https://chatgpt.com/share/
Kishan ,
Only thing that I understood from this chat with ChatGPT is > ChatGPT thinks VERY HIGHLY of the STORY narrative of YourContentCreator
As far as its ADVICE ( on how to improve this feature even more ) is concerned, if Content Creator becomes hugely popular, then Vishesh and yourself may decide whether to implement this ADVICE or not
That story itself is at the bottom
With regards,
Hemen Parekh
Genre | Most Recent Stories |
Articulation | IIT-Bombay student jumps to death from hostel terrace |
Narrative | STORY |
As if the life he had built here was a show whose run might be cancelled.
The room thickened around him. He could feel his pulse in his ears, in his fingertips, in the space behind his eyes.
He stood up too fast. The chair scraped the floor with a sound that made him wince.
Outside the window, the hostel courtyard was mostly dark. A few rooms splashed rectangles of light onto the ground. Somewhere, someone laughed loudly at something on a screen.
He felt a sudden, fierce desire to be anywhere else.
His gaze moved, almost of its own accord, to the ceiling—the direction his feet always took when he sought air they didn't have to share with anyone.
Upward
The stairwell in Hostel Four was a place that had seen too many rushed goodbyes and too few careful hellos. Its walls were lined with notices curling at the edges: lost ID cards, club events from months ago, a faded poster for a mental health helpline with a phone number he had never dialed.
He climbed slowly, counting the steps:
One floor.
Two.
Three.
On the fourth landing, a poster caught his eye. It had been pasted recently, the edges still clean.
Feeling overwhelmed?
You are not alone.
Call our 24/7 helpline: ***
A faint smile ghosted across his face. The words felt like they belonged in another world, one where people actually stopped on staircases to breathe and call strangers.
He climbed on.
By the time he reached the heavy door to the terrace, his breathing had evened out. The act of walking had distracted his mind, the way it sometimes did. For a fleeting moment, he thought of turning back, of texting Aditya—You free? Let’s chai at shack.
His hand rested on the metal bar.
Instead, he pushed.
The Edge
The sky above the IIT Bombay campus glowed a gentle orange, the haze of city lights reflecting off a low invisible ceiling. Clouds hung like held breath.
Standing at the edge, he could see the faint outline of the lake. He remembered the first-year orientation walk when the seniors had marched them around the campus, shouting warnings about attendance, about rainy season leeches, about the most important thing—maintaining your CPI.
“Guys, CPI is life,” one had joked.
Everyone had laughed. So had he.
Now, years later, the joke no longer felt funny.
He sat on the low parapet, feet dangling over nothing. The city hummed below like a massive generator, its electricity threaded through every exam he’d written, every dream his parents had hung on the word “IIT.”
His mind flicked through images as if someone, somewhere, had pressed fast forward.
His mother, scrolling through WhatsApp statuses to see his hostel festivals.
His father, standing a little straighter when neighbors said, “Your son is in Powai, na?”
His younger cousin, asking on a video call, “Bhaiya, do you have robots in your college?”
What would they say if he told them he wanted to stop?
I’m tired.
I can’t keep up.
I don’t know if I even want this life everyone planned for me.
He pictured their faces, their confusion, the way worry would harden into fear, fear into anger.
“They won’t understand,” he whispered into the night.
A breeze skated across the terrace, fluttering a forgotten plastic bag in the corner. Somewhere below, a phone rang shrilly through an open window, then was silenced.
He thought of the word the newspapers would use.
Suicide.
A cold, clinical term that would not mention the thousands of paper cuts that had bled into this moment. It would not speak about the time he’d stared blankly at a derivation he’d once known by heart, or the way his chest felt constricted whenever placement season came up in conversation.
It would not mention the nights he lay awake rehearsing explanations for a future that no longer seemed to have room for him.
He imagined the headline anyway, because the human brain is cruel that way.
IIT-Bombay student jumps to death from hostel terrace.
The words slotted into place with terrifying ease, like they’d been waiting for a name.
Down Below
On the same terrace, at the far corner behind a column, another figure stood, back turned, phone pressed to his ear. Harsh was in third year, Mechanical. He came up here to talk to his girlfriend because network was better and privacy was a luxury the hostel did not afford.
Tonight, they were arguing.
“It’s not about you,” he was saying, pacing in a small tight line. “It’s just… everything. Classes, projects, my dad keeps asking about GATE. I don’t know.”
He paused to listen.
“Yeah, I know you’re stressed too,” he said softly. “I just… I feel like I’m failing at everything all the time.”
He stared blindly at the city, his words snatched by the wind.
As he talked, he heard the terrace door open and close somewhere behind him. Footsteps. He thought about moving, offering the newcomer space, but the argument had reached that point where you forget the rest of the world exists.
Later, he would replay the next thirty seconds in his mind until the edges blurred.
A shadow moved at the periphery of his vision. The faint scrape of shoes. A pause.
“Nahi yaar, I’m just—” he began, and then the sound came: a single, terrible thud from below that did not belong to the ordinary catalogue of campus noises.
He froze.
“Hello? Harsh?” the voice on the phone said. “What happened?”
He did not answer. The phone slid from his hand, clattering against the concrete.
He ran toward the edge.
Impact
Later, the police would ask him what exactly he had seen. The college would appoint a committee that would bring him into a room with too-cold AC and too-bright lights and ask him to walk through the moment step by step, as if retelling it could somehow make it manageable.
But in that first raw instant, all he knew was the shape lying crumpled on the ground far below, too still to be anything but wrong.
His throat closed.
“Somebody!” he yelled, voice cracking. “Somebody, come!”
Within minutes, the terrace, the stairwell, the courtyard below would be flooded: security guards with walkie-talkies, hostel seniors pulling on slippers, wardens breathless from the stairs, someone dialing an ambulance with shaking hands.
In the chaos, no one would remember exactly who turned Naman’s body over, who covered his face, who called the warden “Sir, sir, please come fast.”
What would linger instead were fragments: the smear of blood on the courtyard tiles, the silver flash of an abandoned phone half under a bench, the way someone, somewhere, kept saying “He was just here. I saw him at lunch. He was just here.”
Time, which had been measured in lectures and lab slots, now broke into before and after.
After
The next morning, the campus awoke to messages instead of alarms.
WhatsApp groups buzzed with forwarded screenshots:
Have you heard?
Hostel 4…
Second-year Civil…
Jumped from terrace…
Police in campus.
At breakfast, the mess was quieter than usual. People clustered in small circles, their plates half-eaten.
“Did you know him?” someone asked.
“Agarwal, right? I think he was in my tutorial.”
“Yaar, why would he do this?”
Some shook their heads, others stared at their phones, already reading the first online report: a short, stark article that turned a life into five sentences and a headline.
IIT-Bombay student jumps to death from hostel terrace
By afternoon, news vans gathered near the main gate. Cameras pointed at the grey walls of the institute as if answers might be printed there. Journalists spoke in measured urgency, linking this death to others on other campuses, the narrative of pressure and despair slotting neatly into place.
In one corner of the campus, administration drafted a message to the students:
It is with deep sorrow that we inform you of the untimely passing of our second-year B.Tech student… We extend our deepest condolences… The institute is committed to supporting the mental health and well-being of all its students…
In Hostel Four, the corridor outside Room 327 filled with shoes that did not belong there. Friends sat on the floor, backs against the wall, saying very little. Someone had placed a candle near the door, though the wind kept trying to blow it out.
Aditya sat inside, staring at the empty bed across from him.
Only now did every small detail look like a sign.
The untouched tiffin from last night, still on the table.
The stack of unanswered emails on the laptop screen.
The hoodie hanging from the back of the chair, as if its owner had simply gone to the bathroom.
“He said he’d come for dinner,” Aditya whispered, to no one in particular.
Beside him, Karthik rubbed his eyes under his glasses.
“Did he ever… like… say anything?” he asked.
“He said he was tired,” Aditya replied. “But we’re all tired.” His voice broke. “I didn’t know it was that kind of tired.”
The Things We Don’t Say
In the days that followed, classes resumed. Attendance monitors ticked on. The mess served the same four rotating menus.
The terrace of Hostel Four was locked for a while.
Counselors took extra slots. Posters appeared on notice boards and WhatsApp groups about wellness sessions, peer support circles, phone helplines. Tutorials were prefaced with small speeches about “reaching out if you’re struggling,” about “no shame in asking for help.”
Some students rolled their eyes. Others listened too carefully.
At night, in rooms across the campus, people lay awake staring at ceilings of their own.
“I saw him at LAN gaming just last week,” someone would say in one hostel.
“He helped me with a tutorial sheet,” someone would whisper in another.
“He used to lend me his calculator in the lab,” a classmate would remember.
Stories surfaced, brief, tender, sketched in the margins of shock.
No one could quite reconcile the fragments: the boy who laughed at memes, the boy who solved integrals faster than anyone else in the batch, the boy who slipped through the cracks of the story they told about themselves as the country’s brightest.
In group chats, a new kind of message began to appear.
Hey, you okay?
Been a while since we talked. Want to go for chai?
I know things are rough this sem. If you want to crib, I’m here.
They were clumsy attempts, often unsaid out of awkwardness. But some were sent. Some were answered. Between problem sets and project deadlines, entire lives quietly shifted course because someone chose to message at the right time.
We rarely hear those stories.
What Remains
Months later, the mark on the courtyard tiles had faded. New batches arrived, dragging their suitcases up the stairs, wide-eyed at the sight of the lake, at the sprawl of the academic area, at the senior who pointed at a locked door at the top of Hostel Four and said, with a shrug, “That terrace is closed now.”
“What happened?” a first-year would ask.
“Some incident,” the senior would reply, voice flattening the story to make it less dangerous.
The first-years would nod and move on, their heads already full of timetables and clubs and acronyms they would soon toss around casually.
But among the ones who had been there before, the date would live on in a quieter way.
For Harsh, it was the night he hung up his phone and finally called the helpline on that faded poster.
For Aditya, it was the day he stopped replying “all good” by default when a friend asked how he was.
For a professor in the Civil Engineering department, it was the prompt to start emailing students individually when they missed too many classes, writing not “Please see me regarding attendance” but “I have noticed you have not been coming. Is everything okay?”
Change came slowly, unevenly. It could not bring one boy back.
But it did something else: it began to name the darkness that had lived unspoken in too many rooms.
Some nights, when the air was heavy and the city lights blurred into a single smear, someone in some hostel would walk up almost to a terrace, almost to a window, teetering on the thin line between staying and leaving.
Maybe they would remember a headline.
Maybe they would think of parents who would never find the right words for this kind of grief.
Of friends who would sit outside a locked door with candles.
Of juniors who would inherit the same hallways but not the same chance to know them.
And maybe—just maybe—their phone would buzz.
Where are you? Mess?
We’re ordering anda pav. Come na.
Sometimes, that was all it took for the night to tilt.
Coda
Naman’s story, like too many others on too many campuses, will never appear on a CV or a LinkedIn profile. It will not be carved into the marble of institute history, spoken of in convocation speeches about excellence and innovation.
But in the quiet revolutions it sparked—in the awkward, brave conversations between friends, in the professors who now look twice at attendance sheets, in the handful of students who decide to dial a number instead of step toward the edge—something of him remains.
The terrace of Hostel Four still belongs to the city at night. The hum of Bombay continues, indifferent and endless.
Human lives, by contrast, are small, precious, and unbearably fragile.
Between the first step up a staircase and the last step off an edge, there is often a moment where the story can still be rewritten.
If you ever find yourself in that moment—on any terrace, in any hostel, under any ceiling—know this much, at least:
Your worth is not your CPI.
Your value is not the logo on your ID card.
You are not a headline waiting to happen.
You are a whole story, and you do not have to carry it alone.
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