In light of the recent debacle regarding the missing KUET student, let me throw some maths at you regarding why “Bhai Haraam” doesn’t work with cases like these.

So, in the last 1 month – I have prayed with the Jaamat just around 8/10 times. In a University of 5000+, I would assume that 50% is present during lunch hours – where the Jaamat barely had 20 people. If I were to assume that 5 times this much people prayed at different locations around the University, then we could safely say that less than 0.04% of a highly diverse subset of our population is devoutly religious. Now, for the sake of assumption, let’s assume that I am off the mark by 300%. That makes 0.12% of the population religious enough to care about an afterlife.

Now, in a country of – say – 8 crore adults, we have a subset of approximately 96K people who are probably devoutly religious (with the definition being of-course different from person to person). Now, research by WHO shows that around ~6.7% of adults in USA have depression. If I were to assume that 10% of Bangladeshi Adults have high-level depression, then the chances that a religious adult in Bangladesh has depression of that extent puts a ballpark figure at 9600 only.

That’s less than 0.0000625% people in the country who might actually fall for the extremely sad fallacy that they should just stop having depressive/self-destructive thoughts because their religion won’t permit it.

Allow me to help you visualize it. If your average local population was the size of a double sized tennis court – then you would need to hit a very specific 0.25 square-inch of space within the court in order to find a person who hears your logic and backs off from self-harm. The probability of hitting that space is close to zero if one were to account for the importance of your opinion.

So no – everytime you see someone who has self-destructive thoughts – do them a favor and try to alleviate what they are going through. If you believe in prayers, pray for them instead of just asking them to pray. Become a better friend. Be better family. Talk to them instead of mindlessly scrolling a feed you have already seen thrice today. Be human. Your shitty trump-card is best kept to yourself.