Suicides in Educational Institutions
Questioner: Hello, Acharya Ji. I wanted to ask about the recent suicides; multiple suicides, which happened in top institutes of the country, which included our institute as well. So, I wanted to know what is the reason behind these suicides which are occurring in the country, and is it due to societal pressure or academic pressure?
Acharya Prashant: You see, a kid is a very dependent being. Very dependent, so the kid is heavily exploited. You tell the kid that your life is worthless if you do not attain such and such goals, and then you keep the goal so unrealistic, and make the competition so severe by telling the same thing to every kid that practically only 1% can attain the goals they have been conditioned to attain. What will happen to the remaining 99%?
One of the most fundamental needs of the mind is to know itself, who am I, and why do I exist. Parents and educators never bother to address this question, let alone answer it satisfactorily. Instead, they indirectly, unconsciously supply you with a readymade and junk answer. They say, “You exist to achieve.” Achieve what? “Stuff that we tell you to achieve.”
Who told you that working for some MNC, and earning fat dollars is the purpose of your life? Left to yourself, would you have ever come to this conclusion, please tell me? Any of you? In fact, left to yourself, most of you would have never bothered to appear for the JEE. But you have been told that such and such things are non-negotiable; you need to have these. And everybody is telling you the same thing.
And even that would have been alright, had you been helped to awaken your own capacity to inquire and know. If that capacity is awakened, then it does not matter what the entire world is telling you. Then you can keep everybody’s opinion aside and say, “I know on my own. I do not need to believe because I know.” But the constant bombardment of propaganda is accompanied by an equivalent dehumanization of consciousness. Your consciousness is turned mechanical and animal, dehumanized.
So, these two things happen in tandem. One, you are told what things are all about. Secondly, you are actively discouraged from knowing on your own. If you know on your own, then you become some kind of a renegade, unacceptable, an uncontrollable rebel or something who needs to be straightened.
So, now the fellow comes, and he has been given impossible targets to achieve; and he has been told, “If he doesn’t achieve those targets then life is meaningless.” Some of them buckle, very sadly. All links in any chain do not carry the same strength; there are weak links, right? If you put undue pressure on the ends of the chain, some link will break. The fault does not belong to the link; you must question those who put the pressure.
Great talent, great talent; and what is that talent been told to do? That talent is being told, “You know, you go somewhere, and write code, random code and if that random code is for one of the top companies, then you are successful.” What success is there in this? Somebody is being told, “You go and work in a bank, and you just do data all your day,” what success is there in this? Had you not been being paid those big dollars, would you ever choose this kind of work, please tell me? What success is there in all this?
Somebody is selling shoes after doing computer science B.Tech from IIT Madras, what success is there in this? It’s just that the company is a footwear giant, MNC footwear giant, and then you take pride. You don’t take pride; your parents take pride, your parents take pride, and the entire society takes pride. And then a few girls can come to you, or their parents rather, “The fellow is earning, so, you know, how about a match?”
From all the directions, the message that is coming to you is, there is this particular definition of success; and if you cannot measure up to it, then life is not worth living. So, some of our friends, unfortunately, take it very literally. They say, “If life is not worth living, why should we anyway continue living at all?” You could say, “They are more logical than the rest of us.”
Culpability has to be fixed. Everybody who has been continuously teaching you that life exists just for the sake of material gratification is the culprit. Catch him; justice needs to be done. Otherwise, this kind of trend will continue. It’s not just about your campus; it’s happening everywhere.
Pressure, by itself, might not be necessarily a bad thing, but pressure for such non-sense? One fellow gave up his life because his elder brother was a super achiever. The elder brother was actually from an IIT. This fellow did not manage into an IIT; he was at some other place, and there too, he was not getting the desired kind of job offers. He quit.
On one hand, I commiserate with the parents. On the other hand, one needs to have a straight word with them. What exactly are you feeding your kids on? Do most parents even deserve to be called parents? For any small, for any small project, you require at least some qualification but for the project of raising a kid, you require zero qualification. All you need is, you know, one night of physical encounter. And then you say, “I’m a father and she is a mother, and the two of us are qualified to raise the kid.” How exactly are you qualified to raise the kid?
This is nothing but symptomatic of a society where inner education is considered dispensable, where we say that if you teach the student in history, geography, maths, science and the languages, that is sufficient. The student does not need to be given education in life. Education of the self, that is not necessary. If that is not necessary, this will be the outcome; and sadly, this outcome might keep getting repeated.
And that inner education, mind you, cannot come just naturally from the family or somewhere. Just as you require experts, professors to teach you maths and physics, similarly, you require experts to deliver life education. If that is not there, then the mind will remain very cluttered, very confused, and ultimately, sometimes suicidal. What a wastage, what a wastage! And what makes the wastage worse, is that the lives of those, even those who survive are rendered waste.
We talked about the fellow who’s working in a footwear MNC post his electrical engineering, why should that not be considered an equal wastage of life? Or the fellow who decides to sell fizzy drinks. If you look at the IIMs, for example, they attract a lot of crowd from the IITs. And what do these IITians do passing out from the IIMs? Somebody is selling fizzy drinks, somebody is selling home loans, that’s an equal wastage.
But we don’t want to talk of that; we talk of that as gainful employment. In fact, we gloat over that. We say, “You know, this is heroic. My Johnny has attained a 3-crore package,” and that sometimes comes to the newspapers as well. That should indeed come to the newspapers as a thing of tragedy, not as a matter of celebration.
