so that they can fit into something they can’t change.
This matter is not about the fact that it is women who are abusing – we do not subscribe to the view that women should not abuse. This is about the revelation that students – male or female – are being coached to abuse as an institutional part of the campus culture.
This is not however limited to just IIM Calcutta and XLRI Jamshedpur – a lot more campuses of prestigious B-schools have their own versions of tasteless acts classified as culture, often bordering on the perverse as this example from IIM Ahmedabad (as reported by an alumnus) is.
We spoke to IIM Calcutta’s Dean of Programmes and Initiatives Prof Saibal Chattopadhyaya, who chose to distance himself from the video and seemed more concerned if the video was uploaded from IIM Calcutta servers. Asked if he was worried about what he saw in the video and had subsequent concerns about the campus culture within IIM Calcutta, he said, “I have to verify first if these students (in the video) are indeed ours but until then I can’t say anything.”
What we want to ask is, are we okay with our country’s taxpayer-funded educational institutions being utilized this way? Can these campuses ever compete with Harvard and Oxfords of the world? Most importantly, is this the right thing and are you okay with what you see?
More importantly, what makes people create these traditions? What do we classify as wrong and where do we draw the line? Do we even need to draw a line?
We think we should, but we’d like to know your views. Feel free to post your comments below or on this discussion thread .