India, Sept. 25 -- When I was an engineering undergraduate at BITS Pilani, nearly 40 years ago, we lost three students in my cohort to suicide during college, and two more not too long after. Nearly 1% of our entire batch. These deaths seemed so difficult to understand at the time.

The batchmates we lost were young people who had made it into one of India's leading engineering institutions and were, by all societal standards, successful young people. Yet, for some of them, life became unbearable. I thought about those friends when I heard about the student who died by suicide at IIT Bombay last week.

The circumstances surrounding that death remain under investigation, and we should not be drawing conclusions about that one student from ...