Who 'killed' Jason Arday? The absurd tragedy of Cambridge's 'youngest black professor'

There is a saying among bibliophiles: Never judge a book by its movie. For true readers, nothing any director dreams up can ever match the cinema playing inside one’s head, to borrow a line from Anurag Kashyap’s greatest villain. Two rare adaptations that arguably hold their own against their source novels are Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.And yet one film that outshone the book that inspired it is 3 Idiots, loosely based on Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, which captures the meat-grinder aesthetics of engineering education. There is a scene that hits a little too close to home when a student decides he has rolled the boulder long enough and commits suicide, unable to deal with the vagaries of engineering life. During his funeral, the film’s prodigal protagonist confronts the authoritarian dean and claims that it wasn’t suicide but “murder” caused by an institution and a society that created unbearable pressure that no post-mortem investigation could ever measure.While a Camus-like forensic dissection of suicide is beyond this piece, that line about institutional pressure came to mind when one learned of Jason Arday’s death, nine days after h...