Dead in the teens : The trauma of India's Students

One of my friends whose whereabouts are usually not traceable, because he is involved in hectic travel has grounded himself for the next month or so. He has stationed himself at home ; well not exactly at home, but like a tame pet, he goes off to the office in the morning and is safely back to home base by evening. after hearing that piece of news, I haven been given similar instructions on the home front and my wife herself has taken leave a month’s leave and has parked herself at home. In both our families, a child is going through that iconic rite of passage – the board exam….. An event talked about in awe and hushed whispers.

I do not know the number of students who sit for the Board examinations in India every year, with practically each state having its own board of secondary education apart from the grand daddy of them all, the Central Board of Secondary Education. But whatever be the number, the ides of March bring with them the news of the examination season and the country it would seem defers to the phenomenon. elections if due, are scheduled and rescheduled to ensure that the examination schedule is not trifled with ; the election commission , typically a law unto itself , defers to the board examinations – elections will never be scheduled in a way that they interfere with the examination time table.

But stress for exam going students and increasingly their families is becoming a major issue in the last decade and it is a matter of concern that young people are being exposed to stress at such an early stage of their lives when their coping mechanism is so weak. Eexamination stress pushes students to various kinds of perversions, not only affecting concentration and memory but also forcing them to adopt abnormal behavior. Stressed out children are increasingly consuming tobacco, drinking tea, coffee and taking commonly-available amphetamine drugs such as cough syrups to keep up while preparing for exams.

And then there are those who simply can’t cope and end their lives. According to government reports, over 5000 students committed suicide in 2006. The unofficial figures are even higher. It seems stress is pushing our students to the brink; many of them just in class six. Boys are more vulnerable to committing suicide than girls, because adolescent girls seek support from family and friends to deal with emotional stress during examination. But as boys are less expressive, they tend to suppress their feelings of inadequacy and fear of poor performance. This often drives them to suicide to end their frustration

What’s pushing today’s Indian students - a bright generation with a global reputation for their high intelligence quotient - to the brink? Parental and peer pressure, rising ambitions and fierce competition are brewing a deadly cocktail for these young minds. Moreover, a nation racing towards affluence, an economy on a remarkable upward growth trajectory and skyrocketing salaries are putting unprecedented pressure on youth to succeed.

Although some note has been taken of the phenomenon, the changes are till date largely cosmetic. helplines set up by the central board of secondary education and other NGOs that function in these months of the year certainly serve a useful purpose, educational reforms that will evaluate performance and learning by means other than examinations alone or an over haul of the syllabi have been slow in coming. The reform of India’s Macaulayan system of education based on rote learning and memorisation requires urgent attention.

Besides, though the UPA government has imposed a 2 percent cess on all Central taxes, decades of under-investment in education has created shocking shortages of buildings, laboratories, libraries, even drinking water and sanitation facilities in the nation’s dilapidated education sector. A national consensus has to be built on the premise that higher education outlays are vitally important investments in the nation’s future and that this outlay is needed to be accompanied by revamp of the educational system so that young lives are not snuffed out under the burden of school syllabi and examinations, which currently passes for education in India

How Sacred is Life ?

Certain themes tend to be the proverbial red rag before the bull. For the Church, particularly the Catholic Church, euthanasia or mercy killing is one of them. As of course is abortion. And when the church finds itself in a position where it finds itself confronted by a piece of legislation that is being enacted precisely to this en d and that too by godless communists the stage is set for a confrontation. As is happening in Kerala at the moment.

While no one will dispute that life is sacred, it is the very sacredness of life itself that is now seen through a variety of prisms and what different people see reflected through the prism is quite different. Advocates of mercy killing will say that a man living as a vegetable dependant on others for very existence is an affront to the dignity of a human being and there must be a way out with adequate safeguards where a man can choose to take his life either through conventional suicide or assisted means where his friends and family carry out the wishes of a person expressed and willed earlier.

The more socially conservative would say that no safeguards are adequate enough and that in an unscrupulous society, society would find it very easy to get rid of those it considers an unwanted burden; those who are no longer economically productive, the weak and the elderly. This is of course entirely plausible; human kind has an intermittent history of having exactly that.

Then of course there is a third strand – the spiritual strand which claims that life is created by God and can only be extinguished by God alone. This is the Judeo- Christian view and the view that has traditionally influenced our law making till the recent times. If suicide is a crime under the Indian Penal Code thus far, it is precisely because of this influence.

But the Indian tradition is not so uniform. There is a long tradition in the Indic religions of the wise and enlightened being able to discern as to when their useful span of life is over. And when that discernment dawns, they then intentionally withdraw from life in various ways. The Mahabharata story of the Pandavas retreating to the bitter cold of the Himalyas where all of them except Yudhishthira died of cold and exhaustion is a well known example. In recent times, Acharya Vinoba Bhave is another personality who chose to embrace the Jain tradition of santhara which involves fasting to death after living a rich and long life. Many others also follow this practice from time to time.

But clearly issues like mercy killing must be viewed with in the social context in which they are enacted and a just question that deserves to be asked is about the quality of life that citizen’s experience. One must not forget the many that are able and agile and are in the prime of life who aren’t waiting for laws to enact to take their life. The stressed students who die before and after our back breaking board exams, the farmers whose suicide we no longer read about because terrorism captures every headline, are they able to live lives of dignity ? life is sacred all right but the essence of its sacredness needs to be affirmed in many ways and not just by forcing a man or woman to live when there is nothing much to live for.