The recent death of a 17-year-old Jadavpur University student has sparked renewed focus on ragging in the country. Thriving for decades across college campuses, this ‘initiation ceremony’—or, let’s just call it for what it is, cruelty and abuse—has been normalised by Bollywood for an equally long time. It shouldn’t be too surprising, as it remains an industry that reveres hierarchy and status quo, doing everything in its power to uphold them. But at least two more factors make Bollywood filmmakers depict ragging in shallow comedic ways: a) their limited understanding of Indian college life (where ragging becomes an easy plot point to inject ‘realism’ and ‘humour’) and b) their fascination with—and subservience to—bullies (most evident in their crawl-when-asked-to-bend attitude over the last several years).