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Saturday, May 05, 2012

violence in student community - how much is too much?

this morning's news paper carried two independent stories of college students committing suicide. 


the first one in bangaluru was a Manipur student who hung himself in front of his girl friend because he felt that she was not taking him seriously enough and apparently had not taken his calls whole day. 


the second story was a college student in Chennai who quarreled with a fellow girl student over a chair that he regularly occupied in the classroom, when he was reprimanded by the lecturer for not adjusting, he went out of the classroom and set himself to fire in the campus.


both died.


earlier this year, a school kid in Chennai killed his class teacher because he felt she was harassing him for getting low scores, another school student jumped and killed herself from the fourth floor of her school as her friends teased her for something, yet another student consumed poison in classroom unable to withstand exam pressure.


every other day there are stories from different parts of the country about students, both school and college, who seem to commit acts of violence on themselves and others. what do we do? 


civil society has a few agencies who feel the desperation enough to work on this area in a consistent manner, but, this is a larger social malaise, not merely a local problem to be addressed by local civil society organizations. it is a looming social disaster amidst many others sure, but, potentially the most dangerous one.


our society today perpetrates violence among our young ones in three distinct ways -
emotionally
mentally and
physically.


emotionally children are disturbed in their formative years where act of violence is the only way of grabbing attention, getting things done, allowing for others to act...


mentally the methods and means of destructive violence as ideas planted in the minds of the young are enormous in our society...


physically, the access and affordability of tools of violence, that can be available between the moments of intense mindless rage and a moment of calm reflection and inflict a irreparable damage through its sheer access is a problem too...


modern society has used concepts such as 
freedom to explore all behaviour possibilities, 
exposure to all kinds of ideas and 
freedom of choice on emotional, mental and material fronts respectively. 


while this being desirable, perhaps 
exploring possibilities without destructive violence, 
exposure to ideas sans its celebrating frills and 
freedom of choice with enjoined responsibility are an urgent need to save humanity from destroying itself.


while economic orders and political formation do it in large scale as violence that can't be resisted except as through social organization, it requires only small changes in families, households and neighbourhoods to ensure that we don't shape a future generation that has lost all sensitivity to the pain caused by destructive human violence. 


it is be a sad land of Buddha, where a State explodes a nuclear bomb and says, 'buddha smiled', it is a ill land of Buddha if children inflict violence on themselves and others at an age where they ought to be reminders of the human capacity to love that adults forget with 'education'. 


it doesn't take much effort to initiate local action, how much more violence will we need before we say, 'too much'? or are we losing the capacity to say that already?

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