I am inordinately fond of my friends. I have a coffee mug with an old quote from Euripides that says, “One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives,” although, truth to tell, that mug was bought to tease my mother more than anything else. But friendships are those special things that allow us to break the boundaries of our own fleshly prison, to reach beyond ourselves and share ideas, jokes, and a vision of the world as we would like it to be.

There’s the old saying that friends are the family you make, not the one you’re born with, and one of the deep joys of friendship is that our friends are often from backgrounds and places we know little about. It is through conversations with friends who are lawyers that I have learned a little of their world, through conversations with architects and designers I have learned of how to look at buildings and homes. One of the things that makes me intensely happy is when friends visit from overseas, and we can talk about their country, their food, their music, their politics, the horizons they see...

What is often missing in this celebration of friendship are issues of social status, money, and disparities in power. We would like to believe that in our friend circles such things do not matter, and, truly, quite often they do not. But it is a privilege to have friendships of this sort, to have the opportunity to build them. This was brought home to me earlier this year when a student in my old university committed suicide. A friend, Praveen, wrote about it on a Facebook post, and I called him up, wanting to know what had happened. The student had been from a marginalised community, and I feared that his suicide was triggered by harassment.

Praveen explained that it was not harassment that had eaten away at the student, but something else — an issue of friendships, of social acceptance, or the lack thereof. “He really wanted to get into this university, and this was his third attempt at the MPhil programme. He was immensely proud of the achievement, and it was an achievement,” Praveen said. The student had come from a poor background, had worked as a manual labourer to make ends meet. His hands were hard from work, like a rock, Praveen said.

At the same time, like a rock, he had his own hard edges. The pride that had seen him make the giant strides he had, to traverse the immense distance from being a manual labourer to a postgraduate degree-holder in one of the finest universities in India, also left him unable to ask for help, or accept anything easily. And in university he found it difficult to make friends.

Most of us make friends at a younger age, in school and college. At that time the socio-economic background of our friends is hardly the topic of discussion — inevitably some are from richer families and others from more powerful ones, but it does not intrude. And by the nature of schools and colleges, the impact of these differences, and their visibility, tends to be relatively narrow.

Universities are different. By the time we enter universities, we have formed our friend circles somewhat, and also their characters. They are more aware of who they are, and their family background. The atmosphere of academia, and of proving yourself through studies, still acts as something of an equaliser, and despite the diversity of people from all over the country, and from all walks of life, there is a place to meet as equals.

But we do not live by our academic achievements alone. We want to be acknowledged as human beings, as being worthy of friendship and of respect; and in the case of this student, he did not find that.

It was not as if he was alone, he did have some friends, and he had mentors, such as Praveen, to reach out to, but that was not enough. To have made the journey he had, and then find himself feeling left out because his classmates talked of experiences he hadn’t had, of living life in a way he never could, must have been immensely disheartening.

And at the back of his mind was always the question of whether it was he that was being rejected, or was it his class, his caste, that led to his social isolation.

So he killed himself. A young man of immense pride, who had changed his world through the hard work of his hands, was lost just like that. It is hard to wrap my mind around it, and yet, all too easy to understand. He deserved better, I wish our country had been able to give it to him.

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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