‘Constantly Troubled, Good at Acting’: Friends Remember Delhi Student Who Died by Suicide

‘Constantly Troubled, Good at Acting’: The death by suicide of a 16-year-old student on Friday triggered an enormous demonstration outside the St Columba School in Delhi with close to 100 individuals including parents, students, and relatives present with placards and demanded answers.

The protesters complained about students being singled over unpaid fees, others about teachers who threatened to slap children or ridicule them in front of the entire classroom as reported in one of the previous HT stories.

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It is worth mentioning that on Tuesday, a class 10 student jumped off a high metro station in West Delhi after leaving a note saying that his teachers and headmistress bullied him. His friends and family members said that the boy experienced targeted harassment and the school did not pay attention to warning signs.

The friends of the boy remembered the final hours when they desperately tried to find the boy after he was not home as his mother called and told them.

“We kept looking for him for almost an hour around the school. Later we were told to go back. We heard aunty crying in the background. Then uncle called and said he had found him… and that he was gone,” one of the friends said.

‘Wanted to become an actor'

The friend responded by saying that he and the victim, as well as his two other friends, were the subject of constant teacher picking.

“We were constantly troubled, scolded, humiliated. We didn’t think he would take such a step. He was so good at acting and writing. He wanted to become an actor,” he said.

One of my friends told me that the Class 10 student was able to write drama scripts in a few minutes and loved acting. “He admired the actors who had studied here. He used to say he wanted to carry the legacy forward like SRK," he added.

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Student protests following suicide

The event that followed the protest demanded accountability by the protesters and also against the purported harassment of students and their relatives by the school.

One of the demonstrators was a mother, who claimed that one of the teachers in the school humiliated her son, who became a student on the EWS (Economically Weaker Section) quota, on account of unpaid fees.

She told HT, “My son was in Class 8 then. Every day, this teacher made him stand up and asked him to et the fees pgaid, even though other EWS parents hadn’t paid either. Kids laughed at him. After a month of this humiliation, we finally paid.”

The woman further alleged that the media coverage on the suicide case gained momentum, students were forced to sit in their classes all day long without bathroom breaks due to the fear that they would talk to one another.

It is worth noting that she is not the sole person who has been accusing the school of supposed harassment of the students. The same allegations were made by parents who had congregated to protest that their children were targeted by minor errors as well as had to endure taunts by teachers.

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