I was browsing the net last evening. A news headline caught my attention “IIM Student commits suicide after being dumped by boyfriend on facebook”. It caught me totally unawares and I jolted in my seat. I clicked on the link ,went through the entire article and also searched all major news websites to get more of the story . It read “Malini Murmu, the victim, a first-year student at IIM, Bangalore and a native of Jamshedpur, Jharkhand committed suicide by hanging herself in her room. In a spurned love story, the couple broke their relationship after an argument. On Sunday, Sep 18, Malini found a status posted by her boyfriend on Facebook that read: "Feeling super cool today. Dumped my new ex-girlfriend. Happy independence day." The status depressed her and on Monday, she didn't attend the classes. Her classmates noticed it and went to her room and found the door locked following which they called the security guard, who broke the door. They found Malini hanging from the ceiling fan. Malini in a suicide note on left on her laptop wrote that she committed suicide after her boyfriend left her.”
A surge of emotions rose in me…anger, frustration, sorrow, helplessness and despair. Before they could get a tighter hold on me and have some serious negative influence, I decided to pen down what I was feeling. I want to put down two major points.
Firstly, the facebook status that the guy put up…Is that not a display of our fast means of communication? The mantra of modern age : Feel it, Express it…in a super fast way…share with everyone the moment it happens…say it aloud to the entire world. Everyone wants to share their lives with everyone out there…but some of them do it in a really condemnable way. They even want to share that they are feeling superb after dumping their girlfriends…without the slightest thought of what the “ex-girlfriend” would feel… evidence that emotions like sensitivity are fast losing their place in our modern fast-paced world…I know its not very logical but it made me feel may be those times were better when we did not have the means to communicate so quickly…at least such mishaps did not happen. People could not humiliate others in front of such a big community all around the world in such a short time! You needed time and a lot of influence to spread malign about anybody in your circle of friends and acquaintances. But now, everyone of us is ‘blessed’ with instant messaging and spreading out the word. So why not use( read misuse) it to our full capability…???!!!
The second point I felt was the absurdness of the extreme step taken by Malini…a series of questions stormed my brain. What was she really thinking when she took the extreme step? Was giving up her life the best way to take revenge? I do not wish to speak ill of a soul now gone…but certain questions refused to leave my head. Agreed, the break up would have caused immense sorrow and the facebook post a lot of humiliation, but what about all the love that her parents and siblings and friends must have showered on her in her 22 years of life? What about all the efforts she must have put in to reach IIM-B, one of the most prestigious institutions in India? What about the ambitions that she must have had? The dreams her parents must have seen? As we grow up, life does teach us to balance our emotions, doesn’t it? Did she not feel the need to reach out to somebody…her friends or anyone else? Has the value of life become so less that you can give it up for such an issue?
That’s not the way things get sorted. Or revenge is taken (as she wrote before hanging herself). Life has a purpose. And strangely, I got reminded of people out there who die for a noble cause…like our soldiers. And also of people who die because they don’t get the basic necessities of life…who die of starvation. It brought to my mind another point. We all tend to take the things we have for so much granted that we tend to forget their importance and our fortune to have them. An example : Each morning, we have our own problems to deal with. The thought of some country attacking us and killing us does not cross our mind. It is occupied with the tension of heavy traffic on the roads that day or something of that sort. That is because that has become a part of our life. That is why we can worry about traffic jams and low salary. The analogy can be applied in the above case too. The love and care of family and friends and good education had all become a way of life. So they were taken for granted and a break up could become a reason big enough for giving up LIFE!
It is not that our generation is too sensitive or too rash. We do understand what is right and wrong for us. But if some events in life cause frustration and sorrow, we need our friends and well-wishers to remind us of the good things life has given us. May be if Malini had reached out to some dear friend of hers, the sad mishap could have been averted. But sadly, she took to confining her feelings within herself…locking herself up in her own room.
My deepest condolences to her family and friends. May her soul rest in peace.
