Two class VIII students have shot a 14 year old boy at Euro International School Gurgaon. Abhishek Tyagi has been shot three times with the licensed pistol belonging to the father of one of the shooters. This parent is now on the run. The police are hunting him for negligence in safely storing a firearm. The accused have been sent to fourteen days’ judicial custody at Faridabad Juvenile Home.

Instant gratification is a technical term for being impulsive and doing whatever whenever. This urge is propelling kids to kill each other and even themselves. Mainstream media like the Telegraph Kolkata is hollering the entry of Western style school-killing in our schools. But they are looking at this phenomenon as an isolated urban phenomenon. This is misleading and will not prevent future shoot-outs.

Recently two class eleven kids in small-town West Bengal killed themselves. Saurav Das of Bishnupur High School had declared undying love for Mahima Jalan. The girl rejected him. The boy treated his friends and asked them to remember how badly he was treated if anything were to happen to him. Then he went home to die. Less than a week ago when Mahima returned to school, her friends started questioning her right to live. She too then committed suicide. A class nine student in the same town recently set herself afire. No mainstream media bothered with these deaths. These incidents are important in understanding the Gurgaon shootout. The Gurgaon boys have accused their victim of being a class-bully. They thought the best way to rid their problem was through death. These far-off Bishnupur children too thought death is the solution to their mutual problems. None, either in uppity Euro-International School or in Bishnupur High School were willing to let time sort out the differences. All were victims of the impulse to instant gratification. They had to have their problems sorted out instantly, whatever the cost. Why?

The mainstream media are churning out endless cliches like increased violence on the television, increased consumerism and the decline of general morality as causes for the violence in kids.

There is another much simpler explanation. William Golding, a long time school master who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in his twentieth century classic Lord of the Flies, had written of children turning violent and cannibalistic when left to themselves. He debunked the myth of the innocent child. His contention was that aggression is so innate that without adult support kids revert to pre-human times of animal predatorial behavior. The two kids who killed Tyagi just followed their instincts. Civilization failed to affect them. How is that billions who are watching violent movies are not being affected and only these two got touched by evil? They most probably had the seeds of evil in themselves to begin with. All this talk about outside influences affecting them is secondary and irrelevant.

This violence is nothing new and extraordinary. The human mask just gets unstuck from time to time.

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