The boy hadn’t attended college for a fornight

A 16-year-old college student has been missing since Monday, after his parents scolded him for his addiction to the popular video game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, better known as PUBG.The Navi Mumbai Police said Aayush Ashok Chudaji , 16, a resident of Sai Savali Sadan in Nerul, Navi Mumbai, left home for college on Monday but never returned.Chudaji studies at S K College of Science & Commerce, Seawoods, but hadn’t attended lectures for the past fortnight, spending his time playing PUBG instead. He would stay up all night playing the game on his parents’ phones after the fell asleep, wake up late and spend the day playing the game at cyber cafés.His family lodged a missing person complaint at Nerul police station. The police suspect Chudaji is in Pune, having been promised a job in a cyber café there by someone he met on PUBG. His uncle Nandu Angade said, “We learnt later that he had told his friends that this person had promised him a job in a cyber café, where he could play the game as much as he wanted, so he went to Pune. The police have sent a team, but we are also going there to look for him at cyber cafés and game parlours.”The Nerul police, with help from the cyber cell of the Navi Mumbai Crime branch , tracked down his ID on the game but found that he had abandoned it – after reaching the top level of the game –and was probably using a new, unknown ID.Angade added, “His parents shouted him as he used to play the game all the time and had stopped going to college. We are worried because he had ever travelled as far as Pune alone, and has not communicated since Monday.”Chudaji’s father works with a private company in Thane and his mother works in Vashi, the police said.