“Boys and girls together? Arre baba, there will only be trouble!”—the grandmothers, the aunties, and the WhatsApp uncles of India chant this like a holy mantra. For them, co-education is the gateway drug to doom: a ticket from ‘innocent schooling’ straight into the moral ICU. 

But the smarter kids of today are already in an ICU of another kind. Their ventilator is the mobile phone screen. Even at midnight, long after street dogs have quit barking and power-saving mode has finished its shift, millions of young eyeballs glow under the blue light. The lullabies of old have been replaced by the ‘ping, ping, ping’ of notifications. Sleep is out, dopamine addiction is in. 

Meanwhile, ‘relationship’ has undergone a neat item-number remix. Once upon a time, love was about handwritten notes, whispered secrets, and occasional stolen glances. Now it’s about double ticks turning blue and the existential horror of being ‘seen’ but not replied to. A whole generation is sinking into an emotional quicksand where emojis—smiling, crying, heart-eyes—have been handed the delicate responsibility of carrying human feeling. Spoiler alert: they’re buckling under the weight. 

Naturally, our elders have the solution. Blame co-education! They insist. “If boys and girls sit together, sparks will fly.” Which is hilarious, because in most classrooms today, the only sparks come from the overworked Wi-Fi router. 

Our social scientists echo the panic with more jargon. Prof Paras Nath Choudhary shakes his academic head: Boyfriends-girlfriends are trending at too young an age. Digital chatter, he warns, makes conversation a 24/7 minefield: no reply equals insult, slow reply equals betrayal, ghosting equals apocalypse. And if your break-up happens to share the same bench as you, well… God save the group project. His main thesis: we imported Western dating culture into a society that still hides its underwear ads behind brown paper. 

Parents, too, join the chorus of despair. They complain that schools pay less attention to imparting moral values and more to cosmetic looks and issues like who is pairing with whom. Social worker Padmini Iyer recalls, “In our days, kids weren’t wasting time on perfume. Now, even Class 6 children are busy with deodorants and ‘partner search’. This is not progress—it’s Fogg Effect apocalypse!” 

But beneath the humorous surface lies a darker truth: chatting has replaced actual human touch. WhatsApp convos at 1 AM, Instagram reels as love letters, Snapchat streaks as proof of loyalty—this is romance in the 2020s. Add the endless anxiety—Will they reply? Will they screenshot me? Will my private chat leak on a school WhatsApp group?— and you’ve cooked up an emotional biryani with zero nutrition. 

The consequences are deadly serious: around 13,000 students every year take their own lives. That’s 7.6 per cent of India’s total suicides. The National Crime Records Bureau gently calls this “unaddressed psychological pain, academic overload, stigma, institutional insensitivity.”

Our schools set children on fire with expectations, then hand them only a water bottle marked ‘Syllabus 2025’. We train them to mug chemistry formulas but never teach them failure management. They can crack IIT, but can’t crack the code of loneliness. A psychiatrist put it best: “We prepare them for exams, not for life.”  Wonder! Which school does that!

So no, dear Aunties. The apocalypse is not because of boys and girls sharing a classroom bench. It is because our education system values scoring over surviving. Because our society still treats mental health as ‘foreign nonsense’. Because we confuse perfumes with immorality, but cheer when schools run kids like lab rats for marks. 

What India needs is not stricter segregation, but a brave new system—one that lets children grow into emotionally intelligent, resilient beings who don’t measure love in blue ticks, or life in mark sheets. A system that says: failing is normal, heartbreak is survivable, and real respect comes not from gender silos but from human empathy. 

Until then, Aunts will keep blaming co-education for India’s moral decay, while the kids keep sinking deeper into their glowing screens, typing the only prayer they know: “Reply fast plz…”