What We Lost with Faisal Bashir

His death is a painful reflection of what we have become, a society that treats dreams like assembly-line products and turns ambition into a burden too heavy for young shoulders.

- Ummar Jamal

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.

Back in school, when | told people I was opting for Humanities in Class 11, it felt like I'd committed a crime. My relatives reacted as if | 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 | loved: writing, debating, law. 1 knew I didn't want to spend my best years chasing a dream that wasn't mine.