Though he was not more specific, the mention of the name Kedar points to a suicide on the IIT-M campus in the same BTech batch as Saketh Sreenivasaiah. Saketh Sreenivasaiah, 22, the Indian student whose body was found in a lake in California after six days of search on Saturday, had graduated barely six months ago from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras; and a celebratory announcement was the last post he made on social network LinkedIn. In it, he poignantly remembered a batchmate, Kedar.
“This milestone would’ve been much better alongside my dearest friend and batchmate Kedar. The warm moments & memories we shared continue to inspire,” Sreenivasaiah wrote. Though he was not more specific, the mention of the name Kedar points to a tragic death on the IIT-M campus in the same batch, 2021–25. In April 2023, a second-year undergraduate student at IIT-M, 20-year-old Kedar Suresh Chougule was found dead in his hostel room in a case of suicide. It had come after days of being in depression and getting some mental health support, reports at the time noted. He was pursuing B.Tech in Chemical Engineering, like Saketh. Kedar’s death marked the fourth such incident at the institute in three months.
After Kedar’s death by suicide, IIT Madras had said it was “taking all possible measures to proactively identify and help students under stress”. Saketh Sreenivasaiah, in his LinkedIn post with a photo of receiving the degree at the IIT-M convocation in July 2025, said, “There are far too many stories, learnings, and moments to do justice to in a single post.” He dedicated the degree to his late grandfather, “who would’ve been the happiest to see this moment!”
After this post, his LinkedIn activity only had him sharing others’ posts about the Deep Tech Innovation Lab at his institute, the University of California, Berkeley; and of fellow students or scholars sharing their achievements such as publications. The American police have so far not made public their probe, though Saketh Sreenivasaiah’s roommate claimed he’d been told by the cops that they were treating it as a case of suicide for now.
The body of Saketh Sreenivasaiah, who was from Tumakuru in Karnataka and a postgraduate student at UC Berkeley, was found in Lake Anza near Berkeley Hills in California on February 14. Details now emerging point towards a period of withdrawal and loneliness.
His roommate Baneet Singh, also from India, shared a poignant account of his final two weeks before he went missing on February 9. Baneet said in a post on LinkedIn that Sreenivasaiah had “started eating less and engaging less, only surviving on chips and cookies”.
He recalled an interaction when he saw Sreenivasaiah returning from class “wearing a red bathrobe”. Asked why he was wearing a robe to his lectures, Sreenivasaiah is said to have replied: “I’ve stopped caring, man. I’m cold and don’t care what anyone thinks of me. I don’t care about anything”.Baneet Singh admitted that he initially laughed at the remark, thinking his friend was “just being silly as usual”.
Reflecting on the tragedy, he wrote, “The opposite of life was never death. It was indifference. To stop caring, which led to him not caring for his own life, either”. He added, “I didn’t expect this from a friend who lived, ate, travelled, laughed and joked with me. It hurts,” he added.
