Your summer holidays are just over and many of you must have taken a vacation either with your family or with your friends. I am sure you have returned with amazing memories and a renewed energy — ready to take on the new academic year.

In the years of experience I have had working with adolescents I have heard so many youngsters make life and career decisions based on a very simplistic thinking process: “Let my marks come. I will then decide!” Is this any different from planning your journey by saying, ‘Let me take an autorickshaw and see where it goes. I will then decide where to go from there’? And yet, that is the strategy many youngsters use when they ‘plan’ their life and career.

You are at the beginning of a new academic year — a year filled with potential, hope and immense possibility. If you want to make the best of this year, then you need to begin the year with a plan about where you want to be by the end of this academic year. This academic year will offer you numerous opportunities to learn new things. You will be able to learn new intellectual skills through the subjects you study in school. You will have occasions to learn new social and life skills through your interaction with your peers in and outside of school and through your participation in extra-curricular activities. Knowing where you want to be at the end of the academic year is what will help you make appropriate choices and achieve the best in the year ahead.

Let us now take a look at what you can do to make the coming academic year a fruitful one for you.

Think about what makes you unique: For many adolescents knowing about themselves is not an important task. During the year, promise yourself that you will get to know yourself better. Start by finding out what motivates and interests you. Create a vocabulary to think about yourself, to describe who you are and what interests you. Write down as many points you can think about yourself and then write a brief ten to fifteen line paragraph that describes what makes you unique. Try and do this within the first month after the reopening of school.

Write a vision statement of who you would like to be by the end of the year: Having a personal vision statement is a great way to add focus and direction to your life. Over the years, I have worked and reworked mine again and again. Today my vision statement is: “My life vision is to bring life and life in its fullness to all whom I meet by comforting the disturbed and by disturbing the comfortable.” This vision brings greater clarity and direction to the work that I do as a psychological counsellor or in my work in the education sector with schools across India.

So how do you write your own vision statement? Start with the list that you have prepared in your pitch about yourself. Ask yourself then, how will you like to use these in the coming year? My suggestion is to think of three things when you are writing your vision statement: 1. Your most important talents — those things that make you absolutely unique; 2. Where you would like to use these talents — your school, your community, your neighbourhood, your home; and 3. Why do you want to use this/these unique things in the areas you have chosen.

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The post Planning your ‘journey’: The start of a new year appeared first on The Teenager Today.

Across cultures, initiation rites have been part of the social fabric. ‘Coming of age’ is generally celebrated through a ‘ritual’.  These rites indicate that the member qualifies to be a full-fledged member of the group to which he or she is being initiated. These are sometimes also called ‘rites of passage’ and signify that the person is moving from one group to another. The Bar Mitzvah in the Jewish community or Confirmation in the Christian community or the Thread Ceremony are just a few examples of these ‘coming of age’ rituals.

In the social context of India, entry into college is a significant milestone not only for the individual but for the entire community itself. As they say colloquially: “Pappu ab college ja raha hai!” Every youngster looks forward to the day when they will pass through the portals of their school and enter into the grown-up world of college life. From junior college to degree college and from degree programmes to professional programmes, every step is viewed as a step closer to adulthood. In this context, it is but natural that these significant milestones are marked with some kind of ritual to indicate the progress and entry into a new phase of life.

While most institutions will have a formal induction programme to introduce and acclimatize the ‘freshers’ into a new realm, there is a lighter side to this welcome. Many colleges across India have ‘Fresher Parties’ or ‘Welcome Parties’ thrown to welcome the newcomers. This serves an important function for the initiate — it helps him or her meet new people, get to understand the culture of the institution (which may be dramatically different from the culture of their previous place of study), understand practices and among many other things, general tips of how to survive successfully the new academic programme.

At these events, there is quite a bit of light-headed ribbing and rubbing, pulling of legs of the freshers or pranks played on them. After all, humour is a good way to dissipate the stress of the transition and facilitate a faster moving into what is expected from the newcomer. However, in quite a number of cases, this degenerates into violence — physical or emotional or psychological, social or even sexual. It is these forms of ‘welcoming’ that the adult world is not comfortable about and the hullabaloo about banning such ‘fresher parties’ must be understood by the generation of youngsters in this context. It is precisely these forms of welcoming that come under the gambit of ragging (also termed as hazing or bullying) — illegal under the law of our land.

Ragging — a problem?

If initiation rites are part of social functioning, then why must ‘ragging’ be considered a problem that needs to be banned by civil society? I have heard youngsters proclaim their opposition to such bans by justifying such behaviour as normal and acceptable and that anyone who wants to be part of higher education should be ready for such behaviour. “After all,” says Rohit, a second year student from a college in Mumbai, “if you are not man enough to deal with a little fun, then you are not ready for growing up!”

Ragging is considered a social evil in our times, because what we are talking of is not some light-hearted fun and frolic, but rather behaviours that have serious physical and psychological consequences. Today, in many colleges, despite ragging being banned, new students are beaten, asked to do things of a sexual nature — like kiss someone or mimic a sexual act or reveal things that are considered personal and private — without their consent. Madhavi Chopra, a law student from Delhi, sums up the problem well in an article written by her:

“It has been rightly said that the end may not always justify the means. Behind the façade of ‘welcoming’ new students to college, ragging, in actuality, is a notorious practice wherein the senior students get an excuse to harass their junior counterparts, and more often than not, make them easy targets to satiate their own perverse sadistic pleasures. Apart from sustaining grievous physical injuries, those unfortunate students who succumb to ragging either develop a fear psychosis that haunts them throughout their lives, or worse, quit their college education even before it begins. For any student who slogs day and night to secure admission into a prestigious college, ragging can be his or her worst nightmare come true. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, today, ragging has taken the shape of a serious human rights violation with even the most respected and disciplined educational institutes falling prey to it.”

What is “fun” for a few people, becomes a living nightmare for another, a violation of their basic right to live a life of dignity; and to be stripped of one’s dignity, even in the name of ‘welcoming’ is what makes ragging unacceptable and something that needs to be stopped.

Root of ragging

When what was meant to be a welcome degenerates into violence, we are forced to ask: ‘What do the seniors get from indulging in such behaviours?’ A lot of thought and research has gone into studying such behaviours. The one thing that stands out as a common factor is what most perpetrators feel is ‘power’. They feel powerful that they can make others feel ‘powerless’; they get their high from making others do, what in a normal day would be considered inappropriate.

This raises a very serious question: “If I need to make others feel powerless in order to feel powerful, then is it really power that I enjoy?” I think it is high time that we relook at the concept of ‘power’ — not in terms of dominance, but rather as the ability to bring about change in my life, in the lives of those around me, to my community and the society and country that I live in. Using our God-given talents and abilities to build up others in the truest sense constitutes authentic power.

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Recently there was an advertisement for an educational portal that encouraged students to stop being sheep — merely following others to make educational choices but rather to use their portal to make personal decisions in order to stand out from the crowd. This is a predicament that most students face because of the sheer number of courses and programs that are available to students today: ‘It’s so confusing … What else can I do other than follow someone else’s advice?’

Some of us deal with this prickly situation by questioning why we even need to spend so much time studying all those subjects, which anyway seem so unconnected to life. “Why do I need to study?” This is a question that almost every student in school asks at some time or the other, of themselves, or their teachers or their parents. The stock answer that most adults will generally give is: “Because it is what you need to do for your future. If you don’t study now, what will you become when you grow up?”

What will I become when I grow up? Well, that is the million-dollar question that perplexes not just students today but also their parents. The dilemma students’ face today is that there are just too many choices that one can choose from — not just in terms of occupations, but also in terms of education; and this only adds to the confusion. And just to make matters worse, we are bombarded by advice from all sides about what is best suited to us.

“I think you should do this” … “No, do that” … “This is what is best for you!” Yes! But if everything is the best for me, how do I choose what is really the best for me? And if I don’t really know what I want to become, then when it comes to making a choice of what to study next, I invariably find myself being forced to choose one course or another. Given that I haven’t really understood what each course is about, most individuals tend to go with the general opinion about academic programs to make their choice. The real question that most of us face or will face is: How do I decide what to study?

There are four possible ways in which we arrive at a decision. For some of us the answer is simple. I just go with what either my parents or elders in the family suggest. This approach is based on an inherent sense of trust that my parents and family elders know what is best for me. There is no doubting our parents or other elders’ good intentions. They sincerely desire the best for us. But how well do they really know me? How aware are they of the options that are available to me as a student of today? Are they really equipped to comprehend the world that I will have to live in? If the answer to any of these questions has an element of uncertainty to it, then this is not really the best way to go.

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