Arnab Mukherjee’s (below ) study table in his room at hostel No. 4 of BIT-Mesra, Ranchi, on Friday. Pictures by Hardeep Singh

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’…

Ranchi, Nov. 4: Caught between academic pressure and parental expectations, a final-year architecture student of BIT-Mesra orchestrated a painful death for himself, hanging from the ceiling fan in his hostel room while the pertinent Bob Dylan anthem played unremittingly on his laptop.

Twenty-one-year-old Arnab Mukherjee, who had Googled successful ways of suicide before his final act on Friday, also left a scribbled note for his parents that read: “Don’t expect too much from me”.

Every inch of Arnab’s room No. 9 at hostel 4 bore tell-tale signs of inner turmoil. His study table was littered with cigarette packets, matchboxes, pens, paper knife, crumpled paper and plastic, while a solitary whisky bottle stood empty in one corner. The walls bared a collage of posters and sketches, many of them doleful or scary scenes of torture.

One of the walls bore a few lines in his handwriting that said: “What is lost is a reason to mourn, out of the night that covers me blank, pole to pole for my unconquerable soul”.

Classmate Arun Sharma was the first to make the chilling discovery.

“We were supposed to submit a 100-marks thesis for our final semester at 8.15am. I headed for Arnab’s room around 8am and knocked on his door, but there was no response. After sometime, a few other friends and I hit the door hard and it creaked open. The sight was numbing,” recalled Arun who lives in room No. 3 at the same hostel.

“He (Arnab) was hanging from the ceiling fan and Bob Dylan’s famous 1964 number was playing on his laptop,” the BArch. student said.

Arnab’s father Narendra Nath Mukherjee, a resident of Doranda’s AG Colony, is a sales executive at hotel BNR Chanakya, near Ranchi railway station, while mother works in a private company in Secunderabad.

Mukherjee is learnt to have told the police that he had taken a loan of Rs 8 lakh for his only child’s engineering studies. Sumit Kumar, the in-charge of BIT-Mesra police station, said Arnab hadn’t done well in one of his final-year semesters.

“In his first-year semesters, he had scored A and A+, but his grades started falling thereafter. In the first semester of his final year, he scored D. The boy came from a middle-class family. Peer pressure and parents’ expectations took a toll on him,” the officer said.

BIT-Mesra deputy registrar Colonel (retired) A.K. Nanda confirmed Arnab’s poor grades. “He sure was not doing well in his studies, but that doesn’t mean one should end one’s life. He had backlogs, but there was still time to make them up. It is really unfortunate,” he said.

Besides papers and other items from the room, police have seized Arnab’s cellphone. Kumar said they were going through call and message records.

The otherwise academically abuzz campus of BIT-Mesra went numb with shock soon after the tragic news came to the fore. The motley crowd of students, teachers and college officials was understandably not forthcoming in answering queries.

Only a hushed excitement surrounded the two-day national aerospace convention, which began today and will see several eminent academics and scientists from the country participate.

Some of Arnab’s friends, in their statement to the police, have said that the youth was not the victim of an estranged relationship with any girl. “We don’t think he was into any kind of relationship at all. However, we also did not sense his acute depression during academic and social interactions,” a student said.