Death, be not proud

Life is never easy. But it’s not all darkness. Nor all sunshine. It’s frittering light and shadows. It’s ungraspable and forever elusive even to the learned, the mighty and the mystics. Why kill yourself then when life is all mystery?

The alleged suicide of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput a few weeks ago (it’s being contested as murder by his family) has gripped the attention of the urban middle class. I mention ‘urban’ because suicides are increasingly a phenomenon of towns and cities.

In rural India, suicides are largely by farmers. They are driven to death, overwhelmed by debt and under duress, hounded by moneylenders. But mostly, people in rural areas, despite their travails and hardships, are stoic and cheerful.

Their way of life and beliefs and faith gives them rare strength and they somehow get on with life imbued with hope and live with zest. If you ask a farmer during times of stress and uncertainty, how he’s coping, pat comes the reply in the form of an old Kannada proverb: “He who brings you to the world, won’t he provide for you!”

To return to the subject of suicides in our cities and our alienated, high-pressure lives, Rajput’s death is on prime-time television because anything Bollywood, even unedifying gossip, is titillating. Raucous TV debates are often misleading and miss the woods for the trees.

Rajput’s suicide reveals a larger problem that has afflicted our urban society. Suicides of urban youth are on the rise among those who are aspirational but whose hopes are dashed on the rocky seas as they embark on life’s voyage, akin to the frail boats that often toss about hither and thither and finally founder.

We also read many stories of successful individuals working in technology companies, film and TV actors, high-profile entrepreneurs, senior civil servants and even police officers suddenly pulling the trigger or jumping off the bridge one day.

Extreme disappointment, depression, grief, loneliness, rejection, unrequited love, infidelity, betrayal of friends, pressure of debtors or fear of humiliation pushed them over the edge. They felt in their solitude and in the dark recesses of their minds, life was too much to bear. Life was not worth it. “Life is unfair,” as John Kennedy said.

Killing oneself and killing others are the twin puzzling paradoxes and malaise of our times. A hundred years ago, taking one’s own life and murdering others were the dominant themes -- crimes of passion and crimes of logic. People committed suicide for philosophical reasons and ideas, and murders and executions were carried out on ideological grounds swept away under the inexorable march of history.

In the last half a century, there are increasing instances of people in various parts of the world feeling betrayed by an unjust world, and some unhinged lone wolves and hundreds of others radicalised, embrace a cause and are taking the extreme step of taking their own lives by blowing themselves up while simultaneously murdering hundreds of innocents.

We will not dwell on these complex, macabre psychological issues that move terrorists and individual psychopaths who kill themselves after killing others.

Let’s return to suicide in modern societies. Russian novelist Dostoevsky’s nihilistic characters advocated suicide, convinced that God did not exist and hence life was not worth living. Bertrand Russel quipped, “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong!” Galileo, when threatened with death for propagating his scientific ideas, wisely abandoned them.

Albert Camus speaks of the absurd predicament of human beings, “the human need for meaning, and the unreasonable silence of the world,” that drive men to dark despair and death.

Tagore’s lyrical lines expresses it more luminously. “What language is thine, O sea? / The language of eternal question. What language is thy answer, O sky? / The language of eternal silence.” Looking at our mysterious universe, Tagore invokes wonder instead of despair.

Camus’ central message in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, which explores the problem of suicide in our times, where life suddenly seems meaningless and unbearable and unjust, affirms an outlook and philosophy “that is a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert” even if one does not believe in God, even when our condition seems wretched and hopeless and we feel condemned by forces we feel we can neither overcome nor comprehend.

Whether one believes in God or not, the answer must be sought through surrender to the Creator or by living with awareness or revolting against one’s fate and overcoming it. Saint Thyagaraja sang “Ma Kelara Vicharamu...” -- “Why should I worry, when you are there my Lord, you hold the strings and our destiny…We are your puppets...”

Deliverance is not to be sought through death but by embracing life and living and facing our fate. “Amor Fati -- love your fate -- which is, in fact, your life,” said Nietzsche. Our fate that we suffer today was sown by our past actions. It follows then, we can also change our future and create our destiny by choosing new paths and acting anew with hope and courage, though “made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” Therein lies our purpose and all our glory.

Jnanapeeth Awardee DaRa Bendre, the revered Kannada poet who knew poverty, love, suffering and death and joy, mocked death with gentle humour with these memorable lines:

I do not fear death

Because while I live,

It doesn’t come

When it comes,

I’m not there.

(The writer is a soldier, farmer and entrepreneur)