Spare the rod and spoil the child, is old saying. But one Principal, who recently caned a child Rouvanjit Rawla, a student of Class VIII, La Martiniere Boys School, was accused of abetment of suicide of the latter, when the boy hung himself to death at his home at Kolkata. However, Principal Sunirmal Chakrabarti, denies this, saying caning the boy cannot be linked to his suicide, as a principal who has to discipline his wards, he did just that. Can a boy, who must be around 13 years, take away his life, just because the Principal caned him for indiscipline? Today, children are lavished love and care like never before. They are pampered. If Rabindranatha Tagore, if he were alive today, he would have blamed the parents for making their children so intolerant like Pathik Chakravarti, in his ‘Home Coming’ story. Fathers often boast that they are like a friend to their sons. It is not right; the parents should have their own space and the children theirs. Parents need not be over strict, but neither should they give over freedom.
Contrast this with the suicide of super model Viveka Babaji, former Miss Mauritius and a Miss World participant who committed suicide by hanging in her home at suburban Bandra, Mumbai. Even though autopsy showed that she committed suicide, Police are weighing the circumstantial evidence like a note in her diary like ‘You killed me Gautam Vohra’ who is said to be her boy-friend. However, Gautam has filed an anticipatory bail application in the Sessions Court stating that he knew her only for the last 1 month, which in no case leads to infatuation of the dead model. He is said to have asked the Police to look into the past of the model who became famous because of her poses in the Kamasutra campaign, her debts, collapse of her business, and other sad events in her life. However, our breaking news channels, who are hunting for a worm, calls him her boy friend, and suggest that he must be arrested for abetment of her suicide.
A Football fan in the Malabar when watching Argentina-Mexico match wailed loudly that if Argentina hits another goal, he would commit suicide. This 19 year boy did exactly that when Argentina hit the Second goal in the match. What frenzy behaviour?
Ritu Saraswat, a fourth Semester BSc (Home Science) student of DrAmbedkar University, Agra took her life away because she was under tremendous mental stress due to the impending university examination. Another girl who was in Class V and aged 13 of Mojampur Village, Malda in West Bengal (girl’s name: Firoza Khatum) committed suicide after her parents pressed her to marry.
One Army officer and two sepoys committed suicide in their barracks in Jammu and Kashmir. All of them are stated to have returned from long leave and assumed their responsibilities only recently.
Kerala, the highest literate state in India account for 3% of India’s 1.2 billion, but witnesses 10% of suicides in the country. 50 5 of the suicides are directly and indirectly connected to liquor, and 30 % of the women who attempt suicide in Kerala are wives of alcoholics. Children, under the age of 18 constitute 7 to 10% of regular drinkers in Kerala. They drink hard liquor.
When some one you love dies from a heart attack or cancer, you remember him not in relation to his death but in relation to his life. This is not true of suicide. You go over and over the details of how he did it, why he did it and what any one could have done to prevent it. You keep rewriting the story, trying to get all the answers, or you bury the question and never fully grieve the loss. If you are constantly rewriting the life of the person who killed himself, you’re not moving ahead with your own life. Many people retire and don’t end killing themselves. Many people suffer from depression but don’t take their own lives. There is combination of factors, biological, physiological, psychological and genetic- that converge at a critical moment to push some one over the edge. The brain is an organ like an organ like every other organ in the body-heart, liver, kidneys, whose primary purpose is to keep us alive. But with the person who commits suicide that mechanism shuts down. It’s as if there is a wall and at some point, no matter what, that person is going to go over it. The painful reality is there’s a part of suicide we will never understand, but there is also growing body of scientific evidence that a specific area of brain-the orbital prefrontal cortex- is defective in people who commit suicide.
What was in common between Rouvanjit Rawle, Viveka Babaji, Firoza Khatum, Ritu Saraswat, football fan, army officer and the two sepoys, who all took away their lives, for one reason or the other? There was a generation gap between all of them. The young boy Rouvanjit, committed suicide because of his pride. We teach our children to be competitive. We teach them aggression. We want them to be somebody. We want them to excel. Can youbelive a boy in the First Standard is attending tution class in the evening! We aim the sky, and nothing less than the sky. Our expectations are very high. We want our children to come up to our expectations. If they cannot, we cannot tolerate. When they can’t come up to the expectations of their parents, these children in their young age become disappointed. They hide their disappointment. Disappointment becomes despair. Despair to helplessness. The present Society should not drive their children to a world where they do not enjoy the charm. They must enjoy their life. Cherish life. Only then, they will attain fulfillment. Parents are the real culprits for creating deluge in the young minds of children. They spoil the childhood atmosphere of the young tots with their wild dreams, expectations that they foresee in their little one. Let us remove the artificial Iron curtain- our ambitions which we slit down the throat of our children.
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