What We Lost With Faisal Bashir

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Representational Photo

On the morning of April 19, I opened my phone to the kind of message that makes your stomach drop and your heart pound. Faisal Bashir, 19, a boy from Kupwara, had been found dead in his rented room in Dudwana. The JEE results had come out just a day before.

He didn't make it. And he couldn't take the pressure.

And suddenly, the quiet grief of one family became a mirror to the noise we've all been pretending not to hear.

I didn't know Faisal personally, but I've known many like him. Young boys and girls with tired eyes and hopeful hearts. Children who grow up believing their future rests on a single exam, who carry the weight of entire families' expectations as they try to memorise the periodic table one more time before bed.

I've lived that pressure. I just chose to walk away from it.

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Back in school, when I told people I was opting for Humanities in Class 11, it felt like I'd committed a crime. My relatives reacted as if I had thrown my future away.“You're wasting your potential,” they said, just because I wasn't running in the NEET-JEE rat race.

But I knew what I loved: writing, debating, law. I knew I didn't want to spend my best years chasing a dream that wasn't mine.

And it wasn't easy. There were days I doubted myself. But looking back now, seven years later, I'm grateful I listened to that quiet voice inside me. I debated on national television. I became the youngest President of the Jammu and Kashmir Students Association. My words found space in top national newspapers. I found a path that made me feel alive.

Had I followed the conventional route, I don't think I would've known this version of myself.

That's why Faisal's death shakes me so deeply. Because I know that feeling. The pressure. The loneliness. The sinking dread of disappointing everyone you love.

Faisal was not weak. He was failed by a system that tells children their worth is defined by a rank, by an exam that measures memorisation more than curiosity, by a society that calls you successful only if you become a doctor or an engineer.

We've turned education into a punishment. Coaching centres pop up in every corner like fast-food joints, offering“success packages” to desperate parents. Their hoardings show toppers with wide grins, but no one talks about the sleepless nights, the panic attacks, the quiet breakdowns. No one talks about what happens when you don't make it.

And year after year, children die.

Their names flicker briefly in the news, then disappear. But the system that pushed them over the edge stays intact.

We need to stop pretending this is normal.

Why should a child feel that not cracking NEET or JEE is the end of their future? Why don't we celebrate poets, artists, social workers, or sportspersons with the same pride? Why have we let success become such a narrow, suffocating thing?

Children are not born dreaming of degrees. They dream of flight. We are the ones who tell them their wings are only valid if they fly in one direction.

It's time we rewrite that story.

Schools must have counsellors, not just to deal with mental health after damage is done, but to build emotional resilience from the start. Parents must learn that love is not measured in grades. Media must show us more than just NEET toppers, they must show us the designers, the change-makers, and others.

We need laws that regulate coaching centres so they don't prey on fear. We need campaigns that showcase the beauty of different paths. We need teachers who teach children how to think, not just what to write in an OMR sheet.

Most of all, we need to ask ourselves what kind of future we are building. The one where children live with joy and purpose, or one where they quietly disappear after failing a test.

Faisal's death should haunt us.

And it should move us to act. Not with token sympathy, but with real change. Because if we don't, there will be more Faisals. More rooms left cold and quiet. More dreams buried too soon.

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