I am not at all making fun of anyone when I say that Kota is just the kind of a city that would inspire the feeling of taking your own life. The busy roads which were miraculously dead calm if you chose the right time to come out and the narrow lanes and many streets which were filled with students either hanging out in fast food joints or busy returning to their dwellings. And I say dwellings because honestly now that I am myself living on the campus of DU I feel that be it a P.G.(paying guest) or a student hostel it can never quite truly feel like a home.

The students making their way to the hostels, PGs, flats, and houses busy getting on with their lives and studies makes a person really wonder, "Are these people the ones who are capable of taking their own lives? These motivated and determined-looking kids? Them? Naah, a person would look a certain way if they are suicidal." And in the next upcoming days whenever I got to read about a suicide in the paper I was struck by the thinking and mentality of kids of my years and elder to me. "My goodness, it's just studying! Can't they manage that?! What do they do with their time if they can't even study?!". In defense of my narrow-minded and young self's thinking I would like to point out that a certain study ethic, which was instilled in me since childhood and the absence of television or a smartphone from my formative years was what made me prone to be a studious introverted and bookworm girl who lives in an interesting household developed a practical thinking and a cynical personality. Though my worldview of studies being "easy" to do will change in my years when I was forced to leave my basketball for coaching classes - Maths, Physics, and Biology with Chemistry taking up all my time. And as my pre-pubescent and pubescent ages would concur, I never did belong to the difficult STEM stream or its subjects. My love for books, social studies subjects, and art in general was clear to me but I decided I would do it. I will clear NTSE, and I will bring a scholarship home. I will become good at Maths and there will come a day where I will excel at it. But since my ninth grade started and I was persuaded to leave basketball by my parents, I lost both my physical and mental health. I had a hard time juggling both school and coaching, concentrating in classes, studying the Mathematics and Science subjects in general. I used to wake up to go to school every morning, come back around two in the afternoon, change clothes, eat, and then sleep if I could fit it in that schedule, then change my clothes again for my coaching shirt and jeans and then attend 3-4 hours of coaching where I struggled to concentrate on the classes. I don't know how I survived my ninth and tenth alive but what I understood in those years completely was that why students committed suicide. The frustration of not getting what is being taught, not being able to follow up on home assignments, seeing your peers do better when you are trying your best, seeing how your parents are spending money on your education, the pressure for building a conventional and a successful career and the guilt. The guilt of not meeting their expectations, seeing that their money is going to waste and you couldn't even make them proud…. It's a lot. And that is capable of messing up the strongest of minds. I was struck with this realization that maybe I would never be able to achieve excellence no matter how hard I try. While others were naturally good at these subjects I could never get basic concepts even when I spent hours on them. And those years taught me that no matter where you are in your life one should never belittle feelings and thoughts the mind instigates to punish you. It's a response created because we were always celebrated only if we brought laurel leaves home, a single mistake can ruin it all, marr a perfect record. And we were constantly scolded for making the smallest of errors. I distanced myself from my parent's cause –surprise! Surprise! They never understood me and my siblings cause they were good at something I never could be and was constantly compared to them in a field where I could never win. I just desperately hoped everything would come to an end, that maybe when my tenth ended I would be happy and free. But my parents were determined to make me take science in my later years. And it started my breakdowns and fights with them. This reached a point where I threatened that I would cut off my family and disown them if they didn't let me choose arts. And so, when I chose arts, let's say eleventh and twelfth, the classes where students were most prone to taking their lives were spent with much less stress even though my subjects in arts demanded extreme hard work from me. And I won't sugarcoat my reality, I am nowhere near figuring out what I want to be in my life and the path I have chosen is not at all predictable. But what I do know is that each time I think of suicide now, for me, I still have hope that I can struggle enough and make it life. I always have that ray of hope I hold on to in my darkest days that this path has light for me unlike how many students simply cannot feel it nor are able to see it.

But now I have experienced what the students of IIT and NEET go through, I choose to respect if they choose the path of self-immolation, because I know it's not the right path but they simply cannot see any other way to feel free, feel comfort even just for a moment. And honestly, I feel, even though people will call me immature, it's unfair, to push someone in an unfamiliar, competitive, and extremely harsh environment where it's expected of that person not only to survive but make it through the hardest routines and crack exams. And on top of all of it expect them not to break even once.

In India, awareness is spreading but not fast enough. How many teenagers are to be found dead for not being able to handle life's pressures before society realises that maybe, they need to leave kids alone in figuring out what they want to do with their lives?

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