One of the suicide notes read, ‘I am responsible for my suicide. I cannot fulfil papa’s dream.’
Another boy wrote, ‘Daddy, I hate maths. I am a good-for-nothing son,’ ending his suicide note with a frowny face.3
These juvenile suicides, committed under the burden of ambition, are not uncommon in India, and we must ask whose ambition it is that they are burdened with. At the age of fifteen or less, it is not likely that all of them have such an intense ambition in them to clear an exam.
It is also not uncommon to hear of Indian parents goading their children to study hard for a stable job—regardless of what stability means in an increasingly unstable world. If we look at data on this subject, a recent survey conducted by a global bank found that ‘career success’ turned out to be the most popular goal Indian parents have for their children, outranking that of a ‘happy life’.4 The same survey indicated that Indian and Mexican parents were the keenest in the world that their children be successful in their careers. And more parents in India than anywhere else believed that a postgraduate degree was necessary for their children to achieve their life goals.
Whether it is love, money, education, status, freedom, friends, affection or time, a real or perceived deprivation in any of these aspects of life could leave us all (parents or not) reacting in ways different from the normal. We could be thinking obsessively of nothing else other than that specific pressing need. It might develop in us a keener sense of the value of the resource we lack, or it might be so debilitating that it could shrink our mental horizons and narrow our perspective. Indeed, in the country with the largest number of malnourished children on the planet, there are several situations that induce a sense of deprivation. It is then these reactionary behaviours by parents that severely affect the context in which children in India grow up. Parents indeed want the best for their children, and when they have been deprived of something themselves, they would often be keen to ensure their children aren’t.
Many parents, frustrated with their own condition, search for avenues of social justice in the schools of Kota. The test preparation schools here, and plenty others elsewhere in India, promise to catapult families out of their state of deprivation. Kota is rife with stories of how children of railway station baggage handlers, truck drivers and cycle rickshaw pullers study and make it to IIT and other prestigious colleges, changing the fortunes of the entire family. Bringing up a child in India involves the same intensely nurturing emotions as anywhere else in the world, yet parenting here holds a mirror to the dark, dubious side of a fast and unequally developing economy.
I would argue that for children in any country, it is not the GDP of a nation per se, but the quality of economic growth in areas such as health, the crime rate, income distribution and so on that matters more. A healthy mother is more likely to give birth to a healthy child. A society with a low crime rate will be a more nurturing environment for the child to grow up in, with safety and freedom. On the other hand, if there is inequality in the economy—no matter how fast it is growing—there will be parents who will live their entire lives feeling a lack of resources. And these parents would be bringing up their children in a different way from what they would have done otherwise.
In India, not only is there a severe lack of health and nutrition interventions, which inhibits a child’s developmental potential, but also an abnormally skewed pattern of education opportunities. On the one hand, there is a vast illiterate population, and on the other a privileged few are likely to get the best education resources to become even better. Increasingly, boys and girls are equally likely to be enrolled in school, but boys are more likely to be attending private schools and to have more money spent on their education.5 We do not have enough primary schools—and even fewer schools where teachers are not missing from class—but we have world-class higher education institutions.
However, while we hear the success stories of a few sacrificing parents who train the ‘first-bench boys’ of our country, the majority, whose children occupy the middle and last benches, are invisible. The pressure exerted on children in this category is terribly damaging. The consequent cases of juvenile suicide are often ignored, because every success in India is supposed to herald the birth of a thousand dreams, whereas every failure anonymously fades away.
I had been spared, but my brother, nine years my junior, was at the receiving end of my parent’s life project. They aspired to make him an IIT success. My brother was an average student, a keen cricket player, and an excellent debater. When he was in middle school, I wrote his debate speeches, my mother would sit up with him all night to make him learn by rote what I had written, and he would go on to deliver a spectacular performance to bring home the prize.
By the time my brother reached senior school, we had moved to live in New Delhi as my father had retired from the Indian Air Force. After a lifetime of service to the country, he had been awarded a pension which was barely enough to cover our family’s monthly bills. My mother worked as a teacher at a local school, and in the evenings, she would teach at home to help our family make ends meet. I did odd jobs, such as working as an usher at exhibitions to cover my university fee and all living expenses. My brother studied in the school in which my mother taught, and so his school fee was waived. However, three years before his IIT entrance exam, my parents decided
