That extreme step

The fact that life is fraught with problems, makes our lives more exciting.

The recent staggering news of a youngster, who knuckled under academic pressure and committed suicide, dredged up some unsettling and unsavoury past memories in me – the memories pivoted around those instances of self-killing, which according to me is the most despicable and deplorable act.

The first time I had heard of this self-killing was while I was barely on the threshold of teens, when a distant relative’s short-fused daughter had committed suicide, following a severe spat with her sibling. Her brother even today, hounded by guilt, holds himself responsible for this tragic event. Being unable to rip his mind off gnawing thoughts of this gruesome incident, he says, it’s beyond his comprehension how a simple sparring with his sister, could culminate in such shocking and irrevocable catastrophe as this.

Another ineradicably branded memory on my mind is that of a friend’s neighbour, who hung himself to death. It seems, with his incredible largesse, he had ladled out lots of loans to legions of people around, sans signing on legal documents. But, the time he was mired in acute financial crunch, the debtors bilked him, reneging on their verbal promise to return his money.

Apparently he resorted to taking the extreme step, which according to him was the panacea to all his financial crisis. Little did he realise the repercussion of his reckless and reprehensible act, and the way it could impact upon those at home.

Yet another instance is that of an acquaintance’s daughter, who committed suicide for not having bagged super-duper marks in her academic exams. Her mother, initially paralyzed by shock, had later broken down, hysterically wailing with, “Children are supposed to lend succour to parents in times of an emotional trauma, but this girl herself has become the cause of one. I didn’t know she was so self-centered enough to have left us in lurch, who couldn’t face life with spunk”.

Even today those words of a bewailing mother echo in my ears. Be it any issues – academics, financial or emotional, to counter it, I feel, one has to have loads of ‘intrepidity’. Actually, the very fact that life is fraught with problems, replete with miseries, cobbled with challenges, itself makes our lives more exciting.

In fact, these failures/disillusionments act as foil, making us realise the true worth of success, in any arena. Moreover, as failures and successes keep fluctuating, one should sanguinely think that “when some success in life’s some avenue gets blocked, maybe this failure could be a stepping-stone to some other success in some other avenue, in some other sphere of life!”

This apart, if one has plenty of ‘pluck’, no problem in life would appear as insuperable, and no hurdle looks insurmountable.