Yesterday, Alpa, a junior resident doctor took an overdose of alprazolam, a drug of the "Calmpose" family. She took the tablets at 12.30PM, but luckily was found by a colleague an hour later and was immediately rushed to the hospital ICU, where she was treated in time and recovered.

A friend of hers told me that Alpa was going around with a guy, who was leaving for the US the next week, but who had still not told his parents about the two of them. Apparently, she did this out of frustration, to put pressure on him to work things out before he left. She probably did not want to die anyway, but just wanted to scare the wits out of him.

She was lucky. She lived.

Jugal was not so lucky.

Jugal, a friend from school days, fell in love with a Muslim girl, in college. During residency, due to opposition from both families, they got married to different people and a year later both committed suicide. I know his widow; a sweet girl, also a doctor, who for no fault of hers got involved in a no-win situation. Thankfully, she is now happily married elsewhere.

A year after I joined college, I came across an annual magazine published three years before my admission, which carried an obituary in poetry about a girl who had killed herself. When I asked my seniors about this, they said that she was going around with a guy who refused to marry her and she killed herself. Five years ago, another resident was found dead having injected himself with KCL (potassium chloride), arguably, the best way of killing oneself if you are dead sure you want to die. And after "Ek Duuje ke Liye" was released there were innumerable newspaper reports of couples killing themselves by jumping from cliffs into the sea, emulating Kamalahasan and Rati Agnihotri.

There are really only two reasons in college and residency days for wanting to die. One is stress and the other is a bad love life. Though there are occasional cases of students killing themselves because they could not handle the work, it is not a common reason. Friends, peer-support and other stragglers, all help in handling the stress. But I guess there aren't enough people to help when love affairs go sour.

Alpa is a smart kid. She was born in a small-town, studied in a large city in central Maharashtra and then came to Mumbai to do her residency, both to learn something better, and to experience the high of living alone in this city. She fell in love with the city and with someone from the city. Even if things weren't working out with that someone from the city, was that a reason to attempt to die? Jugal was a genius at work and a genuinely nice person. A love affair didn't work out and he killed himself. Here one day and poof, gone the next day! Just like that.

I accept the fact that I am a master of my life and that I have the right to decide whether I want to live or die. I also accept the fact that in a terminally ill situation, suicide (euthanasia) is not an unacceptable solution. But somewhere down the line, it kills me to see bright people throwing away their lives because of love affairs gone awry. I too fell in love, and maybe if things hadn't worked out, I would have rebelled and fought and done something weird in those days. But killing myself...ending my life? It doesn't make sense to me. I can, to an extent, understand the reasoning and probably even the emotions behind a situation that could momentarily make someone lose reason; but that these can overpower our natural instincts at self-preservation, is something I cannot understand, condone and accept.

Life is just too precious to even think of giving it up. Maybe, if it is a real struggle to live, as in the case of 30% of our population that lives wretched lives without food, clothing and shelter, there may be a case for ending that life. I say maybe, because high up there, insulated from the deprivation and hopelessness that pervades their lives, that most us have no first-hand experience of, it is difficult to really know and understand what goes on in those minds. Yet they keep on living. And these privileged idiots, with everything going for them, with bright careers and rosy futures, can't figure out a way of working things out? And actually kill themselves because of soured love affairs?

Intelligence at work or in school or college obviously does not imply concurrent emotional intelligence and I think many of us tend to forget that. And maybe there is place in our educational system for teaching students how to be emotionally intelligent.

So that we don't kill ourselves over stupid love affairs, especially when a few years down the line, we would have looked back and either laughed or sighed with a little nostalgia and then continued living. Especially in this era, which really is the best time to have been alive.

So I come back to that one question. Why!