Barely a week ago, two lovers in Kerala, the girl a second semester MBBS student in Kochi and the boy a student in a dentistry college in Thiruvananthapuram, killed themselves after their parents opposed their relationship. Though located hundreds of kilometres apart, they planned their deaths over their mobile phones and took their lives at the same time. A year ago, the suicide of three Class 12 students at Alappuzha, also in Kerala, shocked the state. It later turned out that the girls, who came from an underprivileged background, had been given mobiles by their boyfriends and had hidden them till they killed themselves. “Spirituality and the traditional Indian austerity seem to have lost relevance and ‘market-imposed milestones’ are being actively pursued at the direct cost of personal will and happiness,” says Kulkarni. A different take on spirituality and freedom, though, turned out to be the reason for West Bengal’s Sugata Bhattacharya’s unquenchable quest for death. A note left by his feet as he hanged himself from his hostel room merely said: “For no reason; for one reason, death”. Some time before he took his life, Bhattacharya had penned some poetry: “I’d rather be a bird in the open skies and hover gracefully unbound and free…In my deep slumber I can be as I may…”
The reasons are as varied as they are tragic. For Venugopal Reddy, the demand for a separate Telengana state was reason enough to kill himself. It had to do with “something that the government can sit and decide”, KG Kannabiran, president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, told the press. “The movement need not be violent as this is not a revolution… but they have stationed the entire police force here (at Osmania University, the nerve centre of the Telengana movement) and that has provoked the students. We are angry. I would not be human if I didn’t get angry,” Kannabiran said. For Venugopal Reddy, that anger led to suicide.
So is there a solution to all of this? Says Salman Abid, a career counsellor from Andhra Pradesh: “So many students have committed suicide but the question of Telengana remains unsolved. The solution lies in the students asking themselves a few questions: will my death separate the soil of Telengana from Andhra?; am I alone with complete authority over my life when my second creator – my parents – are alive?” It is time to realise, he points out that while lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, lost time is gone forever. For the depressed student about to take his or her own life in today’s India, though, there seems to be little time to ponder such matters of reality, or life.
The reasons are as varied as they are tragic. For Venugopal Reddy, the demand for a separate Telengana state was reason enough to kill himself. It had to do with “something that the government can sit and decide”, KG Kannabiran, president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, told the press. “The movement need not be violent as this is not a revolution… but they have stationed the entire police force here (at Osmania University, the nerve centre of the Telengana movement) and that has provoked the students. We are angry. I would not be human if I didn’t get angry,” Kannabiran said. For Venugopal Reddy, that anger led to suicide.
So is there a solution to all of this? Says Salman Abid, a career counsellor from Andhra Pradesh: “So many students have committed suicide but the question of Telengana remains unsolved. The solution lies in the students asking themselves a few questions: will my death separate the soil of Telengana from Andhra?; am I alone with complete authority over my life when my second creator – my parents – are alive?” It is time to realise, he points out that while lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, lost time is gone forever. For the depressed student about to take his or her own life in today’s India, though, there seems to be little time to ponder such matters of reality, or life.
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