A few days ago, a NEET paper leak shattered the dreams of millions of aspirants. Many students fell into deep mental distress, but what shocked me the most was that some students ended their own lives. These suicides raise painful questions about our education system, society’s attitude, and above all, the mental health of students.

First, we need to look at the education system itself. Today, students are often treated less like human beings and more like robots. The system drags them into a never-ending race: crack the toughest exam, compete endlessly, become more successful than everyone else. As a result, many students are silently suffering. They have lost their mental peace. From morning to night, they live inside a prison made of exams, syllabus, and the pressure to rank higher.

Society only intensifies this pressure. Every day, students hear the same questions: Which exam are you preparing for? When will you clear it? Other students have already succeeded. Others are earning huge salaries — when will you? Under this constant comparison, parents too get influenced by society and place unnecessary expectations on their children. Beneath this burden, a cheerful child slowly reaches a terrible state of “do or die.” And recently, some children chose the “die.”

I do not want to offer solutions here. I only want to leave society, parents, and the government with a few questions to reflect upon:

1. Is the purpose of education character building, or merely cracking exams?
2. Is material success worth the cost of a human life?
3. Can a child’s entire life really depend on a single exam?
4. Should society decide the value of our lives, or should our own conscience?
5. Is human life meant to be trapped in a rat race until one day it breaks us completely?

These questions should be raised everywhere — in homes, in society, and even in Parliament.