It may be brushed aside as a bizarre, isolated incident (or accident?) by many people; but the gruesome murder of a lady school teacher by her teenage student in an age old popular school at Chennai has created enough dust and dread in the state. The boy said to be hailing from an affluent background had stabbed the teacher when she was alone in the classroom several times with a kitchen knife. She almost died on the spot. The next day newspaper carried another suicide of a boy who had been frustrated and depressed because he could not meet the demands of his parents and teachers. It has become a regular feature in the newspapers about many suicides of the youngsters due to academic pressures.
Surprisingly, almost for the same reason, one boy kills the teacher and another commits suicide; the pressure of education, parents and teachers. Is this a development?
The boy’s name and his parent’s names are purposely blacked out though in the first stage of information revealed that they are Muslims. Later, it was completely avoided by the press to show their secularism. Well, I am not talking about religion or anything now. I am looking into this murderous attack more on the psychological and social angle.
Teachers cannot be angels and sweet always to all students. In a class of 60 to 80 students where controlling them itself would be a major problem the unruly and disobedient ones have to be surely reprimanded. The boy had done the act because the teacher has written a report about his absenteeism and poor performance in his diary where he had to get the signature from his parents. According to the boy’s testimony, he was influenced by the recent Hindi movie ‘Agneepath’ where the hero annihilates those who he despised. For all this, the boy is said to be a pampered kid who travels only by car or two-wheeler and gets a pocket money of Rs.100 per day.
India, as I have been mentioning in many of my writings, totally lacks discipline and integrity. The present generation parents are overambitious to the core and push their children around the bend. They expect their children to excel in every sphere of life at the tender age itself. They always keep looking for a scapegoat and go on blame game. Education in India has become a flourishing business long back and so the schools look more for two things; money and result. They try their level best to overload the children and whiplash the teachers to be ruthless.
The media and the entertainment areas are replete with violence and mayhem. Most of our movies or entertainment teaches only two important things for life; wealth and sex. The heroes are expected to take law into their own hands and punish the villains. The moral values in the society are at the lowest level. The politicians and the officials are personification of corruption and deceit. The parents rich, poor or middle class hardly have time to spend time with their children and if so it is nothing but over indulgence.
There is no wonder under these circumstances the majority of the younger generation becomes selfish, arrogant, vicious and greedy. Most of them suffer from entitlement syndrome and think whatever they do is right.
The results are as expected; they want to just wipe out what they don’t like. India nowadays become too ‘sympathetic’ and many human rights activists are up in their arms to completely eliminate ‘capital punishment’. So if someone wants to terminate another they hate, they can do that and no need to worry about punishments. The case will drag for years and by the time if any punishment is pronounced everyone will forget about the murder and take sympathy and fight for the release of the murderer. The glaring example is Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassination case convicts.
We are breeding a society of unruly youth who are more materialistic than moralistic. The effects have started showing the signs already. If we fail to act even now in the media, entertainment, parentage, education and society we may have to face more grave situations of murders and mayhem in future.
