On Suicide
05:11am Suicide. The word is enough to give some people chills down their spines. Some people may even have had bad experiences around this. Some people might’ve lost their dears to this. Therefore, I think it’s my responsibility as the author of this post to warn you that the following text is not for those who have had bad experiences with this. You have been warned. Go ahead at your own risk.
I have been living in Kota for eighteen months now. If you are not familiar with this city, it’s popular as a hub for IIT-JEE and NEET-UG coaching. IIT-JEE and NEET-UG are national level entrance exams for engineering and medical colleges, respectively. The chances of cracking these exams is less than surviving a fall from the tenth floor of a skyscraper, yet millions of students take these exams every year. Every morning on my way from my room to my coaching institute, I encounter three suicide spots. Two of medical, one engineering aspirant. It sounds horrifying, doesn’t it? Won’t if you see it every day. Suicide is such a common phenomena here that the biggest loser in case of a suicide is not the victim. It’s the landlord. Now it’s hard for him to rent this room to others. Students for some reason avoid rooms where suicide has happened.
Suicide can be, and have been committed by people from a wide range of backgrounds. Often the rich thinks that suicides in Kota happen because parents bet all their money, land, jewelry, and what not on the child. This puts intense pressure on the child to crack the exam and when they fail to do so, they think it’s best to end it all. Similarly, the poor thinks depression, suicide, anxiety are problems only the rich have to deal with. In fact, some believe they are “fake” problems the rich created because they don’t have enough problems in life. Hence, the general public’s take on suicide is nuanced. But despite all that, everybody and the law agree that committing suicide is wrong because it’s unnatural. And I directly challenge this notion.
From a broad perspective, many human activities are not natural. I would even go a few steps ahead to say that being humane is being unnatural. Deforestation is something humans have been doing since they learned to form communities. Isn’t that unnatural? Consider building dams. You have restricted the natural flow of rivers, might as well change their paths. Isn’t that unnatural? The primary aim of medical sciences is to increase our life expectancy. We strive to prolong death. But death is natural, right? So delaying a natural event that is guaranteed to happen is also in a way playing against the rules of nature.
Let’s talk about something as complex as nuclear energy. The biggest threat of nuclear energy today is radiation exposure. Radiations with high penetration power, such as gamma rays, pose health risks. They can promote cancer cells in the body. And you are being exposed to it all the time! Maybe the floor on which you stand has some radioactive nuclei that are releasing radiations. You are constantly exposed to cosmic rays. In fact, you probably even eat some radioactive nuclei in your daily diet. Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon found in plants. But this is never an issue because the dosage is negligible. Nature has maintained a balance. The first step of running nuclear plants is to suck every fissile atom from the naturally occurring uranium ore – which have less than one percent fissile atoms. I am not saying if nuclear energy is good or bad. All I want to convey is that the primary consequence of all human activities is to stumble the balance.
All engineering is but challenging nature. From building dams to predicting the weather. Predicting the future is such a gamble. Today, we operate hundreds of supercomputers to simulate weather. We want to predict the future. But even with all that effort, it’s known that one can never tell if it will rain with full confidence. Still, we take on the challenge. One might say that this is so because we are limited by the technology of our time. Well … this is where Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle opens its fangs. One of the most popular concepts in quantum physics, it literally says that nature has made it sure that we remain in the dark. It limits the knowledge we can have. Science after the Newton’s era has understood that physical systems are not deterministic; everything sprouts from the atoms and in quantum physics our best understanding is absolutely probabilistic.
When so many human activities are outright unnatural, it’s hypocritical to criticize suicide because it is unnatural. Although it’s not that suicide is not common within nature. Living cells have lysosomes, also known as “suicide bags”. They assist the cell in committing suicide. But still on a macroscopic scale, not many species are known to commit suicide. Therefore, it’s okay to call it unnatural. Although I wish to go deeper into this topic.
Therefore, I believe suicide is a completely humane idea. It’s humane to die. In fact, since I call taking control humane, suicide is literally seeing the Gods of death in the eye and challenging them. Because you rejected their plans and now have taken your life in your own hands. It’s an attempt to make the Gods helpless. They cannot kill you. It's you who will perform the deeds. If I have to die anyway, at least let me enjoy my freedom to choose my path to the river Styx.
As an end note, suicide is deeply personal. One cannot condemn a man for taking his own life. It’s illogical but in India committing suicide is illegal. Suicide is all about taking control. It’s about being humane. And yet, this is not a justification of suicide. This is simply rejecting the idea that suicide is wrong because it is not natural. It could be bad for other reasons but it being unnatural. However, let’s keep that discussion for some other day.
You are not alone. Help is a phone call away. Dial +91 9820466726 (AASRA Helpline) or +91 8376804102 (Fortis Stress Helpline) now if you feel you need help, feel anxious, uneasy or depressed.