Things That Bang

They took turns, shooting a fourteen year old boy. Five bullets ripped through his young body in the high end Euro International School. Abhishek Tyagi died on the spot. According to news reports one of the boys smuggled his father's gun to the school's toilet and later he and his friend shot their nemesis to death.

"I thought it was loud metal work going on," says the student of the private Euro International school in Gurgaon, a thriving info-tech and property market town.

But as Karan approached the dank ground floor stairwell, he stopped in his tracks and froze.

Lying on the floor near a rubbish bin was the blood splattered body of fellow school pupil, Abhishek Tyagi, 14, with whom he had played a game of cricket in the school playground a few hours earlier on Tuesday.

The boys are in juvenile detention for fourteen days.

A boy died, not by stabbing or having his skull slammed against a rock but by a gun. There has been no real public uproar. No eyebrows raised for we all have heard similar stories of warring gangs in schools, of bullies picking on class mates.

"Yes, I killed Abhishek," the 14-year-old said without a trace of remorse or hesitation when he was produced at Sector 40 police station after the shooting at Euro International School here.

The two boys allegedly killed Abhishek Tyagi as "he was physically stronger than both of them and been beating them up for the past two months", Gurgaon Police Commissioner

Sure, the parents should have made the gun inaccessible, but for their children to be so cold in their anger to plot murder makes one wonders whether they were just bad seeds and not youth gone astray.

Speculations of little consequence are rife but this isn't a new crime that rocked the city. Anger, jealousy, lust and hatred plague our schools but we avert our eyes. Blame games are of no use, we need to take a hard look at our society for it wasn't some 'low life scum' belonging to a government school, like some belonging to the Delhi/Gurgaon middle class might say, but this was their own upwardly mobile boys who committed the crime.

The school has cameras fitted in and now the parents are demanding metal detectors. Whats happening in our schools? Where is all this anger coming from? Is it time for parents to think of home schooling? Or turn schools into prisons?

How can we protect our children from their own classmates?