…and the moment I stepped into her room, and saw her hanging from the ceiling fan, all I was left with was unbearable grief, soul-wrenching bereavement, and a permanent scar on my heart.
“Why did you do that, girl?” Murmuring
this, my voice broke, my heart shattered, and my breath became heavy. Not just
for the days to come, but for weeks, and months, and years to come. I grabbed her in my arms, emptied
a deluge of tears, mourned the most calamitous loss of my life, felt as
loneliest as if I was the only remaining person in the world, and madly prayed to the Almighty with the best of my devotion to bring her to life once again. But all went in
vain! Nothing made her alive. She kept lying in my lap, with partially closed eyes, and keeping a million-dollar gentle smile on her face as she always used to. My sumptuously beautiful girl who was always filled with charisma and zeal was all still today. I had lost all my senses that I wasn’t
agreeing to accept that these scintillating eyes would never open again, and this
sparkling smile would just disappear forever. I was so lost in anguish that I entered
into a new melancholic world – where the walls around me were weeping, the furniture
singing distressing music, the Smiling Buddha sitting with a long face, and the
lively & positive messages on wall posters converted into dark & evil.
“I wish someone would have
described you the harsh realities of life, and maturely conditioned your mind
in such a way that would have stopped you from taking this extreme step. I wish
I could have sat next to you and talked to you once for a few hours and made
you realize how phenomenal life is, how fortunate it is to have taken birth in
a human’s body, and how loving & caring there are tens of people out there
who wish with all their hearts for your overall wellbeing and happiness. I wish I had reminded you again that failing a competitive exam is never the
end of life; getting mercilessly cheated and apathetically abandoned by your
partner doesn’t mean at any cost that all is lost or the good times will never
come in your life; and facing a rejection today never indicates that you’ll
never be able to successfully get through the hurdles of life. There are
millions of opportunities out there that carry the potential to award you a
life full of prestige and luxury. Also, there are millions of people around the
globe from the opposite gender you can choose to spend your life with, make a
wonderful family, have children, and live happily ever after. I wish I would
have once narrated to you the ordeal your parents, partner, good friends, and well-wishers
would go through after this deplorable step of yours…” I kept on lamenting.
Despite getting ample amount of
time and resources, if you are still unable to solve the typical IIT-JEE
questions, rightly answer the complicated UPSC questions, or fail to remember
piles of information for your NEET exam – it’s quite simple to come to the
conclusion that you won’t get through the exam. In fact, why should you? But, that
doesn’t mean you will end your life because of this. If you really wanna
crack it, all you need is to do some introspection, do your own SWOT analysis, rectify
your mistakes, and work harder & smarter for the next attempt and stop not until
you attain your quintessential goal of life. I know it just isn’t as simple as
it sounds, but that’s what you need to understand, this is what life is!!!
You’ll have to keep yourself high in spirits, no matter how fierce, toxic, and
challenging the (intrinsic or extrinsic) factors go. I hope that you have now
understood that quitting is not the solution, it never is. Do you really think
that you’ll find yourself in absolute peace once you depart (by killing
yourself) from this life? No! You won’t be!!! Stop living in the disillusion
that you’ll free yourself from all the complications by quitting your life
in this manner. In fact, you’ll be living a life that will be way worse and
nasty than the one you are living now. Also, give sincere thought to what’s
gonna happen to your parents, partners, and well-wishers. Running away from
the harsh realities of life, and in the quest of setting them free from societal constraints, you actually are dragging them (especially your parents
and life partners) into a zone of sheer misery and gloom in the crucial decades of their life when they will be needing you the most. With this disastrous step
of yours, you are only forcing them to hate their own life. I agree, if there
are some serious issues with the coaching and exams, they must be resolved in
the very first place; but solely holding them responsible for any student’s
suicide is not completely right.
If you didn’t perform well in the
tests, you couldn’t match pace with the curriculum, you couldn’t completely
revise the academic resources provided, and you didn’t solve enough questions – it’s not the fault of some coaching institution or the exam per se,
to a huge extent it’s yours only. IIT-JEE won’t ask a childish ‘what is 5+5’
question, neither UPSC will ask you to write an essay on cow, nor NEET will ask
you the full form of WBC. So, stop expecting and praying for it to be easy. I
may sound rude to you at this time, but that is the ultimate truth of life.
Someone has rightly said “If you can’t bear the heat, get out of the
kitchen”, the same could be analogised to “If you want it to be easy, comfortable, and joyful, don’t come to Kota, or don’t get into any competitive exam’s den”.
Coz, it is not going to be, in fact, it should not be. If it is the battle for
the best colleges in the country or the best jobs; it’s not wrong for them to
reject anyone who is even a modicum lesser than the best. Hence, keep aspiring
for the best, keep building up yourself, and keep polishing your skills and your
overall personality – as there’s no alternative. As I mentioned above, if you
fail, it doesn’t mean at all that you don’t deserve it. It all is just a matter
of time. You have to have brutal patience and the unrelenting belief in your mind
that you won’t give up. Keep yourself engaged in it wholeheartedly. I assure
you, one day you will make it. Quitting on life is never an option. There are
always a million other golden opportunities out there.
These days, there’s much mayhem about
what we exactly need to do, to put a brake on the drastically upward-moving trajectory
of suicides. In my opinion, NO, you don’t need to stop coaching institutes from
conducting tests, shut them altogether, or declare more days of fun in aweek. All these moves by the administration may temporarily make things better,
but in the long run will further deteriorate things for the students, and
sabotage their overall well-being. It’s always better to learn how to fight a
Lion, and face your fears; rather than keeping yourself away from the den, and
running away from the problems. Coz eventually you’ll have to leap into the den
one day, and it will all boil down to how better you have trained yourself
during the times of gloom and sombre. So, it's way better to focus on guiding students on how
to improve their overall mental health and instil inspirational (no matter
how grim) life lessons into their minds as I have tried above. In fact, I guess…making
them read the above post alone (especially the latter part) will make a huge
difference, and garner positive results. Stop making them weaker by giving them
momentary pleasures, and taking their pain for short-lived durations; instead,
try making them mentally and emotionally stronger so they can withstand any situation (no matter how horrible) that life throws at them. According to me, these are the
most important skills for the 21st century and are going to remain
for centuries to come.
My heart goes out to all those students who perished under the burden of studies, their aggrieved parents, and their families. I wish I would have gotten a chance to talk to them for a few minutes. Rest peacefully…!