Suicide, it is said, is the last remaining unresolved philosophical challenge. This week, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, hanged himself at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for a long time. Nicholas was unmarried and without children. Some call it the curse of the Plaths. Sylvia put her head inside an oven in 1963, when Nicholas was barely one. The woman her husband was having an affair with at the time of Sylvia’s death also committed suicide in exactly the same way, six years later.

As 2005 drew to a close, a shocking case of group suicide emerged in Japan. Three men and a woman were found dead on Christmas day in a car parked on the side of a forest road in Tokigawa, Saitama Prefecture. The bodies of seven young people had been discovered in a van in the Saitama mountains to the west of Tokyo on October 12 the previous year.

Both incidents are believed to have been triggered by the meeting of lonely hearts on websites that assist group suicides. Wikipedia informs that the most common method of suicide in such cases is carbon monoxide poisoning achieved by burning charcoal briquettes in grills or stoves within an enclosed area, such as a small sealed room, tent, or car.

Group/mass suicides are not a new phenomenon. The most publicized case in recent memory is of thirty nine people who killed themselves in a hilltop mansion near San Diego, California back in 1997. They believed an alien spaceship was hiding behind the Comet Hale-Bopp and drugged themselves in order to reach it. The victims were self-drugged and then suffocated by other members in a series of suicides over a period of three days. Marshall Applewhite was the leader of the gang, which called itself the Heaven’s Gate cult. He died alongwith the others.

The deliberate, planned suicide has long been lauded in literature. Japanese playwright Yukio Mishima painstakingly prepared for his suicide for over a year — an act that was arguably connected to his political motives.

In literary fiction, the pull of suicide is celebrated as a gentle force that calls to its adherents in moments of epiphany. When Mrs. Dalloway walks down Bond Street one morning, the sight of people doing normal things–buying flowers, jaywalking, taking kids to school–overwhelms her. What if all this were to carry on without me, she ponders. The world will keep moving, and this realization, in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, is no less than a shock to her. A little later, her thoughts leading naturally to their final destination, she says to herself, simply, without irony: “It is possible to die.”

Years later, when Laura Brown (from The Hours) is reading Mrs Dalloway and comes across this passage, the glassy clarity of the words pierces her, and she succumbs to their spooky pull–leading to unintended consequences that will play out over many decades.

Virginia Woolf isn’t the only writer who induces suicidal feelings in readers. Sample this from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas:

The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is Selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends and enemies a bit of soul-searching…

…Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core. Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortes’ll lay Tenochititlan to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternity.

-Robert Frobisher, Letters from Zedelghem

I completed my engineering in Gwalior but attended the first year at Indore’s SGSITS. This was 2001, the first time that I had stepped outside home. I used to stay in an apartment with two other first-year students. All of us, as unwritten rules demanded, wore to college white shirts whose third button was blue. This was so the seniors could spot us and do with us what they liked.

I stayed not far from the college, so used a bicycle to and fro. One day, when I was returning home, a group of seniors stopped me 200 m short of the apartment and ordered me to reach some place in half an hour. The way it was said left no possibility of discussion. I went home, quickly changed and started on what would become a deeply scarring experience.

The apartment where I was called was located on the seventh floor of a building in a residential area. When I rang the bell, a gaggle of boys –clearly tipsy–opened the door. There, in front of me, was a first-year student, in complete undress. My heart began pounding rapidly, and for a split second, I wanted to dash for the door and escape. But that would have only exacerbated matters.

The first thing I was asked was the full form of SGSITS. When I answered, I was slapped really hard–twice–on the face. “Be louder,” said one of the boys. I did as told. Two more slaps. “Not so loud!”

Then, weirdly, I was asked the names of national newsmagazines. One of the seniors said, “Who is the editor of ‘India Today’?” “Aroon Purie,” I said. Another slap. “It’s Prabhu Chawla, you dumbass.”

I was now asked to take off my shirt. I must have looked like I had seen a ghost, because one of them said, “Don’t worry, we won’t do anything.” It was so vague it was scary. I looked at the other first-year student. He was beyond the stage of reacting. He just looked at me–at us–with dead eyes and an expressionless face.

I took off my shirt. My hands were trembling and I felt sick to the stomach. One of the guys offered me a bottle that very clearly contained some form of liquor. Stupidly, I refused. “Don’t be so uptight,” this guy said, and placed the bottle at my lips, making me take a couple of swigs. I could not believe this was happening to me. I, this person who was happy in his room cocooned with a few books, was at the centre of a ragging party that was going from bad to worse.

“Come on, relax. Tell us how many times a day you do it.” I could sense this was turning towards some murky sexual territory, so I kept quiet. One tight slap. “Didn’t you hear him?” another said. I mouthed something–indecipherable even to me. Another slap. All of them started laughing. What followed was a barrage of expletives in Hindi, which I was made to repeat. There were some other questions along the way which I will refrain from mentioning.

I couldn’t keep track of the time. My mind was simultaneously racing and in a deep slumber, like all this was happening to some other notion of me–an idea, not a person. In the middle of enacting lewd gestures, getting slapped, and repeating Hindi terms for all manner of sexual positions, I could sense watching myself from a distance–a character in a play that was going horribly off-script.

After what must have been an hour-and-a-half, one of them took me to a roadside stall and bought me a samosa. Seeing I was badly shaken up, he said, “Hey, it’s just to break the ice. How else would you guys open up?” His remark was so meaningless, I had half a mind to smash his face. But I was beyond the point of caring. I just nodded, and he then dropped me home on his bike.

This incident defined the remainder of my stay in Indore. I turned completely quiet, walking in college with my head bowed. Once or twice, I saw the other first-year student who was present at the seniors’ that day. We nodded to each other, but the shame and pointlessness of that evening precluded the possibility of anything else. We were brothers-in-arms, in a way, having shared an intense, private experience. If only it had been pleasant! Needless to say, I avoided like a plague the seniors from that evening. Some ice breaking!

Still unable to get back to normal six months into that incident, I sought a transfer to the engineering college at Gwalior. It was a time-consuming, bureaucratic process, and my father made several trips to Bhopal to get it done.

To this day, the weird repercussions of that day keep me company. I do not like getting into confrontations, even I am in the right. I would give up on a stressful situation even if it means also giving up on an opportunity of a lifetime. And I will not read news reports of ragging for fear they will be too close to the bone for comfort.

Even though I am gratefully alive, unlike one Mr. Aman Kuchroo.

Reading the Financial Times‘ ranking of global B-schools (available here), the same question swam in my head as when Advani had praised Jinnah in Pakistan or when the middle-aged Sheba Hart makes out with an underage Steven Connolly in Notes on a Scandal: What were they thinking?

Forget the number of institutes represented (100) and the sheer scale of criteria they were ranked on. My question is, is the list a barometer of quality — does the world even need that many MBAs, when clearly they don’t know their CDOs from their CDSs? What, okay who, do these institutes churn out?
At number 3 on the list is Harvard, the alma mater of one Mr. John Thain, whose only lasting contribution to Merrill Lynch may be the $35,000 toilet he got built for his private use. (How do you even bring yourself to use such an expensive dump?)

There is something surreal about this saga, almost like American Psycho leaping off the screen and taking the form of all those Masters of the Universe who, until yesterday, believed that the world ticks to their beat.
And boy, were they right! MBAs got the highest salaries, had the trophy wives, vacationed on another planet, and even got away with the criminal act of flying in separate jets when they went to the government with begging bowls in their hands.

In India, the craze for an MBA degree does not seem to cease. An acquaintance who works for an MBA training institute tells me the favourite read in her class is, you guessed it, The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand would be glad. Alan Greenspan, chastised by the crisis, less so.

Countless such MBA training institutes are mushrooming all over the country, admitting gullible, stars-in-their-eyes students who have no aptitude for an MBA (and no Math and English skills to crack CAT, the entrance test). The fee for a six-month programme is, on average, a quarter of a lakh.

How will these just-out-of-college boys and girls learn to think for themselves if all they do is learn English words from tiny booklets that have 10 synonyms for every “tough” one? Where is the choice to follow one’s heart when one does not know how to heed its beat?

Are we then headed for our own John Thains, flush (pun intended) with money, but without an original idea to call their own?

Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s pre-eminent paper (besides Denver Post) printed its last edition last Friday. In a moving farewell write-up, the editors at the 150-year-old paper wrote of the hard times that have befallen the newspaper industry in the US, and how the paper could not find a suitable buyer since it was put up for sale in December. It must take some courage to walk into the newsroom (and what a fine newsroom too) and inform the staff that they would soon be retrenched. At the Obit Magazine, there is a fine video about the last days of Rocky, which includes not unjustified barbs at the management.

In such times, the world of William Randolph Hearst seems almost like a distant dream. Hearst is the much-maligned inspiration behind the lead character in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane — a megalomaniac publishing tycoon who left no stone unturned to bring his readers the latest news. It is fitting then that nearly 60 years after Welles’ film, Kenneth Whyte, a leading Canadian journalist, redeems this enigmatic personality and his reputation in The Uncrowned King (Counterpoint; 512 pages; $30).

William was the son of millionaire senator George Hearst, who in the late 1880s was struggling with the San Francisco Examiner, a bleeding newspaper. Still an undergrad at Harvard, William sent his father a detailed proposal to rescue the paper, and, against the wishes of his mother (who thought a career in mining offered better prospects), persuaded George to make him proprietor and later editor of the Examiner.

In Whyte’s view, William ran “a smart and well-written paper. Its crusades were often courageous and marked by an unmistakable sense of public service.” At a time when it was unheard of, the Examiner routinely carried specials on photographically striking news events such as arson and drowning. Further, it frequently plied its readers with special offers and freebies.

The Examiner’s circulation grew by leaps and bounds, and by 1895, Hearst had his eye on New York. Most of the book concerns the bitter circulation wars that ensued between Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Both newspapermen had a touch of the obsessive about them, and the saga of their rivalry is brought out in racy detail by Whyte.

The author overturns a few commonly held assumptions about William Hearst. Quashing charges of yellow journalism levelled against Hearst, Whyte emphatically points out that rigorous scholarship has borne out the veracity of the reports carried in his papers. Further, Hearst, Whyte stresses, would have been better placed to handle the growth of online media, since he wasn’t one to take on challenges lying down–unlike the current crop of newspaper editors who are only too willing to chop cerebral sections (such as book reviews) to cater to an imagined, dumbed-down readership.

The Uncrowned King is a sympathetic doff of the hat from one newspaperman to another.