The Trophy Mukund’s Boys Picked.

Another girl hangs herself from a ceiling fan in Kota.

Paddakka’s eighteen-year-old grandson shoots himself in America.

Naturally, Paddakka’s neighbor had her forensic diagnosis locked and loaded over morning filter coffee before the body was even cold: “We warned her not to take that job! In a country like America, you have to keep a haddinakannu—a proper hawk-eye—on the kids!”

Meanwhile, over at the hospital quarters, thirty-four-year-old ENT surgeon Aparajita swallows a blister pack of pills. And right on schedule, the world and her husband throw their hands up over Marie biscuits: “Hai re, why on earth are our kids so utterly fragile these days?”

The government, smelling a lovely photo-op, gallops in to save our souls. They announce the school syllabus will be made “student-friendly.” Rather than declaring the sweatshops of Kota insulting, predatory, and illegal, they issue stern new circulars with enough loopholes to drive a fleet of coaching buses through.

Problem solved.

Next stop: Narayana Murthy’s 72-hour work week. Because obviously, the road to corporate martyrdom doesn’t begin in an IT park. It begins at age eleven, in a windowless room under a buzzing tube light, staring at an Abacus workbook while a mother times your bowel movements.

I keep thinking back to Professor Mukund Prabhu’s boys.

For twenty years, Nithin and Yathin were the undisputed pole stars of middle-class respectability in our colony. The gold standard: IIT, IIM, high-flying overseas packages. One in the United States, one in Germany. Every visiting aunt and uncle dropped their names like depth charges over tea: “Look at Mukund’s boys! That is how you build a life!”

Sweetheart, do you know where the shining heroes are today?

Still in the US. Still in Germany. Both divorced, both quit their high-wire jobs, and both living quietly on state social security.

Nice, no?

Curiously, nobody brings up Mukund’s boys over tea anymore. The collective amnesia is spectacular. But my patient Ameya, who scraped his knees raw clawing his way into becoming a fairly decent surgeon, still seethes with rage at their ghost: “Saala, my entire childhood was state scholarships, mental math, coaching for this and coaching for that. How come not one uncle stands up today and tells the colony kids: ‘Go on, beta, become a waster on social security like Nithin and Yathin!’”

On weekday afternoons, kids bunk their classes and sneak into my clinic. They don’t tell their mothers.

Before you get scandalous ideas, I run a mental health outreach. Sometimes the parents do come along, wearing the bewildered faces of blue-chip investors whose stock just crashed:

“Doctor, she topped her 10th boards. Now she’s in medical college, she’s got involved with this North Indian boy, and she is simply not studying.”

“Doctor, our boy has fallen into bad company. Fix his focus.”

They get terribly disappointed when, despite my medical degree, I refuse to write a script to chemically numb their child into obedience.

Instead, I look at the blood report. It’s always a delight. Serum Vitamin D: 8 ng/mL. That isn’t a student; that’s the biochemical profile of an eighteenth-century potato left in a cellar. The circadian rhythm has such raging ADHD it doesn’t know whether it’s noon in Mangalore or midnight in Madagascar. Cortisol is blasting through the ceiling.

The parents nod sagely: “It’s the mobile gaming, Doctor.”

Of course. It’s always PUBG. It could never be the fact that you took a young mammal, locked it in a room with drawn curtains for four years—chowkonachya char konat baslo aamhi lapun—stripped it of daylight, fed it cold upma, and expected it to function like a Japanese diesel engine.

When the parental hawk-eye leaves my room, these terrifying, ungrateful rebels don’t complain about the hostel food or the vast syllabus. They sit on my examination stool, look down at their shoes, and leak silent tears:

“Doctor, I’m an imposter. I only reached here because I killed myself for two years. My father spent his entire provident fund on my coaching. Now I’m failing the weekly quizzes. I’m a disappointment.”

One of the most catastrophic fairy tales we ever fed our children is Arjuna and the bird’s eye.

“Look only at the eye, boy! Forget the tree, forget the branches, forget the sky!”

We worship it as divine focus. It’s precisely why poor Arjuna never learned to see the bigger picture. We have spent generations turning our children into racehorses with leather blinkers, romanticizing the paranoid terror of simply not getting eliminated.

We expect triumphant young adults who will rise up and sing “Kattuvevu naavu hosanaadondanu”—ready to build a brave new world. Instead, we produce terrified five-year-olds walking around in the bodies of twenty-five-year-old postgraduates.

“Ma’am, apne class ka toh main thope tha… yahaan har ek thope hi hai.”

That’s the second hammer blow.

Take Rajat. He gave up football, gave up Shaktimaan, gave up having friends who didn’t talk about mock percentiles. In his hometown, he was the prodigy who had climbed Everest.

Then he walked into King George’s Medical College.

On day one, Rajat ran headfirst into an inconvenient law of arithmetic: in a lecture hall of two hundred district toppers, exactly 50% of the room must finish in the bottom half. That is basic math.

If you are there because you genuinely love human anatomy, a poor grade is annoying, but you dust yourself off and dissect the next cadaver. But when you are only there because you are the repository of your family’s social bragging rights?

There is graffiti scratched into library desks across Manipal that tells the whole story:

“Are you here because of your inspiration and dedication?”

“No, I am here because of my parents’ aspiration and perspiration.”

For a kid who has outsourced his entire identity to his parents’ smile, failing an internal test isn’t just a bad day at school. It feels like an eviction notice from his parents’ love. The shame is fatal. The guilt over the burnt provident fund is suffocating. And now, the college thoughtfully fires off automated attendance and quiz alerts straight to the parents’ WhatsApp.

(When an attendance glitch for my daughter went to my father-in-law because his was the permanent address on file, the poor gentleman nearly had an apoplexy before we sorted out the office clerical error. We laughed it off. But not every kid survives that WhatsApp ding.)

Then there is Neel. Brilliant with computers, extraordinary comic timing, a natural stand-up comedian. But family tradition decreed a stethoscope, so his youth was entombed inside coaching modules. He didn’t even know he was funny until he was already drowning. Right now, he is in rehabilitation after trying to kill himself.

And what is our grand civilizational response?

Hostels install safety nets beneath the balconies. They wire CCTV cameras into corridors. They put sensor-springs on ceiling fans so they snap under human weight. We treat the pile of dead children in Kota as an engineering problem that requires an architectural patch.

It spares us having to look at our own living rooms.

It spares us having to admit that our desperate thirst for colony prestige is eating our young alive. Mukund Prabhu’s family did everything “by the book,” and both sons ended up shattered on welfare. Yet when our own children start cracking, we blame the boy next door, the phone, the lack of “character”—anything to avoid admitting that we built the cage.

So if you are twenty, sitting on a hostel bed with a clamping weight on your chest, staring at a ceiling fan and thinking you’ve reached the end of your life—listen to me.

Your chest hurts and your brain feels like lead not because you are weak, but because you are an animal starved of sun, running on an empty tank, trying to live a life that belongs to your uncle. That feeling of absolute overwhelm isn’t a character flaw; it’s just your body slamming on the emergency brakes because you’re driving with no oil.

You don’t need a motivational lecture from a godman, and you certainly don’t need a spring on your ceiling fan.

Step outside tomorrow morning. Let the sun hit your face. Let the sacred family dream fall off your shoulders and shatter on the floor—it was never yours to carry anyway. Disappointing your parents for six months is entirely survivable.

Dying for their tea-party bragging rights is not.