Dying To Succeed

"He was very excited. We used to tease him by addressing him as 'Doctor'. But after a few months, he began panicking. He was studying all the time, slept very little."
"Is it wrong to be ambitious? My son wanted to make the village proud by becoming a doctor."
"Every parent wants their child to become something big one day."
Mangal Singh, 52, Kolari, Rajasthan State, India

"Students are under a constant state of anxiety here. They are unable to study, concentrate, remember, sleep or eat. They complain of headaches and breathlessness. Many just weep in front of me."
"They feel guilty because their parents have spent so much money and have high expectations. Parents often impose their own unfulfilled ambitions on their children."
Madan Lal Agrawal, psychiatrist, Kota, India

"We have also told coaching schools to conduct screening tests to determine if students are really capable of scoring in Kota."
"This [sending results of bi-monthly tests to parents via text message] keeps the students on the edge all the time. The parents keep calling them to scold."
Sawai Singh Godara, Kota superintendent of police

How odd. Why would a city's police superintendent care about pupils studying in his city being under stress? Kota has a population of a million and a bit. Two decades ago the city had a small number of private math and science tutors. But in the space of that twenty years much has changed. Many private schools have opened for business in Kota, and it has become a hub for ambitious parents and their offspring to travel to in recognition that the city's business has become one of study preparations for academic opportunities and success.

Those dreaming of being admitted to India's prestige colleges make the trek to Kota. Over 160,000 students from across the country flooded into Kota's admissions schools last year. The city has attained a reputation as India's capital for test preparation. Aspirants must meet rigid requirements, however, above all determination and commitment and ability.  Proving that one has all those characteristics can be beyond gruelling for many constantly under stress to perform and devoting uninterrupted hours to study schedules.

That kind of rigour takes its toll on the vulnerable. In the past five years, more than 70 students have taken their lives in despair. Last year there were 29 students who committed suicide, unable to cope with the unending stress and disappointment. These confused and unhappy young people have hanged themselves, set themselves on fire, and taken to leaping from high-rise buildings. Mangal Singh's son, Shivdutt Singh, was one of those; he had locked himself in a dorm room after non-stop studying and hanged himself from the ceiling fan.

A dutiful son, he left behind an explanatory, apologetic note: "I am responsible for my suicide. I cannot fulfill Papa's dream." How utterly devastating, for the young man of 20 and for his expectant father now grieving the loss of his son. Both loved one another of a certainty, and each wanted the best that the future might afford for one another; the son to be able to make his father proud of him, and the father wishing to see his son fulfilled in a profession of great meaning and status.

City officials have ordered that coaching schools appoint counsellors to intervene when required in assessing the psychological stability of students; further, to commit to the organization of relief days free of study when the object in the classroom would be to have "fun". And above all, to ensure that fees are refunded to any students unable to forge their way to completing the process they had entered the coaching schools to prepare for.



The atmosphere of fierce competition for college admissions has resulted in a test prep industry in Kota, where middle-class aspirations are on the rise, and parents have ambitions for their children which may be misplaced. Young people, urged along by their families, arrive in Kota to sign up for coaching classes and to study from three months to two years. The goal is to win admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology, representing 16 public colleges.

Those colleges are recognized for their potential in realizing some fortunate students' futures, for graduates are valued by global companies offering substantive salaries. It is considered the Ivy League of Engineering education to graduate from one of the IITs; a sure-fire ticket to elevated social status and a position in a top tech company, either in India itself or California's Silicone Valley. One of IIT's most prestigious graduates is Google chief executive Sundar Pichal.

Almost one and a half million students take the entrance exam each year, with fewer than 10,000 accepted. This is where the test prep industry comes in, motivating families of modest means to aspire on behalf of their children's future prospects, to join the student body of those schools. No longer the sole preserve of the socially elite in a growing atmosphere of middle-class entitlement, offspring of modest means have made the grade, inspiring in others of their class the will to make the attempt.

Canadian First Nations Rights

"Any right, aboriginal or other, by its very nature carries with it the obligation to use it responsibly. It cannot be used, for example, in a way which harms people, aboriginal or non-aboriginal."
1996 Supreme Court of Canada finding in Van der Peet vs the Queen

Barry Gray / The Hamilton Spectator    Makayla Sault, 11, shown performing a dance routine at an event in Ohsweken last May, died Monday of what her parents say was a stroke, nearly a year after she was taken off chemotherapy for leukemia.

It seems somehow not quite within reason that children under Ontario's Health Care Consent Act may be given the right to determine how they wish medical treatment to proceed for their particular malady. Are young children capable of weighing options and possibilities to arrive at a wise decision for their future well-being? But they may do so when an authority figure feels that child's judgemental capacity appears to understand "the reasonably foreseeable consequences of a decision or lack of decision".

And so it was that an eleven year-old leukemia victim (acute lymphoblastic leukemia), Makayla Sault of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation had her personal determination to halt the chemotherapy regimen -- which was the only treatment that could be 80% to 90% certain to preserve her young life -- respected. Pediatric oncologists at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, attempted to persuade the child and the child's mother that to withdraw from that treatment was a death sentence.

The doctors appealed to the Brant Family and Children's Services, and its executive director, Andrew Koster made the determination that he and the child protection service would not prosecute the case because it was felt that the child's well-being was well placed in the loving care of her parents, evangelical Christian pastors. And that the little girl was convinced that an apparition of Jesus had appeared to her while she was in hospital, assuring her that he had cured her, spoke to the depth of faith within the family.

This, despite that the hospital's doctors had carefully explained to Makayla Sault's family that her leukemia could be cured only through the treatment of chemotherapy. Without that treatment death would be certain to follow, and fairly soon. As for the regional child services, even with that knowledge, they held fast to their position of non-interference in the case because "their choice to use traditional medicines was within their right". The family had "eloquently exercised her indigenous rights as a First Nations person."

And in exercising their rights the little girl was taken by her family to the Hippocrates Health Institute of West Palm Beach, Florida where she underwent the life-saving course for victims of cancer. Such as exposure to and treatment through aroma-therapy, wheatgrass enemas, acupuncture and naturopathic massage. The family paid $18,000 in their zeal to treat the child in a manner that would accord with what her body required to heal itself.

The Hippocrates Health Institute had successfully sold itself to the parents as a sole-source curing agency for any dire ills besetting the human body. This enterprise, licensed by the state as a massage parlour, advertises itself as the premier source for therapies known to cure cancer among other sever diseases like Lou Gehrig's disease.

The little girl considered herself cured of leukemia and assured anyone who might be interested that she had recovered, and the memory of her dreadful time coping with the initial stages of chemotherapy was all behind her as she looked forward to her future. Her future arrived with a suddenness that surprised the family, as the cancer, in remission thanks to the initial chemotherapy regimen, stormed back into her body with a vengeance. That vengeance took her life.

Oncologists explain the stroke that Makayla suffered which led to her death on Monday as the common result of leukemia left untreated by chemotherapy. As they mourn their dreadful loss, Makayla's parents ascribe her death to the ruinous effects on her body viscera by the chemotherapy treatments that Makayla had found so excruciatingly painful.

If there is a moral to this story it is an elusive one. In paying obeisance to Native culture and values Canadian society dares not offend First Nations by informing them that science trumps hocus-pocus. To do so is to invite a popular uprising of Canadian aboriginals declaring that the contempt in which their culture and their history is held is unbearable, and they must be permitted to honour their past and live as their ancestors did.

And so, they do.

Do You Have Children?

"Do you have children? If you do, I don't have to tell you [what it's like to grieve in the rawness of a dreadful loss]."
"It's hardest on her mother. She hasn't eaten for 24 hours, hasn't slept for 24 hours."
Bereaved father, Cantley, Quebec

Maryse Beaulne 17, was killed in a hit-and-run while crossing a highway on her way to college near Cantley on Tuesday.     Facebook page / Ottawa Citizen

She was far too young to die. Not that it made any difference, since the hapenstance of circumstances that make such things occur represents indifference to human tragedy. We are born and as infants supported by our parents' love and attention to our needs. They do the best they can to arm us with the very same advice they received from their parents. All that advice is summed up in two words: be careful.

It's often been said that the young are too carefree to be careful. And while adults begin to have a sense of their own mortality, the young cannot see that far into the future, wouldn't care to, and don't believe they are anything but invincible; nothing will occur to them that will spin them out of their comfort zone of just being themselves. Their inability or unwillingness to have a care is sometimes their undoing.

Caution is no way to live, if you're a teenager, and the world has opened its portals to give you opportunities to venture where you will as you make your way into adulthood. Sometimes you think like an adult, but not too often, since it's tedious and stultifying. Best to linger between childhood and emerging independence.

Independence is being responsible for yourself in a manner not entirely consonant with the freedom of living on the verge of graduation into another life, when secondary school is left behind and other choices beckon. Whatever those choices are, they mean you've embarked into another life entirely, free to travel, to work, to pursue academic studies, to make new friends and acquaintances on your way to total independence.

And it's horribly sad when some don't make it to that fork in the road on their journey through life, because life has abandoned them. Not of their own volition, but due to matters beyond their control. Even if what they have chosen to do is partially responsible in that careless sense of being at one with life, of doing what you will, despite, or perhaps even in defiance of advice rejected.

So, early in the morning before day has completely dawned brightly, venturing your way along a highway very close to the home you live in with your family, preparing to get on the bus to take you to school, you're listening to music on your iPod, wearing the dark clothing that most teenage girls prefer, and there is nothing unusual about the day. At first.

In shouting distance of the brown brick bungalow in Cantley, Quebec where she lived with her parents, while walking along the highway, heading out to le CEGEP de l'Outaouais, Maryse Beaulne was swiped by a pick-up truck. Highway 307 that runs through Cantley is decribed as a busy, twisting road demanding a driver's full attention even when driving conditions are good.

According to Const. Martin Fournel of the MRC des Collines police, it was "pitch black" when Maryse was struck while crossing the highway when the northbound truck "clipped" her, throwing her into the oncoming lane. A witness described seeing the girl struggle to her feet and then being struck by a second vehicle heading in a southbound direction. The first vehicle stopped, the driver putting on emergency flashers to warn other vehicles; the second vehicle sped on.

"Obviously, she had severe injuries", said Const. Fournel. As it happened, off-duty police officers from MRC des Collines and Gatineau were close to the scene and among the first to arrive at the accident site. The girl was transported to Gatineau Hospital, then transferred to the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa. Then she was pronounced dead at 9:10 a.m.

The intersection of the highway where Maryse Beaulne was fatally struck has a street light, but the visibility at that time was judged to be poor. The pick-up driver simply "couldn't see her", and will not be charged. "The driver saw that he hit something or somebody and pulled over right away", explained Const. Fournel.

And though he immediately turned on the orange flashing light on the roof of the company truck "Obviously, it was not quick enough", said Const. Fournel.