Between Books and Battles
Dr Anoop Singh
dranoop8998@gmail.com
“A student today is not merely a learner – they are a warrior navigating a battlefield of expectations, economics, and emotions.”
There is a certain romanticism that society has long attached to the idea of student life – a golden period of youth, camaraderie, and intellectual discovery. Classrooms buzzing with curiosity, canteen conversations that stretch long into the afternoon, and the exhilarating freedom of a life still brimming with possibility. Yet, if one were to peel back this idealized portrait, what emerges is a far more complex and, at times, deeply painful reality. Today’s students are carrying burdens that previous generations could scarcely have imagined, and it is time we, as a society, listened.
The Weight of Expectations
From the moment a child enters school, the machinery of expectation begins its relentless grind. Parents, teachers, relatives, and society at large converge with a singular, often suffocating message: perform, excel, and compete. By the time students reach college or university, many are already exhausted – not from learning, but from the sheer pressure of being expected to be exceptional.
Entrance examinations that determine the trajectory of entire lives, rankings that reduce human potential to a three-digit number, and the perpetual fear of falling short – these are the silent tyrants of student existence. In India alone, millions of young men and women sit for competitive exams each year, knowing fully well that only a fraction will succeed. The rest must grapple not only with failure but with the crushing shame that our culture so carelessly attaches to it.
Financial Hardship: The Silent Crisis
Education, which was once envisioned as the great equalizer, has in many ways become the great divider. The cost of quality education has soared to dizzying heights, placing an enormous financial strain not only on students but on entire families. Many students from rural and lower-income backgrounds migrate to cities in search of better institutions, only to find themselves battling sky-high rents, inflated tuition fees, and the daily indignity of counting every rupee.
Countless students juggle part-time jobs alongside their studies – working nights at call centers, delivering food, tutoring younger children – all while trying to keep pace with an unforgiving academic calendar. They study under streetlights when hostel electricity fails, survive on meager meals to stretch their monthly allowances, and send money home to ailing parents even when they themselves are in need. These are not characters from a Dickensian novel; they are our students, sitting in classrooms across the country, silently battling every single day.
The Mental Health Emergency We Refuse to See
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of contemporary student life is the quiet mental health crisis unfolding within our educational institutions. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and burnout are no longer rare exceptions – they are widespread realities. The National Mental Health Survey and various institutional studies consistently reveal that a significant proportion of students experience severe psychological distress, yet seek help far too rarely.
Why do they stay silent? Because our educational culture has yet to normalize the conversation around mental health. To admit struggle is still, in many corners, seen as weakness. Families who have sacrificed everything for a child’s education cannot easily accept that their child is breaking under the pressure of that very opportunity. And so, students suffer alone – scrolling through social media feeds that show everyone else apparently thriving, convinced that their pain is a personal failing rather than a systemic one.
The tragic consequences of this silence make headlines with disturbing regularity. Student suicides – particularly around examination seasons – have shaken the national conscience repeatedly. Yet our response remains frustratingly inadequate: a few counseling centers understaffed and underfunded, an occasional awareness campaign, and then silence until the next tragedy.
Social Isolation in a Hyper-Connected World
It is one of the great paradoxes of our time: students today are more connected than any generation before them, yet many report feeling profoundly alone. Social media creates curated illusions of belonging while deepening real-world isolation. Friendships are increasingly transactional, communities are fragmented, and the art of genuine human connection is slowly eroding beneath the weight of digital performance.
For students who have migrated far from home, the loneliness can be especially acute. They navigate new cities, new languages, new cultures – often without a safety net of family or familiar community. The festive seasons that light up the rest of society can feel like the loneliest times of year when one is hundreds of miles away from home, unable to afford the journey back.
The Road Ahead: What Must Change
To write about student struggle without also pointing toward solutions would be to indulge in despair without purpose. There are urgent, concrete changes that our educational institutions, policymakers, and society must embrace.
First, mental health support must become a genuine institutional priority – not a checkbox activity but a well-funded, destigmatized, accessible service available to every student. Second, scholarship and financial aid frameworks must be reformed to ensure that economic background does not determine educational destiny. Third, our pedagogy must evolve beyond rote learning and rank obsession toward a model that values curiosity, resilience, and holistic development.
Above all, we as a society must change the way we speak to and about young people. The language of comparison, competition, and conditional love – “be a doctor,” “top the class,” “don’t embarrass us” – must give way to a kinder, more honest conversation: “your worth is not your rank,” “failure is a chapter, not the story,” and “we are here for you, no matter what.”
Student life is not, and has never been, a carefree interlude. It is a formative crucible – one that can either break or build, depending on how much support surrounds the young person inside it. The struggles of students are not invisible; we have simply chosen, too often, not to look. It is time we looked – with honesty, with empathy, and with the resolute will to do better.
(The author is an educator, researcher, and advocate for student well-being.)
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