“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest ~ whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories ~ comes afterwards.”

So begins Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, where he deliberates on the questions of life and suicide. The last chapter, and the namesake of the title, begins, “The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.” Is life a futile hopeless labour? Are we all Sisyphuses trudging along the path of life, reluctantly, and unsure of whether we should at all make the effort?

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Recently there has been some remarkably ghastly news that sent shudders across society. A car accident in the early morning, involving two brothers and a young boy (son of one of them) led the police to a mansion that housed three murdered persons (the wives of the two brothers and the daughter of one of them). Preliminary investigations revealed that they were a business family who lived lavishly, but at some point, returns must have dwindled, because in the recent past, they had accumulated debts of crores of rupees.

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So the brothers decided to take the lives of their wives and kids and then end their own. In........

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