On November 14th, 1998, a young Indian man named Neil Grover killed himself. Neil was bright: He was studying to become a doctor and doing well in medical school. His mother said he had always been happy; she couldn’t understand why he might have felt the urge to take his own life. His suicide note was as cryptic as the act itself: I had everything, but life is a double-edged sword. If I tell everything, I will lose everything.

I repeated the lines to myself over and over, as if I could stumble upon their meaning. But of course I couldn’t. He was like Srinivas Akkaladevi—another young South Asian medical student who also committed suicide. His family also couldn’t imagine a reason. And both Grover and Akkaladevi were as successful as Sarvshreshth Gupta, the Goldman Sachs analyst found dead after working hundred-hour weeks. The cause of Gupta’s death has not yet been determined. His father, Sunil Gupta, wrote of his son:

He started complaining ‘This job is not for me. Too much work and too little time. I want to come back home...’ We counselled him to keep going, as such difficult phases were inevitable in a high pressure job. ‘Sonny, all are of your age, young and ambitious, keep going,’ I would say.

Keep going is the message we hear over and over. Walk it off. There’s a running joke in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding: The protagonist’s father is always saying “Put some Windex on it,” as a way to heal whatever ails. It’s a cure-all medicine, and none other is needed. Tough it out is the lesson. It is something you’re used to hearing in South Asian culture, where having a high pain threshold is something to brag about, where only a certain kind of pain is permissible. In the end, we never find out if the Windex works.

A few weeks ago, I sat in the drawing room of a grand house in India, listening to a group of parents talk about their children abroad. “Ravi heard from LSE,” said one mother casually, spooning peanuts into her mouth. “He’s been offered a job at McKinsey, and you can imagine the kind of starting salary they offered him... but he wanted to go to grad school first. He’s just thrilled.”

Another mother: “Akanksha only just finished med school and now she’s saying ‘Mummy, maybe I’m applying for a Ph.D at Yale.’ They’re never satisfied with what they’re doing: it’s all about how many more degrees they can rack up...”