The ugly and the beastly

Universities are considered as hallowed institutions of learning and academic pursuit. The cream of the students sitting the Advanced Level is selected on merit to the universities.

One would not normally associate such hallowed institutions with the ugly and the beastly. Unfortunately the news that comes from these institutions these days is about the ugly and the beastly practice of ragging.

A practice started decades ago to "acclimatize" the raw freshers to the University environment has undergone several transformations over the years and now deteriorated to the level of mental and physical torture. Incidents of ragging are so brutal that one wonders whether it is the work of deranged minds.

The Peradeniya University Acting Vice Chancellor has thrown a new light into this ugly phenomenon. He sees a nexus between the present strike wave in the country and ragging. The motive behind ragging is to get the University closed and draw in the students for political street agitations. Any observant onlooker could see that only a handful of senior students engage in this ugly practice. The ring leaders of this orgy usually are political animals or leaders of political groups. Ironically they choose ragging as a modus operandi in recruiting fresh students into their political fold.

While there is nothing wrong in wooing and inducting fresh students into political groupings what is undesirable is the beastly means of doing so. Very often ragging amounts to inhuman and disrespectful treatment, a violation of basic human rights of the individual. It is an offence punishable by law and discarded with scorn by civilized societies.

This ugly practice has to stop. It is the duty of the university authorities and teachers to eliminate it from the university system. In fact, the Government passed an Anti-ragging Act some time ago though it is not enforced yet.

However, this is not a mere law and order problem. It is a social problem too. Therefore, the problem has to be approached from many sides. Some time ago the Peradeniya University started a dialogue with students with a view to containing the phenomenon, if not to eradicating it altogether. Perhaps, once those students left the portals of the university "tradition" may have re-surfaced.

It is up to the university dons and administrators to work out a course of action to eliminate the practice of ragging. Perhaps, some of them may be thinking that it cannot be totally eliminated.

If there is a will there is a way. Is there a will?

Ragging is also a method of enforcing hegemony over students by a certain political group. Hegemony prevents healthy dialogue and kills the spirit of tolerance and dissent, so essential to academic discourse. Further, it disrupts the university academic calendar which increases costs and affects the students' future.

A true World Wide Web

Some say that the term World Wide Web is a misnomer. True, you can browse the web even from Antarctica, but the Web is overwhelmingly English. This is bad enough for those with little or no knowledge of English, but what is even worse is that all domain names (ex: www.xyz.com) must use English alphabetic (Roman) characters. This does not reflect a truly internationalized computer network.

But change is coming to the Internet at last. The private, non-profit body that oversees the basic design of the Internet voted yesterday to allow Web addresses be expressed in characters other than those of the Roman alphabet, though the change will initially be limited to domains controlled by National Governments. Commercial sites will be next in line. The board of directors of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, adopted the change at the end of its latest semi-annual international gathering in Korea.

This is a significant milestone in the history of the World Wide Web, which, by the way, is only around 15 years old. But the Web has changed our lives irreversibly in those 15 years. Today, virtually every bit of information we seek is literally at our fingertips thanks to the Net. With yesterday's development, more people around the world are likely to embrace the Net.

Among the languages that will benefit are Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew and Korean. Most of the estimated 1.5 billion people online use languages such as Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Japanese, which have writing systems entirely different from English, French, German, Indonesian, Swahili and others that use Latin characters. Sinhala and Tamil internet names too cannot be far away.

Along with the internationalization of the Internet, regulatory authorities around the world must make broadband Internet access more affordable and widespread. The new multi-lingual Web should be spun everywhere, no matter how remote or inaccessible.