To find meaning in life

A river divided our villages. While my house was a little away from it, his was on the river. A rickety footbridge connected them. He was my schoolmate, a year senior to me. Almost every day, we met on our way to school and back and in the school during playtime. That day, no one saw him in school. He had committed suicide in the early hours by hanging himself from the branch of a cashew nut tree that stood in their curtilage as everyone else in the house was blissfully asleep.

On hearing the news, the school was declared shut for a day and all of us rush-ed to his house to find him still hanging from the tree, awaiting the arrival of police. This tragedy shocked all those who knew him. What made him take the drastic step, frivolous though it may seem, was disgrace — the ignominy of being accused by his parents of stealing money from the house. Being innocent, such an allegation was unbearable to him.

There is yet another tragic incident, also associated with my alma matter. Our class teacher took his life by hanging himself from a roadside tree, hidden away from public gaze. Purchase and distribution of school stationery to students were his responsibility, and he was alleged to have embezzled the fund allotted. Here again, death eventuated from disgrace. A common thread that connects both these incidents is depression owing to disgrace.

What triggered my memory of these mournful incidents is the rash of farmer suicides and recent reports about an online game called the Blue Whale, which has goaded several vulnerable teens into killing themselves.

After reading this news and realising the game’s dangerous repercussions on children, my uncle questioned a 10-year-old boy in his neighbourhood why he was so interested in the game. The boy replied that whenever he played it, he would come to realise that life has no meaning and purpose. So, he wanted to die. Terrified by his answer, my uncle alerted the boy’s parents to his intention, and averted a tragedy that was waiting to happen.

According to Sigmund Freud, everybody has an unconscious drive to commit suicide. Carl Jung, in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, attributed an accident that nearly killed him, to this suicidal urge or desire. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel — finding a purpose and meaning in life. That is what Viktor Frankl, neurologist and psychologist tried to explain in his seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning.

Having lost all his near and dear ones, save his sister, Frankl continued to live in a Nazi concentration camp in the hope of survival. He founded the Logo Therapy, that is based on the premise that a human being is motivated by a “will to meaning,” an inner pull to find a meaning in life and not to kill himself or herself. One feels this book should be made a compulsory reading for the children of today.