Failure & Death

In Madras, 17-year-old Student Tiru Venkatam sat down to compose a letter to his father: "I failed my examination for the second time," he wrote. "I cannot be of any use to my family. I have decided to end my life." A few hours later, Tiru Venkatam was dead of poison.

India's annual intellectual panic was on; day after day in all the great cities, anxious teen-agers pored over newspapers, scanning the long columns of numbers that reported the result of the rigid entrance examinations for the Dominion's colleges & universities. It was a week of rejoicing for those who had passed. They became family heroes, with bright futures as teachers or civil servants. Some were showered with gifts of books and furniture from local shops and factories. But of the thousands who took the tests, only half escaped the blight of failure.

India's colleges have room for fewer than half of their applicants; the provincial governments, grappling with urgent problems of widespread poverty and starvation, cannot afford to build new universities. Thus each year, as more boys & girls come of college age, the demand for higher education grows more frenzied, the passion for degrees more fervent. (Even a "failed B.A." on a calling card is better than no college record at all.) Meanwhile, authorities have been forced to make the examinations ever stiffer. In Bombay alone, more than 50,000 youngsters took the 1949 tests.

All week, along with the columns of results, newspapers carried reports of this year's tragic wave of student suicides--of 18-year-old Varada Bajulu who tried to kill himself by swallowing powdered glass; of Shankar Bhosle, 21, who hanged himself; of the lawyer's son, only 15 years old, who climbed the University of Bombay's 300-foot clock tower and threw himself off.

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