Don\'t hate the criminal, hate the crime

০৪ ঠা ডিসেম্বর, ২০১৮ সকাল ১০:৩৩

A rant:
{Dumb people trigger warning: sarcasm and truth}

Vikarunnesa Noon School's 9th grader, Oritri Adhikari (15) commits suicide after she gets bullied by her school’s vice principal and principal. She was caught cheating on her exam using her mobile phone and was suspended from the school. The school administration called her parents to school. They went and took the kid, too. And got the infamous “opoman kore ghor theke ber kore deya” treatment- you know, the treatment we Bengalis all get at some point in our lives. They gave her a TC. The news article actually doesn’t say much about what conversation the parents had with the administration. But it indicates that the administration didn’t sit down, have a mature adult-to-adult-talk with the parents and try to get at the bottom of the issue by investigating it further. They just did it the Bangla-Gang-Bang style- you know, the immature, irrational, absolutely unnecessarily-hyper-reactive, Indian-serial-drama-way an astonishing majority of us Bengalis deal with the problems we face in our everyday life.

"Your daughter cheated on our school exam that nobody in the real world actually gives a shit about?! Oh noooooo…. Get out of this holy institute of educayyshunn, right now! Your mere existence pollutes our divine, 100% organi, fake-resistant educayyshunn premise!"

Kid runs from the school, gets home by herself and hangs herself in her room. Thus ending all the pain and upcoming humiliation (from friends, kids at school, other family members, the neighborhood aunties who brag constantly about their kids’ school results etc.) that was gonna hit her like a tsunami. She saw it coming, that 15 years old kid. That’s why she killer herself.
Let that sink in for a moment.

Even a 15 year old is painfully aware of the barbarism we’re capable of today.
The question then rises, why did she do it? Why did she cheat in that stupid school exam? We don’t know, guess what? We’ll never know, because she is gone.

But ask yourself this, “Have I ever cheated on any of my exams in my whole student life?” If you’re a Bangladeshi that has managed to come out of this broken education system alive, 90% of you will guiltily nod. Why, don’t act all goodie two shoes now! Remember that time when you copied your friend’s exam scripts when the teacher so innocently looked the other way or had to take a walk outside to get a whiff of the beautiful fresh morning air? That’s not cheating? You want me to search it up on Wiki?

Cheating in exams is not something new. Frauds and cheats- those are some things that you’ll always have in the society if you don’t actually know how the heck to deal with them! People pretend as if they cannot comprehend why so many young adults and even adults are committing these crimes, nowadays using new technologies. Thieves get creative as time passes, duh?
So when you see that people keep doing these stuff, and in an alarmingly large number- what do you do? You, the one with power simply sit down with all the bubble-heads without power- the policymakers, legislative officials and so on. In other words, people that can actually do some rational thinking and you come up with an effective plan to tackle this issue. Effective, being the key word here because doing the right thing doesn’t always prove to be effective. So you figure out a way and you keep this conversation going all the while you apply that way. Because as time passes, you constantly need to update and revise policies you’ve made and make necessary changes. You can’t just follow along a policy the British made a hundred years ago and hope to God it all works out.

Look, it’s not like people don’t have common sense. You think the people doing these things don’t know that what they’re doing is illegal and can have bad consequences? They do, but why do they keep doing it? What makes that 15 year old do this? Can you do more than just blame it on bad parenting? To figure that out, you've got to have these useful conversations. Why? Because you can’t judge what the core reason was without knowing it any better, you moron!

What pains me most is this question that how can that school principal and her VP live with their irresponsible and immature selves, knowing that they were directly responsible for the untimely loss of kid? It certainly makes you anxious if you’re a parent and handed out your kid to lunatics like these for six hours a day. Yes, she did a bad thing, an offense (a crime, to some extent) that is never to be taken lightly.
She could get a warning from the administration, a few days of suspension and the obvious ass-whopping her parents were definitely gonna “reward” her with. Do I think she was stupid to have done that and should’ve known better? Yes! But none of that is relevant now.
Because she is gone.
But me thinking all that won’t lead me being incapable of doing the basic professional courtesy of sitting down with the kid and her parents and TALK! The school administration could have investigated it further to find out what made Oritri cheat on her exam. Was she under-prepared for the exam? Did she find the questions too hard? Were her parents pushing her little too hard to do better in the exam? Where and how did she managed to get that phone in the exam hall without anyone noticing? My sister went to VNS so as far as I know, VNS is pretty darn scary with their exam hall rituals and safety checks.

You don’t hate the criminal, you hate the crime. That’s something we keep forgetting.

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