n November 14th, 1998, a young Indian man named Neil Grover killed himself. Neil was bright: He was studying to become a doctor and doing well in medical school. His mother said he had always been happy; she couldn’t understand why he might have felt the urge to take his own life. His suicide note was as cryptic as the act itself: I had everything, but life is a double-edged sword. If I tell everything, I will lose everything.
I repeated the lines to myself over and over, as if I could stumble upon their meaning. But of course I couldn’t. He was like Srinivas Akkaladevi—another young South Asian medical student who also committed suicide. His family also couldn’t imagine a reason. And both Grover and Akkaladevi were as successful as Sarvshreshth Gupta, the Goldman Sachs analyst found dead after working hundred-hour weeks. The cause of Gupta’s death has not yet been determined. His father, Sunil Gupta, wrote of his son:
He started complaining ‘This job is not for me. Too much work and too little time. I want to come back home...’ We counselled him to keep going, as such difficult phases were inevitable in a high pressure job. ‘Sonny, all are of your age, young and ambitious, keep going,’ I would say.
[For more of this story, written by Priya-Alika Elias, go to http://www.newrepublic.com/art...an-culture-dangerous]
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