B.Tech Student’s Final Note: A Cry For Change

Warning: This article includes a suicide note.

Shivam, a 24-year-old B.Tech student from Bihar, died by suicide in his hostel room last week. “If you're reading this, I'm dead. My death is my own decision. No one is involved in this," he said in his note.

Even as he claimed the decision was his alone, his final letter revealed much more. Between a request to donate his organs and a plea for the college to refund his “unused” fees to his parents, he wrote, “I was not a good student or maybe never was for this education system.” The pressure weighed heavily on him, but his words pointed to a deeper disillusionment with the larger system itself. “If this country wants to be great, start from the real education system,” he urged.

Suicide is at once a philosophical question, a political question and a silence that lingers beyond words. It is a paradox between courage and despair. It is an end, yet also a mirror held up to society.

“The extraverbal experiences are out there for us to read, to make sense of. The disordered world understands little, judges more. Suicide isn’t just a philosophical question. It is also a societal, political, economic and cultural question. It is a public health question,” Outlook’s editor-in-chief, Chinki Sinha, wrote in 2023. 

Globally, nearly one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds — and for each death, there are more than 20 attempts.

What remains certain is that every suicide leaves behind a life unfinished, with goodbyes left unsaid for those who remain. It is often a story of struggle, of silence, of systemic failures and of a moment of presence that could have made all the difference.

Shivam’s story is far from isolated. In India, a student dies by suicide every 40 minutes, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. More than 13,000 students died by suicide in 2021 alone. Over the past decade, even as the population of 0–24-year-olds shrank slightly from 582 million to 581 million, student suicides nearly doubled — rising from 6,654 to 13,044, as per the IC3 Institute.

In India, academic excellence is often seen as the pathway to success, and this social norm exacts its price. While attempt to suicide has been legally decriminalised and measures such as the New Education Policy and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy exist on paper, research shows their implementation remains limited. 

More than that, are policies enough? The question is: Are we sensitive towards it? Do we notice the signs staring us in the face, or do we wait for hindsight? 

In Outlook Magazine’s 21 September 2023 issue, we say ‘Suicide Isn’t A Moral Question.” India recorded its highest-ever suicide rate in 2021, with 12 deaths for every one lakh people. Yet those who die by suicide are too often branded as cowards or even criminals. What we fail to see is that those we label as perpetrators are, in truth, victims. 

Outlook’s editor-in-chief Chinki Sinha writes about juxtapositions, sensitisation and Sisyphus in, ‘Understanding Despair: Let Stories Help us’.

“Sisyphus, a Greek mythological character condemned by the gods to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom every time he reaches the top, chooses to live and Camus argues that Sisyphus has indeed freed himself of his punishment and even triumphed by accepting it and that the realisation of the absurd doesn’t justify suicide. The idea of the absurd lies in the juxtaposition of the human need to find the meaning of life and the “unreasonable silence” of the universe in response.”

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu chronicled a personal account, remembering her Baba, who lived with Schizophrenia. She wrote about love, loss and suicide grief in ‘The Deepest Cut.’

“I had listened to the word ‘suicide,’ for the first time, then aged 16, without batting an eyelid. I had not cried, either. But, I stayed up all night—as the rage filled me up—waking, after an hour of tossing restlessly and tearing up handwritten letters I had spent almost my entire childhood writing, that almost always began with ‘‘Dear Baba’’. As I ripped out page after page from diaries with frayed, yellowing edges, I felt more and more hatred.”

The conversation around suicide can so easily turn from sensitive to harsh, crowded with accusations and self-proclaimed guardians of morality. This happened in the case of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who died by suicide in 2020. Around the case swirled a storm of controversy — from allegations of drug use to suggestions of professional rivalry.

The authorities and medical reports said one thing, ruling out foul play, but the sentiments around his death were outrageous. In 'The Anatomy Of Sushant Singh Rajput's Death’, Tanul Thakur, breaks down the events that followed. 

How his mental health issues were dismissed, how an FIR was filed against his girlfriend, Rhea Chakraborty, and an entire army of keyboard warriors was unleashed. 

“The genie was out of the bottle, and the ‘SSRians’, wanting #JusticeForSushant, were born. Some of them were “legitimate fans who often posted” about the actor before his death, add Pal and Sen, but many also joined the “Twitter discussion” after his demise, “probably instigated by the celebrities’ initial tweets.”

The Rajput suicide was perhaps one of the most revealing cases the country has witnessed, challenging the very idea that a successful actor could choose to end his life, whatever the reasons may have been. Public sentiment remained unsettled and the discourse around it turned bitter — for some who refuse to accept the investigation’s conclusions, even five years later, the questions and anger persist.

Like a palimpsest, a life lost to suicide carries traces of what came before. Suicides break many myths for those who choose to see — whether it is a farmer crushed by debt, a Pulitzer Prize winner like Kevin Carter, or Robert Clive, who left behind a fortune of £500,000 in 1774.

As for Shivam, the last thing he wrote was an apology letter to his parents, for his inability to take care of them in their old age. "I can't take this stress, pressure anymore."