Education: Failure & Death

In Madras, 17-year-old Student Tiru Venkatam sat down to compose a letter to his father: "I failed my examination for the second time," he wrote. "I cannot be of any use to my family. I have decided to end my life." A few hours later, Tiru Venkatam was dead of poison.

India's annual intellectual panic was on; day after day in all the great cities, anxious teen-agers pored over newspapers, scanning the long columns of numbers that reported the result of the rigid entrance examinations for the Dominion's colleges & universities. It was a week of rejoicing for those who had passed....

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