This month brought the sad news of two young boys dying in Ashoka University – according to reports, one by suicide and the other for which the cause is still to be confirmed. The signs of a mental-health crisis among the young have been around for a while but we still don’t seem to have understood what is going on or how we can help. I am wary of giving parenting advice because each child is different and like everything else, it is contextual. Parenting today is often a lonely and isolating journey because in the last few decades, the burden of child-rearing has been placed solely on parents in the nuclear family. But, raising children has never been just the responsibility of parents. To raise a child is to facilitate a process of knowing the self and building a relationship with the world. This requires all of us to think about how we imagine the world, ourselves and others in our lives.

To speak of my experience of raising a boy requires that I preface it with the privilege of class, of having supportive family close by, of having friends whose presence in my son’s life showed that there is more than one way of being in the world. This enabled many choices that have contributed to the way he inhabits the world. At 32, I became a mother to a boy with a mixed Hindu-Muslim parentage. This context forced me to ask........

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