The year was 1973. Class II. Shishukunja School. Jhenidah Cadet College campus. Second period. Our Bangla teacher just went out after conducting her class. We, the students, started chirping around.
It was our time to have fun. Whenever the teacher went out, we rejoiced. The next period was for maths that day. We didn’t know Haq sir would be standing right outside the classroom. As soon the Bangla teacher went out, Haq Sir entered.
We didn’t expect him so soon.
But, he emerged from nowhere with a broken piece of a wooden chair in hand. He found me at the front bench. Haq sir brought the broken piece of the wooden chair right towards me.
Without thinking anything, he struck.
I tried to obstruct the blow. I couldn’t, and the stick from the broken chair hit my hand. Our sir didn’t know the broken piece of the chair had a nail ingrained in it.
The nail spiked into the upper portion of my small finger. I didn’t understand it properly. But Haq sir noticed it. My finger was bleeding.
When he saw the blood streaming out, he was dumbfounded; didn’t know what to do. Haq sir stormed out of our classroom. My classmates helped me out with a piece of cloth and wrapped the wound so that the bleeding would stop.
This attack from our teacher was so ferocious that I never told this to the school authorities. Neither have I told this to my parents who, I knew, would have taken it very seriously. I still carry the scar of the wound and sometimes try to imagine what was working in Haq sir’s mind at that time when he hit me.
That’s when I knew our teachers weren’t student-friendly. Then on, I never expected for teachers to be friendly towards their students while teaching.
When I went to study in Jhenidah Cadet College, I discovered that it was a den of hundreds of bullies. It wasn’t only the teachers -- all the senior cadets and havildars were champions in bullying the children who used to leave their parents behind to get an education.
Bullying was very strategic in cadet colleges; the bullies aimed to destroy the ego of the new-comers on the very first day or week. Bullying, there, was a way of life and an accepted feature. All of us knew that we’d be bullied by our seniors and teachers.
However, bullying by the senior cadets didn’t hurt, but the behaviour of teachers used to hurt us very much. We had left our parents only to think that our teachers would be our guardians in that rough atmosphere. That didn’t happen at all.
Only a handful of teachers acted like our parents, but the rest of them were complete bullies -- as if bullying was a form of entertainment for them.
It wasn’t very easy for 12-year-old cadets to complete their educational life in those institutions. However, there wasn’t any lack of respect for the teachers who used to bully us.
I thought I was the only one who was bullied by our teachers. But now, after all these years, whenever I talk about it, many react with the same memories of being bullied in school. The experience of people who didn’t study in cadet colleges is the same; they were also victims of bullying in the same pattern.
It’s been a long time since our generation came out of schools. We’re now in the process of becoming old. But the situation hasn’t changed at all for the next generation. The culture of bullying has survived and more so, many new dimensions have been added to that culture.
Many years have passed, but we never thought of assessing the impact of bullying on the nation. The impacts are manifold, and they become more dangerous when the bullied become bullies themselves.
The country is becoming digitally rich, making positive strides in GDP growth, establishing more and more educational institutions, but the bullies are still on the roll. The children are still facing the wrath of teachers; many times, the teachers are wounding their students dangerously.
This has to stop. Bullies must be prevented; their minds must be shaped in order to help the students with their studies, not become obstacles by arousing fear among them. This is an important area to work in with devotion.
Ekram Kabir is a story-teller and a columnist.
