Another IITK Suicide

I came to my blog today, the other one, Travel Tales from India, I saw a lot of people coming to my blog after searching for 'IITK Suicide' and landing on this post of mine through google search.

It immediately made me suspicious. I asked a friend and he says yes, someone did commit suicide yesterday. The last one happened in November end 2005. Within five months, comes the next one. I think end semester exams are going on again in the campus and both happened at the time of the end semester exams. I do not know the reason for both, but it makes me immensely sad that such young kids end up taking their lives with sickening regularity. Incognito writes about it from IITK:

In the evening, as alongwith a couple of friends we were looking at the 'F' list on the DOSA notice board, we couldn't help noticing that there was this course in Chemical Engineering that had around 12 fakkas (F grades). A little too high for a departmental course. And then someone remarked "Is baar kisi ne suicide nahi kiya na!" The entire group standing there burst out laughing. I bet, each one of us knew that the joke was sick. But then it was quite a fact that the suicide by a second year Mechanical Engineering student during the end-sem examinations had resulted in somewhat reasonable grading the previous semester. And this time, no one had done it.
...
An hour ago, I got the news. A Final year chemical engineering student ... had been discovered dead in his hostel room. He was one of those who had been awarded an F in the very course that was the thrust behind that demented joke that I had heard (and laughed at) about a couple of hours ago. History had repeated itself.

Times of India reports:

The incident invited strong reaction from the students who claimed that authorities could have saved Shailesh’s life by changing his course options. Hundreds of students assembled at Hall One where Shailesh used to live and demanded that the grading be made public. They also took to task Professor RB Chhabra of advanced thermo-dynamics who was present there. "We want to know whether Shailesh was intentionally being harassed by the authorities," said an enraged student.

After reading this, I feel I should have been blogging anonymously.

I went to this Tribune Link from Incognito's post. And to my surprise I found what I had written at Sulekha a long time back about an attempted IITK suicide has been quoted extensively. The Sulekha article is semi-fiction, but someone standing at the water tank part and a few others are true.