Pakistan is among the countries where students committing suicide is not an uncommon phenomenon. The World Health Organisation (WHO) asserted in a report that every year more than 15,000 suicide cases are recorded in Pakistan. Around 25 per cent of the cases involve teenagers. Despite the religious injunctions discouraging such a path, people still opt to take that route owing to the perceived darkness in their lives.
As far as the students are concerned, family and peer pressure often lead the list of reasons behind such darkness. Life is not all about getting good grades and admissions to this institution or that. For some strange reason, we put so much pressure on our young ones that when they fail to touch the bar we set for them in our own misplaced enthusiasm, they feel bad on two counts; their failure, and the disappointment of letting the family down. The impressionable, emotionally-unstable age in which the students happen to be, the trauma becomes too big to handle for them on their own. It is time parents and society realised the pitfalls of putting unnecessary burden on fragile minds. Not everyone is born to do whatever the parents decide or what society values. Academic excellence and intelligence are not always the same thing even if we have made them synonymous in our minds. Students should gain education on the basis of their interest level, not under the burden of one pressure or the other.
ABDUL MALIK RAUF
KARACHI
