Food for thought
Something is dangerously wrong with the country’s student community when it comes to facing life, its allied risks and uncertainties. The precariousness of life is natural because one has seen just the present and faced just the past while he is absolutely unsure of what the future might look like. But that’s life, its totality, and its beauty too. But facing life entails a lot of inner courage – the courage to brave all odds and discover opportunities in challenges, and the will to profit from past experiences and deploy them in the present towards strengthening the pillars of an uncertain future. How capable are our students of when it comes to facing life that way?
The latest suicide by a student, Mark Andrew Charles, at IIT-Hyderabad is a case in point. He was pursuing a prestigious course – Master of Designing – and he was about to complete it in another three days when on Wednesday, just fearing he might not do well and not get a job as well, he hanged himself in his hostel room. He was suspected to be suffering from depression – all due to the examination-job factor, which has emerged as a 21st-century killer in the country. Charles has left behind an emotional six-page suicide note, though, saying, “I don’t have a job, probably I won’t get one. No one hires a loser. It’s amazing to look at my grade sheet. A few more letters and it’ll look like an alphabet chart.” He has also advised his friends at IIT-Hyderabad to live a happy life and not to waste it in the IT industry.
Happy life – that’s the crux of it all. In schools, students are not motivated to have happiness as their aim in life, nor are they told what it means to be happy and contented – beyond mere marks and grades. There is absolutely no stress on the making of a quality life, driven by hope and happiness, and by an innate urge to celebrate life in all its shades because life is a potential in itself and what matters far more is the right attitude to live amid the sufferings and uncertainties of the day. In fact, as modern psychology tells us, to be happy requires a skill. One may call it happiness skill culturing and development. This has to start right at the primary level of education so that students are capable of seeing life and its potential beyond the stereotype of marks and grades.
In the instant case, Charles should have had no reason at all to get so fed up with life just because of the grade-job factor that he should be driven to suicide. After all, he was pursuing a Master’s in a job-driven course at a very prestigious engineering college. What should prompt such promising youth to take such a drastic step, or why one should be so very depressed despite the potential available to be explored, psychiatrists would tell us better. But isn’t it a serious case that students, including in Northeast India, are beginning to take life so that they would have nothing to come to their aid as second thought before leaving this beautiful planet all of a sudden? Ponder, ponder, ponder. This deficit of inner courage will turn far more monstrous if the problem is not addressed at an early level. This must now form a very serious dimension of the education system itself.
