A father wanted his son to become a doctor. That wish, repeated too many times and with too much force, ended with the father dead and the son in police custody. What happened in a three-storey house in Lucknow's Ashiana area in February 2026 is not just a crime story. It is a mirror held up to something deeply broken in how we talk to our children about their futures.
What Actually Happened?
Let us start with the facts. A 21-year-old man named Akshat Pratap Singh was arrested for shooting his father, Manvendra Singh, a businessman who owned four pathology centres and three liquor shops. Akshat allegedly shot his father with a rifle at around 4:30 in the afternoon following a heated argument. He then brought the body down from the third floor and, in an unused room, began cutting it into pieces.
The severed hands and legs were disposed of at different locations across Lucknow, while the torso was placed inside a blue drum on the ground floor of the house. The crime only came to light when neighbours noticed a foul smell coming from the property and alerted the police.
When Akshat's sister walked in and discovered what had happened, he allegedly threatened her into silence and continued dismembering the body in her presence. This detail, perhaps more than any other, tells us how far things had gone. This was not a moment of blind rage that passed. This was something cold and calculated.
One Word at the Centre of It All: NEET
The motive, according to police, traces back to one word i.e. NEET. The Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police told reporters that the root of the incident appears to be the father repeatedly pressuring Akshat to focus on studies and clear the NEET medical entrance examination. A thorough investigation, however, remains underway.
NEET, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test is India's single gateway into medical education. It is one of the most competitive exams in the country, with hundreds of thousands of students appearing each year for a fraction of available seats. For many families, having a child become a doctor is not just a career goal. It is a matter of pride, status, and the fulfilment of a long-held dream. The pressure that comes with this expectation is rarely spoken about honestly.
A Family That Had Everything Except an Honest Conversation
Manvendra Singh was a financially comfortable man. His brother, who was also his business partner, said the family was well-off enough to secure admission to a private medical college if needed, and that he was not fully aware of any extreme academic pressure being placed on the boy and yet the pressure was clearly real enough, at least to Akshat. Real enough to break something inside him entirely.
Akshat had also been working at one of his father's liquor stores, drawing a monthly salary of Rs 17,000, but was reportedly unhappy with the arrangement. Here was a young man caught between a future he did not want and a present that offered him no dignity either. He was neither a student nor free to choose his own path. He was stuck, and the person holding him there was the one person he could not escape.
Where Did the Idea Come From?
The police noted that the method used was reportedly inspired by the so-called blue drum murder case in Meerut from March 2025, in which a woman and her alleged partner were accused of killing her husband, cutting the body into 15 pieces, and sealing them inside a large blue drum with cement. The fact that a young man facing an argument with his father had a premeditated method ready in his mind tells us something disturbing about how violence gets absorbed and stored, waiting for a moment of crisis to surface.
The Questions Nobody Is Asking
This is the part of the story that tends to get lost when tragedies like this are reported. We focus on the horror and it is horrifying but we rarely sit with the question of what conditions make a young person feel this trapped. That is not an excuse. Nothing excuses what Akshat did. But understanding how we got here is the only way to make sure we do not keep arriving at the same place.
What we know about Manvendra Singh is that he was a father with ambitions for his son. What we do not know and what we will perhaps never fully understand is what those dinner table conversations actually sounded like over months and years. Were there ultimatums? Was there ever a moment when the father truly listened to what the son wanted for himself? These questions are not asked to assign blame to a man who is dead and cannot speak for himself. They are asked because they are the questions every parent in India ought to be sitting with right now.
This is not the first such case. It will not be the last. Until we are willing to have an honest conversation about what we are doing to young people in the name of ambition, we will keep reading stories like this one and feeling shocked every single time.
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