"Seven bodies and one question: When will we all wake up?"

Seven members of a family committed mass suicide in Panchkula. Hands tremble while writing these lines, and the mind repeatedly returns to the place — behind that closed door, where the hope of an age had died. It is an easy rush to simply call that scene a “mass suicide”. In fact, it is a collective social failure, in which all of us — neighbors, relatives, institutions, governments — are somehow complicit.

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screams of silence

When someone commits suicide, he does not just lose his life, he loses society. He indicates that he cried out a lot, suffered a lot, endured a lot — and then, exhausted, he chose silence.

Praveen Mittal and his family were also probably not silent, we just ignored their voices.

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

Perhaps | did not tell you because every time it broke, we were all busy with our mobile phones.

Perhaps | didn’t tell him because we still associate poverty, debt, and failure with shame, not sympathy.

We are all a little guilty

There is not a single reason behind every suicide, but a social structure - in which a person breaks down financially, becomes emotionally lonely, and then goes away quietly under the blanket of self-respect.

This incident was also similar. A businessman who was once self-reliant, today got ruined under the burden of banks and moneylenders. His children, who wanted to see the world, buried their future.

Was there no neighbor, relative or friend close enough to understand his pain?

Silence is also a crime

We often think of crime as only being ‘committed' - but the truth is that those who do not do anything at the right time are also complicit in the crime.

If one friend, one brother, one customer, one neighbor—if one thing had said in time, “Let's do something,” perhaps these seven lives could have been saved.