Team DailyPedia
At 16, Saira Sirohi had so much in store for her future. Saira had won over 100 medals and was the prevailing 50-meter breaststroke champion of the CBSE National Games. At the age of 8, she stunned everyone with her unbelievable talent after swimming nonstop for 15 hours and conquering a distance of 38 km in her school’s swimming pool. Not surprisingly, the young swimmer was already in training to compete for her country in the upcoming Olympic games in Japan.
However, how she might have fared at the Olympics will remain an unanswered question as Saira committed suicide inside her home in Ghaziabad in India.
On January 25, Saira’s father Jaideep found her lifeless body after she hanged herself in the room she shared with her younger sister.
“At 1:30 am, my younger daughter started crying loudly. I thought someone had entered the house and rushed to their room. But I couldn’t open the door easily though it had not been bolted from inside. When I managed to push it open, I found Saira had hanged herself from the grille above the door. I brought her down and put her on the bed but she was cold and stiff,” Jaideep painfully recalled.
It appears that Saira, a Class XI student in a reputable private school, was driven to do the unthinkable after feeling the pressure to do well in academics. Because of her swimming competitions, Saira had missed several exams last November.
Meanwhile, her principal Jyoti Gupta denied claims that they pressured Saira in school.
“We have her full liberty to choose the date and time on which she wished to appear in the papers she missed. A teacher and other staff members would be on standby to help her appear in these papers. We always prepared diluted question papers for her,” the school principal said.
