Alternating Between Occasional Sanity and General Madness

Alternating between Occasional Sanity and General Madness
“….Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it. For, to define true madness
What is`t but to be nothing else but mad…”
William Shakespeare – Hamlet
      A new batch has arrived, the rag season has commenced, and the raggers are having a rip-roaring time. I remember a former student leader defining the term ragging, saying that ‘RAG’ stood for ‘Royal Academic Game.’ I also remember him narrating some anecdote about its origin. Whether he was telling the truth or whether it was some fancy false definition he himself had been gulled into believing previously or whether it was his own personal definition about ragging I do not know, however. Whatsoever might be the origin of the term ‘rag’, I must say, ragging has never appealed to me. For me it was never a pleasure to be ragged; whether it gives one joy to rag others I really do not know, because I have never ragged anyone myself( maybe I am boasting a little too much about my own virtues!)
Let me tell you a little about our rag season. During it, though I hated to get ragged, I remember, there were some guys (my batch-mates) who told me themselves that they enjoyed being ragged. They told me that they found it so absolutely funny that they looked on it as a wonderful source of amusement and that they really beguiled their time by getting ragged. There were also others who endured it simply because they believed it was sort of compulsory for them to experience it and that rag season itself was their induction into the university culture and the initiation of their university career. The majority of my batch-mates were of this opinion. Some others were, however, diametrically opposed to ragging like I myself was, but were scarcely brave enough to stand up to the raggers, those boisterous bullying seniors.
There was, however, one guy who flaunted his opposition and boldly fought with the seniors who tried to daunt him with their awful blusters. He alone...