SUICIDE…..

How does a person dare to commit a suicide? I think no amount of studies or researches on this subject can actually answer this dare which seems like a mystery. Despite the fact it’s so difficult to murder oneself, we do hear a lot about suicides being committed, by farmers, by students, by married women and men many a times. What are the circumstances that lead a person to commit suicide? As I’ve done no research in the
field save few reports and articles in the newpapers, so I’ll restrict myself to one particular domain of this daring issue and this domain appeals to us (the student community) and i.e., suicides committed by students.

Lets focus our attention on the best students of our country, namely those who belong to institutes like IITs. Recently a student of IIT Kanpur committed suicide and this was the second in past six months and fourth in the past two years. Well, almost every student who comes to an institute, such as IIT, can be considered as, or rather he is, mentally sound and intelligent. So what happens to that soundness or intelligence, so as to say,  after his or her coming to the college?

Some students tend to get lazy in studies because they think that they have studied enough to make it till here, so they tend to have poor performances and hence bad grades, which is not a big deal to them. But on the other hand, there are students who are the real pursuers or I can say in the real quest of knowledge. So no matter what the circumstances be, they study and work hard all the time. Now if such a student is confronted with a situation in which he gets a shocking ‘F’ grade, reasons may be any, what is he supposed to do? Anything, anything but suicide. C’mon however hard it may be to digest the bad marks, pressures from the society, from the family, I don’t think that suicide is the only to way get out of it.

I was involved in a discussion about the same with my friends two days back. One of the them pointed out the term ‘peer pressure’ . He said, “a lonely person, or so to say, a person without a heavy social circle, living by his own, won’t take a step towards committing suicide”. And it seems quite apt to me. Because if a person doesn’t have anyone to comment or scold him or taunt him on his poor performance why the hell will he think of committing suicide.

The guy in the recent case, searched on google on how to commit suicide. As studies reveal, that it takes almost close to 30 seconds to die if you hang yourself by a rope. 30 seconds!!! Can you imagine the unbearable pain of those 30 seconds!! If you poison yourself, it still takes time for it to react and one is supposed to suffer the burning agony inside for quite a substantial amount of time before acheiving one’s feat of committing suicide. Well there are innumerable methods. But this guy chose the one with severest pain but the quickest one too. He went to the railway lines and lie down there, across the rails, fully stretched, and waited for the train. All I can say is Insane!!!

Not very long ago, IITians came up with a documentary-cum-movie on the suicides in IITs. I think it was screened in IIT Bombay. They have highlighted two major problems of a normal IITian in the movie. One is that of the education system of assignments, sessionals and projects of the IITs which take their toll on the students (well I wasn’t satisfied). The second one was (which is also universal but more appealing in the leading institutes of engineering) not having any girl friends. I don’t know why but people ( I mean guys) after coming to colleges think of having a girl friend. And as is the case in IITs and other major institutes of engineering and technology, the girls to boys ratio it pathetic (again don’t know why).  Even take the example of out own batch here in IIIT,Hyderabad. We have 13 girls compared to 163 guys. 13 girls!!! When I revealed this fact to my friends back home, there only response was, “you gotta be kidding us!!” .
May be some people don’t agree with me, but this issue of having a girl friend means a lot to a majority of guys. And in circumstances when you don’t have girls, you live your life in constant frustation. To add fuel to the already worse circumstances, if a guy somehow manages to have a girl friend then the others would die of jealousy.

But whatever be the case, human life is more valuable than anything else. Infact it’s invaluable and those who can’t appreciate it simply don’t deserve to be called humans. Whatever your problem may be, however gruesome it may be, it does never demand your life to get out of it. Though it’s easy to say and difficult it implement but it seems to work this way. I have seen many people who are in deep trouble and yet they are surviving. I think they are surviving just for the sake of somehow surviving, but when I ask them, they asnwer, “look around you my boy, there is so much suffering in this world, you’ll always find poeple in bigger and deeper sorrows than yourself and then you say to yourself, ‘when they can survive, why can’t I’. And that’s how it works. It’s just a matter
of satisfaction and always thanking God for what you’ve got instead of cursing for what you’ve not” . And I mesmerized this statement for the entire lifetime.

Besides, even a small needle or thorn hurts when accidently one steps over it, then how can one think of murdering himself, giving so much pain to the already suffering body. So just grow up. Live for others, in case you don’t want to live for yourself. Look around, be lively, you will find people poorer and baser than you, surviving. And just keep in mind “There is always HOPE”.