Student Suicides
- In
- 12:23 PM, Jan 29, 2016
- Amiya Ranjan Satapathy
The year was 2001, when I moved to USA. I am working in the same company since then. Sixteen plus years, same group, though the duties have changed. My group redefined their competition at different times with a talented pool of people. I was lucky to work with such a bright bunch of people over the years. Sometimes, I felt I could compete with them, some other times, I myself got mesmerized by their sheer intelligence and novel ideas. Most of them graduated from the IITs and did their post-graduation in some university in USA. Given a well-defined problem, I would excel over them. However, when the problem was hedgy or new, I struggled, but they took it through. Sometime I felt, probably my education and lack of contemporary exposure was the cause of the problem. I blamed my rural grooming, family background for these miseries. Very often, I felt bad about my upbringing. I wish, I could have worked hard to be in that ‘elite club’. I blamed the urban elite, who bought top class coaching and training for their kids and tweak the system to their benefits.
I was a scholarship holder in class three, five, seven and matriculation. I was at the top, as long as I was in a small village or in a small town. When I joined a prestigious college in my state capital for my eleventh and twelfth grade, I was a fish out of water. Suddenly the teaching medium changed from my mother tongue Oriya to English. The kids were all educated in English medium and I was not and hence had trouble understanding the lectures. I was a good orator in my high school days. My oratorical skills went away with the change in medium. First few months were really a fight to follow what teacher was saying in class. Over time, I got used to it. By the time I had graduated from college, (though I was not in the top 20 students of the college, I was not much worse either compared to lot of these so called elite kids.), I was cursing my rural background all along. I was revolting too. Many ideas came to my mind to break this barrier by violent means. I don’t know what part of my upbringing or hope killed those ideas just after their inception.
Similar rebellious ideas came to mind here in USA too. I blamed my upbringing for my stagnant career development. As is known, it was a very rough time in USA since 2000. The Dot.com bubble, followed by the great recession, followed by tech consolidation were new phenomenon in this period. It was imperative for one to be on his toe always. One had to be ever ready to accept latest technologies and try to update one’s skills. Rebellions, how great they may be, are excuses for failure to adopt and compete with peers.
Two years back, I moved to a new group in same company expecting a speedy career growth. I faced the same problem here too. I was talking to my manager once about this. What he told me was an eye opener to me. “Getting promotion by hook or crook won’t last long. You need to earn it by your hard work, by your sincere effort, by your intelligence and by your capability to produce something that affects company revenues. Mediocrity isn’t an option here. You can hold onto your job simply by doing enough, but to grow you need to differentiate yourself from others. Continuous struggle and continuous up gradation of your skills are your options.”
I heard that a student committed Suicide in Hyderabad other day. The background is similar. He is from a rural poor family. He struggled and was able to get admission to PhD in a central university. That itself is a huge achievement. His rebellious behavior of taking part in Yakub Memon hanging protest, attacking a fellow student, because of differences of opinion, organizing rallies to fight against so called ‘affluent upper caste people’ may be explained by the same mindset, I was talking before.
It is hard to agree that this rebellion is solution to his problem. In my opinion, solution is to avail the opportunity provided by the system in terms of reservation and to work hard to excel compared to your peers in the field you are working. One way to solve this is to by having a strong character building mechanism through our education system. Any change there will be opposed by the groups who lose their control on this rebellious mentality and brand it as ‘saffronization’. But we don’t have other easy way. I didn’t take a violent turn in my teen age, because of hope and my upbringing. We need to create similar hope and character to withstand this pressures.
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