An 18-year-old student at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay committed suicide at his residence in Jodhpur early on Friday morning. He had returned home from Mumbai on Wednesday. The victim, Siddharth Singh Charan, a second-year student of engineering physics, shot himself with his father’s licensed .12-bore gun at his home in Jodhpur’s Mahamandir locality. The cops found a suicide note in which he expressed his anguish over a number of things that had gone wrong in life, from his grief over his cousin’s death to his poor performance in the exams.
His cousin, Pappu, died of cancer a few months ago. “Life goes on regardless of the existence of any person. Whether you live or not, it makes no difference. What happened when Pappu died? Has life changed in any way?’’ read the note. He also mentions that, though he studied very hard, he scored 2% less than his friend in the annual exams this year. This was corroborated by what his friends on the IIT campus said. “He was not doing too well at studies. He was disappointed with his results,” said a classmate, adding that Siddharth was a bit of an introvert.
The IIT canteen attendant, too, described him as a rather quiet boy. When Siddharth’s friends asked him why he was leaving for home in the middle of the term, he said it was because he had not spent enough time with his family during the Diwali vacation. When TOI contacted Prakash Gopalan, dean of student affairs at IIT-Bombay, he said that Siddharth was doing fine and there was nothing unusual about his manner that would alert the authorities on campus. Siddharth was the only child of Gajendra Singh Charan, a former defence personnel, who joined the state government as a Tahsildar post-retirement. At present, he is the sub-divisional magistrate at Chipa Barod in Baran district.
