I stepped off the train today, made my way out of the station – as usual – and ran into a crowd.
Not the usual office crowd. No, this was a solid clump of guys and girls wearing badly-stenciled Anon masks on the backs of their head. There was indistinct chanting ahead. A few monks floated here and there like huge orange traffic lights. Naturally intrigued, I footed it to the source of the chanting – and ran into today’s special: the university protests.
The general idea is this:
a) You are a state university student. You are one of the select percentage who, having aced your A/Ls, have made it into a government-sponsored university.
b) The government spends a ton of money on you and others like you. While private universities charge anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million rupees for that degree, you’re getting it free.
c) You’re dissatisfied. Naturally, instead of accepting the fact that the good things in life aren’t free, you decide to march on Colombo, COMPLETELY BLOCKING TRAFFIC and generally making an absolute ass out of yourself.
These youth seem to be laboring under the mistaken impression that life seems to owe them a red carpet and the whole nine yards in exchange for a few years’ bent half-heartedly over a book. Can anybody explain the logic of this?
No wonder aliens don’t visit Sri Lanka all that often. If they’re looking for intelligent life, they’re going to be really, really disappointed here.
Yudhanjaya 
Well said. It is the university students who loose the reputation that they should deserve by their foolish acts like ragging, stupid protests etc..
While I completely agree with you on everything you say, I think there are certain norms and pressures these kids have to give into. From having taught for six weeks at a university, I understood that the sense of ‘tradition’ and peer pressure is very high. It is important for the first years to continue doing / or ‘carry on the legacy’ of their seniors: if they were ragged, the newcomers will be too; if they protest, we protest. If the first years opt not to, it would reflect negatively on the batch and this perception is held by both seniors and faculty alike. So I think the ‘change’, if at all needs to start from where the power is at its peak: faculty and administration, but that doesn’t seem to happen either, noh.