I’m sure most people reading this have already got the yearly ‘parent/guardian undertaking’ in their mailbox.i have a few things to say about this.
first off, i don’t think this is an assurance from the students that they will abstain from ragging their juniors so much as it is a tool to bury, minus any legal hassles, students who do get caught in the act of said ragging.
secondly, i must say that i don’t quite get the point of getting undertakings from the parents of the students. what are the parents expected to do to stop their wards from ragging juniors? use mind-control? how useless can an undertaking get? what will parents be asked to do next? give assurances that their children will follow traffic rules? oh! wait; IITM is already doing that – the ‘no-motor-vehicles’ rule. the sheer inanity of it… geez!
come to think of it, what on earth does IIT have to do with parents of its students? why, for example does IIT require branch-change or dual-degree-transfer forms to be signed by parents of the applicants? how does IIT have any responsibility towards the parents of its students? how are the parents of IITians responsible to IIT?
if IIT isn’t doing this because it is responsible to the parents, how incapacitated does IITM think its students are? are the ‘best’ students of the country not good enough to decide what branch they should be in? or have the ethics of a chameleon? (although i would probably forgive IITM for the last one)
the best that can be said of this practice is that it is archaic. how i hope we moved out of the nineteenth century!
