What you will find here is not another discussion about marks, discipline or motivation. This is about the emotional weight students quietly carry, the truths many families live with, and the things people often notice only after something breaks.

This is also about those uncomfortable things sitting in plain sight that somehow manage to remain invisible for years, right until something terrible happens and everyone suddenly begins looking around the room asking questions that perhaps should have been asked much earlier.

Before Student Suicide: The Truth We Keep Avoiding

For quite some time I developed a rather strange habit. I would come across another story about a student in India collapsing under pressure, another headline about a young person taking their own life, another photograph accompanied by words describing a bright future and a promising child who had now suddenly become a tragedy everyone wished they had understood sooner. My heart would ache exactly as hearts are expected to ache in such moments, and I would feel sadness, frustration and that familiar heaviness quietly settling somewhere in my chest. Then I would close the article and move on with my day.

Not because I did not care.

Quite the opposite.

I stopped because after some time a deeply uncomfortable question kept sitting down beside me every single time I read one of those stories and refusing to leave. What exactly is the point of collectively mourning these tragedies if we continue carefully protecting the very things quietly creating them?

Society, after all, possesses a remarkable talent for dressing uncomfortable things in beautiful clothing. Pressure rarely arrives honestly introducing itself as pressure. It enters through the front door wearing names people admire much more. It appears dressed as discipline, ambition, sacrifice, determination and responsibility and is welcomed warmly into family conversations where tea is poured and relatives nod approvingly while speaking about rankings with almost ceremonial excitement.

There is something fascinating in the way educational success is discussed in India because at times it begins sounding less like conversations about children and more like discussions about investments that are expected to produce returns. Percentiles, AIR rankings, placements, packages and admissions travel through family WhatsApp groups with a kind of pride usually reserved for weddings, promotions and life achievements. And somewhere inside this grand celebration sits a nineteen-year-old boy eating instant noodles at two in the morning with chest pain from anxiety, trying very quietly not to disappoint everyone around him.

People often say students today are weak, although I have never really believed that. I suspect many are carrying emotional weights adults themselves would struggle to carry, only adults have had years to build language around exhaustion while young people are still expected to carry it elegantly and without complaint. There is fear of failure certainly, but beneath that there is often something heavier. There is fear of disappointing parents, fear of wasting sacrifices made on their behalf, fear of becoming painfully ordinary after spending years hearing they were meant for something extraordinary, and fear of discovering that one bad result has the strange power to change the emotional temperature of an entire house.

What society casually calls pressure is rarely one thing at all. It is several things arriving together and sitting on one nervous system at exactly the same time, and the peculiar thing is that suffering often arrives wearing clothes society rewards. The student sleeping four hours becomes dedicated, the student isolating becomes focused, the student losing weight becomes serious, the student emotionally disappearing becomes mature, and the student who lives in a constant state of anxiety becomes responsible.

How extraordinary that collapse can occasionally look almost identical to discipline.

Then tragedy arrives and people begin asking the question that appears every single time. Why did he not speak? Why did she not tell anyone? Why did nobody know?

But I have increasingly started wondering whether that was ever really the correct question.

A more uncomfortable question quietly waiting nearby might be whether the world around that child would truly have listened.

Because many students already know the answers waiting for them before they even begin speaking. They know they may hear that everyone is stressed, that this age is for struggle, that others are managing perfectly well, that they are lucky to study there, that their parents sacrificed so much and that perhaps they simply need to work harder.

So eventually many stop explaining, not because they have nothing to say but because human beings slowly stop speaking in places where they no longer feel heard.

And maybe this is one of the truths many families struggle sitting beside for too long because it is uncomfortable and because discomfort often asks things from us that sadness does not. Sometimes parents are listening mainly for updates about performance rather than emotional truth. Not because they do not love their children because most parents love with enormous intensity and would sacrifice almost anything for them, but because many parents themselves were raised inside systems where exhaustion was normal, fear was motivation and emotional expression was considered unnecessary luxury.

Study now and happiness can come later.

Sacrifice now and life can arrive afterwards.

Survive first and perhaps enjoy later.

So slowly and without anyone noticing, love occasionally begins wearing unusual clothing too. Control disguises itself as care, achievement becomes emotional proof that parenting succeeded and children quietly become family projects before anyone intentionally decides for that to happen.

I watched this unfold closely with my own son and suddenly all the statistics and articles lost their comfortable distance. High fever arrived first, then exhaustion, then weight quietly disappeared and his skin lost colour while doctors advised rest, which sounded perfectly reasonable until it collided with the educational world where attendance sheets and internal marks sometimes appear to possess greater authority than the body carrying them.

So he went, not because he felt well enough and certainly not because he wanted to, but because attendance mattered, internal marks mattered and, somewhere along the way, presence had quietly become more important than the body carrying it all.

Everything appeared important except the actual human being trying to survive underneath all of it.

Eventually he landed in hospital exhausted, anaemic and completely depleted.

And yes, my son recovered, not because pressure magically disappeared and not because life suddenly became easier, but because he knew something many students unfortunately never fully feel. He knew his worth inside this family was not conditional and that he could pause, choose differently, fail without becoming emotionally abandoned and still return home knowing that home remained home even without perfect performance.

Quite ironically emotional safety often creates stronger determination than fear ever could.

While writing this article I came across information that initially sounded hopeful because India has increasingly begun introducing mental health frameworks, counsellors and emotional support systems in educational institutions after growing concern around student suicides and emotional wellbeing. One cannot deny that it sounds promising because society finally appears to be admitting students are not machines with Wi-Fi connections and exam schedules attached to them.

But laws have always changed faster than mentalities do.

The issue was never really about placing one psychologist somewhere between the chemistry laboratory and principal’s office and congratulating ourselves for progress over tea and biscuits because schools do not exist separately from society. Schools simply reflect it.

Society also does something rather curious. We hand life-defining decisions to nineteen-year-olds and then become genuinely surprised when their still-developing emotional architecture occasionally shakes under the weight. Then we enthusiastically add sleep deprivation, coaching centres, comparison, financial pressure, fear of disappointing family and emotional silence into the mixture before looking around with complete confusion and asking what exactly happened.

Previous generations had one legendary child floating mysteriously through neighbourhood conversations who apparently never slept, never complained, achieved impossible marks and still remained respectful, organised and helpful at home. Today that child has multiplied into thousands and moved onto social media where polished lives, university videos, productivity culture and carefully edited success stories quietly follow students into bedrooms and sit beside them long after school hours end.

Comparison no longer waits politely for family gatherings. It now sleeps beside students every night.

And here comes the part people quietly change the subject on: some students no longer even know whether the dream they are fighting for truly belongs to them because after years of expectations, sacrifice, comparison and pressure, the voices around them slowly became louder than their own.

Many students are not actually afraid of hard work and many are not even afraid of failure itself. What they fear is becoming emotionally alone after failure because children notice more than adults sometimes imagine. They notice when warmth grows louder after success, when pride becomes bigger after achievement and when conversations become quieter after disappointment because children notice far more than adults often allow themselves to believe.

The question may never really have been why some students collapse.

The more unsettling question quietly sitting beside us is how many are still standing, still attending classes, still smiling in photographs and still producing beautiful results while slowly breaking inside, and whether society simply looked at that suffering, dressed it elegantly in medals and rankings and decided to call it ambition.