Aristotle as Kerala’s Suicide Cure?

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p>I came across a brief blogpost about the correlation between literacy, GNP and suicide rates in Europe and it spawned some rambling thoughts Perhaps this is exactly what blogging’s meant for –

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Does He Have An Answer?

Dr Andrej Maruai, a Slovene psychiatrist involved in organizing the conference, presented a paper called “Suicide in Europe: Genetics, Literacy and Poverty” which convincingly shows the links between the social factors of literacy and poverty, and suicidal behavior. . . .

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p>According to Maruai’s theory, the higher any given country’s literacy rate and the lower that country’s GNP, the more likely the country is to have a high suicide rate. The theory can be convincingly applied to the countries with the highest suicide rates in Europe, namely the three Baltic states, Hungary and Slovenia, where literacy is at almost 100 percent and where the GNP and standard of living have been adversely affected by the transition process.

Maruai’s hypothesis certainly fits one of the oft-cited downsides of “the Kerala model”

…among other states of India Kerala has highest suicidal rate. This is in spite of the fact that Kerala is having the highest rate of literacy and Kerala is having an accepted model for Health Care Delivery System. In this context it is also important to note that Kerala is the largest market of psychiatric drugs in South India and our state is having the highest rate of unemployment and the highest per capita alcoholic consumption.

Why is this so?

Suicide is clearly a tricky multi-variate problem involving a whole host of things like family, cultural attitudes, mental illness, community bonds, religion and so on. Answers for what causes men (I mean it in the generic “human beings” sense although with suicide, males have a 2:1, uh, advantage over females) to find and lose meaning and worthwhileness is rather quickly a political minefield. James Madison famously demurred “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” and the eternal question of “what do men really want?” is front and center.

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Respect Yourself First, Girlfriend!

One interesting place I find a few – but clearly not all – answers is in the ancient concept of Thymos or “spiritedness” which has found a more modern voice in the writings of Harvey Mansfied.

Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.”

..As Mansfield sees it, underserved groups like women or blacks may agitate for a greater share of society’s benefits, but those demands are secondary to being denied honor and respect, to being “dissed.”

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p>Mansfield importantly notes that the self-chest-thumping inherent in Thymos can be both Good (“why should I get to the back of the bus for you?”) and Bad (“I’m the baddest mofo in the hood”). His root claim is that thymos exists and must be accommodated rather than debating whether thymos ought to exist.

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p>If you buy this, then one of the triumphs of civilization has been the degree to which we’ve re-routed thymotic desires away from destructive pursuits like tyranny and conquest and into more productive ones like business and industry. Thymos in political situations is often an inherently a zero-sum game that only a tiny few can ever “win.” For one person / party to gain office, a diff one has to lose – in fact demonizing & handing “the other side” a loss is often a big part of what can make partisan victory taste so sweet… $$ spent by a govt agency pursuing a bureaucrat’s dream project is inherently taken/taxed from someone else… the Crips feel more pride “owning the power” on a block if it was taken from the Bloods… etc.

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Thymos Unaccomodated by Society

By contrast, markets have the important ability to provide a positive-sum game for the masses. A given “space” can accommodate multiple profitable firms and thus career paths for their employees. Marc Andreessen once noted that in another time & place, he and Bill Gates would have had to raise an army to “gain respect”. Now, they pursue tech billionaire-hood instead and we all benefit from their products. The ebb and flow of markets of course, makes it dangerous to rely upon your job as your only source of self-respect. However, there’s no question that career is a central part of modern self realization as we quoted Nobel winner Edmund Phelps on SM a few years ago –

There is the classical Aristotle, who writes of the “development of talents”; later the Renaissance figure Cellini, who jubilates in achievement; and Cervantes, who evokes vitality and challenge. In the 20th century, Alfred Marshall observed that the job is in the worker’s thoughts for most of the day. And Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1933 that the time will soon come when more satisfaction derives from the job than from consuming. The American application of this Aristotelian perspective is the thesis that most, if not all, of such self-realization in modern societies can come only from a career. Today we cannot go tilting at windmills, but we can take on the challenges of a career. If a challenging career is not the main hope for self-realization, what else could be?

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p>Thus, one problem for economically sclerotic states like Kerala is that there are very very few mass avenues for men to “prove themselves Men”. Formerly communist countries like Slovenia probably have large pools of men who don’t quite know how to navigate the radically new avenues for thymotic actualization. In both cases, it’s not the $$ per se but rather the sense of striving, demonstration of capability, and seizing life by the horns which provides meaning. For ex., both Gates & Andreessen continued spirited work well after they’d become rich.

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p>Unfortunately, in Kerala for too long, the “I wanna make something of myself” impulse translated into “Go West, Young Man” or perhaps the Gulf – but clearly that option’s not available to all. Within the incredibly pervasive Kerala state, some find their actualization in politics & union activism but those machinations create a ravenous, zero sum game for the few at the top of the pyramid. Thuglife might be available for the strong & ruthless. Worse yet, both of those domains are often parasitic upon the masses leaving them feeling more like subjects & automatons rather than citizens & coworkers. Maraui’s model takes this a step further –

Entrepreneurship Saved Him from Thuggin’

Maruai maintains that better-educated people, especially in countries in transition, are more conscious of their current lower social and economic positions and are therefore more likely to resort to suicide. Furthermore, such people are more familiar with more effective means of taking their own lives, thereby increasing the suicide rate.

Similarly, while it’s bad enough that too many Keralites can’t find their meaning, the other side of the television screen, the newspaper, and the telephone readily reveal a world where others do and they feel hopelessly left out. Without that base, the normal trials & tribulations of life can toss around a rickety ship pretty mightily. And when that lowpoint hits, being literate makes it that much easier to determine how many of what pill to buy at the state-supported pharmacy…

43 thoughts on “Aristotle as Kerala’s Suicide Cure?”

  1. By contrast, markets have the important ability to provide a positive-sum game for the masses.

    could this bee the age of the ubermensch? has man finally killed god?

  2. Vinod, you may be interested in this well-written post by Rothkopf at ‘Foreign Policy’:

    Slow down, Barack. According to The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal that I often read before bedtime, a ground-breaking analysis by three extremely well-educated British doctors seems to indicate that sudden changes in a country’s economic philosophy can actually kill you…and not just you, but millions of people. Specifically, the study found that countries that embraced so-called shock therapy — stepping out of the warm shower of communism directly into the ice cold realities of capitalism — saw much higher death rates than those that eased their way into the new McWorld of post-Soviet competition and reality television.
  3. There is the classical Aristotle, who writes of the “development of talents”; later the Renaissance figure Cellini, who jubilates in achievement;

    FTR, Sen’s theoretical/ethical grounding for his capability framework comes from the Aristotelian concept of flourishing, via Nussbaum.

  4. Specifically, the study found that countries that embraced so-called shock therapy — stepping out of the warm shower of communism directly into the ice cold realities of capitalism — saw much higher death rates than those that eased their way into the new McWorld of post-Soviet competition and reality television.

    i believe that one needs to dissociate from peers and related metrics to be truly happy. this is the only way to be rid of the grief and envy that comes with walking to another’s beat. the so-called economic philosophies of a nation are the imposition of an artificial bound on the aspirations of the individual. the loss of these false absolutes with the change in economic reality created the sense of futility in many. and death.

  5. Because Sen and Nussbaum have kind of already answered the central question of your post, it’s worth quoting here:

    The approach emphasizes functional capabilities (“substantive freedoms”, such as the ability to live to old age, engage in economic transactions, or participate in political activities); these are construed in terms of the substantive freedoms people have reason to value, instead of utility (happiness, desire-fulfilment or choice) or access to resources (income, commodities, assets). Poverty is understood as capability-deprivation. It is noteworthy that the emphasis is not only on how human beings actually function but on their having the capability, which is a practical choice, to function in important ways if they so wish. Someone could be deprived of such capabilities in many ways, e.g. by ignorance, government oppression, lack of financial resources, or false consciousness.

  6. Didn’t do my Bachelor’s in the US, so “Thymotic desires” and “Aristotelian perspective” goes over my head; not a man, so don’t understand anything about “prove themselves Men either” 🙂 And just don’t understand why men have to force their wives and kids to die with them either 🙁 Suicide by entire families – moslty caught in the debt trap – is becoming more and more common in Kerala.

  7. I would be a bit more sceptical about how far markets can satisfy a thymotic urge; particularly since we always tend to hear more about winners than losers. In the more unmediated market systems, thymotic competition does seem to veer closer towards becoming an increasingly zero-sum game. I think the readings of politics as a zero-sum game in this context is a mis-reading of Fukyama’s central point which was that the “demand for recognition” which he sees as the driving thymotic force can only be mutually satisfied in a liberal democracy; whatever one thinks of this arguement, it doesn’t posit that politics then becomes a zero-sum game as such. That is only true if you are talking about politics in terms of the search for political office; but for Fukyama any meaningful political action that allows ctiizens to participate in it successfully can suffice. I think he cites elections and campaigning as one example; you could perhaps use the recent civil protests in Pakistan as another.

    Of course this raises another problem, since Kerala has a high level of political activism, as suggested by Fukyama’s thesis on the struggle for recognition, and this has played an important role in its developmental success but still doesn’t seem to have addressed broader problems such as the prevalence of a high suicide rate.

  8. Vinod, time to feel both proud and frustrated. You arrived at the ~same conclusion as Sen. But a little too late for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 🙂

  9. i also believe that work is a fundamental right. man must find a channel for his energy and his talent and failing that he gets despondent. unions are the bane of human enterprise and i loathe them with every scrap of flesh on me. no wonder! kerala with its workplace practices is sunk in a funk.

  10. 6 · Keralite said

    “Aristotelian perspective”

    Gross oversimplification:

    “According to Aristotle, the highest or most general good to which all individuals should aim is to live most fully a life that is proper to man.” [try to flourish/thrive in your life; A goes on to specify how you can do this]

    This is not as trivial as it sounds. For instance, other philosophers say that the best life is one where you do things which cause the greatest good for the greatest number etc etc.

    As for Thymotic desires: Personally, I care for sagely desires 🙂 You can take it as ‘spiritedness,’ as Vinod says. I doubt these big words are necessary to make the bare point (which is not really that profound or novel :))

  11. Two observations on Kerala and suicide:

    1. The disruption of traditional family life due to migration: I remember reading a research paper where the author claimed that in families where Kerala women migrated leaving their kids to husband, in-laws, or their parents, increased behavioral dysfunction (abuse, alcoholism) among the husbands was observed. I can’t recall whether such feelings of emasculation translated into higher incidence of suicide as well.

    2. Apparently, according to Kerala State Mental Health Authority:

    Another interesting observation is that in Malappuram district suicide rate is consistently low. This may be due to the effect of religion as Muslims views are against suicide and they encourage submission to God’s will in sufferings and sickness.

  12. i also believe that work is a fundamental right. man must find a channel for his energy and his talent and failing that he gets despondent.

    I agree, though getting rid of unions, which are needed to protect worker’s rights including safety issues, are needed. Here’s my very nonacademic look at this…just from my visits to Kerala, and hearing my malayalee parents and their friends talk about their beautiful state…you’ve got all these educated people and they need an outlet for the interests and ambitions and it’s so f-ing difficult be an entrepreneur in Kerala and get any business started. People get despondant on their “low-status” in a society where they can all read about the successes of other people, particularly in other countries. something has to change in that state so that people can actually put their smarts to good use.

  13. what applies to the mind must apply to the body. sweat is a wonderful thing. man must perspire. he needs a channel to exert himself failing which he falls into a depression.

  14. 10 · portmanteau I doubt these big words are necessary to make the bare point (which is not really that profound or novel :))

    Port, your putting down the ‘bare point’ as not being profound or novel.. I hope you didn’t mean Vinod’s ‘bare point’ 😉 If you meant me, I wasn’t using ‘big words’ to show off. In fact, I don’t think I have even heard the name Thymos before! Was being flippant because while some of the suicides might be committed by bearded jholawalas spurred by their inability to reroute their Thymotic desires (!!) or whatever, most have much more banal reasons such as failure in board exams, failed romance, unemployment, debt etc.

  15. great substantive post, and great writing too!

    One question: why is the base line for any discussion on suicide that choosing to live is the default correct answer, and choosing death is the default wrong answer?

    It seems that choosing to live is the default correct answer only because the people passing judgment on the issue have made that decision themselves. Is it not possible that a person can rationally decide not to live further?

  16. Didn’t do my Bachelor’s in the US, so “Thymotic desires” and “Aristotelian perspective” goes over my head

    Dont feel bad about it. Usually the folks who indulge in such fancy words and name-droppings are half-baked psuedo-intellectuals trying to impress you or to fool you. Always beware of such people.

    As for Kerala, about a century ago it was a “madhouse of casteism” in the judgement of none other than Vivekanda. It has come a long way since then and I think it has better prospects for the future than other indian states.

  17. Dhoni Didn’t do my Bachelor’s in the US, so “Thymotic desires” and “Aristotelian perspective” goes over my head Dont feel bad about it. Usually the folks who indulge in such fancy words and name-droppings are half-baked psuedo-intellectuals trying to impress you or to fool you. Always beware of such people.

    Thank you very much Dhoni for your encouragement. I wish there were more people with your kind of empathy. I don’t feel bad at all about not ever taking a philosophy course or about not being able to wax philosophical about everything. But I do have a US Master’s and will get a Ph.D. in June from a university that has produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other in the US, though my Bachelor’s is from Kerala 🙂

  19. It’s worth mentioning the context within which Mansfield, in a popular context, brought up thymos — namely, that to him it is “manliness”, in the context of his book “Manliness”. However, as was pointed out in a critical NYRB review of his book:

    “In fact, Mansfield’s acquaintance with classical literature is suspect. He thinks that the Greek word for manliness is thymos—which more properly means “animatedness,” of various degrees. Mansfield wants the word to have as its central meaning “aggressiveness,” which is better covered by hybris.[6] Aristotle’s term for manliness is andreia, a noun formed from the word of man, ane¯r. That will not serve Mansfield, since he wants manliness to be unreasonable, and andreia is the very reasonable mean struck between timorousness, phoboi, and recklessness, tharrh¯e. Thymos is unreasoning, says Aristotle, and therefore not a man’s virtue. A beast has thymos—and does not have manliness. But the unreasoning aspect of thymos is what Mansfield admires.” – http://www.unfogged.com/archives/manliness/manliness.html

    I am loathe to use Mansfield’s reasoning to understand social phenomena like suicide for many reasons, notably his hostility towards science, empiricism and belief that rational control has deprived us of some innate “essence” of being men. And apparently, women don’t have such an innate thymotic drive (because thymos after all, refers to manliness — those women that display it must therefore have manly characteristics, if I remember his reasoning..) — Mansfield the evolutionary biologist! (Incidentally, he really seems to detest the contemporary, meaning last 50-100 years.., trend towards being more quantitative in political science — just because he can’t do the math, doesn’t mean those quantitative social scientists won’t be better able to elucidate issues related to social ills better than Mr. Manliness, but I digress).

    I think Sen’s capability framework is far more rational, and amenable to quantitative reasoning, and less reliant on specious greek conceptions of human, sorry Manly, drive. As for Mansfield, he may be a good translator, but I find him curiously irrelevant. His book was pretty funny I must say.. combined with anecdotes of girls I know who’ve met him, they build an interesting psychological profile of the man. But that’s a story for another time.

  20. Assuming your Thymos hypothesis for argument’s sake. I think Kerala has too much spiritedness, though most people don’t consider business as a form of “actualizing” their spiritedness. So you have cashew barons funding alternate cinema, rubber (!) barons funding media outlets, and people making millions (not joking) smuggling stuff to/from Iraq (fighting American warships in the process), and then using that money to fund bull races in their village.

    Kerala’s spirit doesn’t express through business much, though that is not entirely true. Two of the founders of Infosys are Mallu. TATA and Hindustan Lever have a long history of top managers of Mallu origin. Indian business journalism is run by Mallus. Some of the top hatchetmen for Reliance were Mallus. Some of the top mills in Coimbatore are owned by Mallus. So those who really wanted to actualize using business have done that.

    The suicide problem doesn’t come from the lack of channels for the spirit (business opportunity exists elsewhere in India, and Mallus have used that). It comes from the lack of “right” channels, a lack of clarity on what these “right” channels are, and an unwillingness to 1) move out of the state to look for those, and 2) compromise. Mallus want to live in a perfect world, and (going by popular culture) that dreamworld looks a lot like the feudal past that they themselves threw away. So now there is a lot of alienation, drinking, goondaism, even terrorism.

    Capitalist business is not the answer to Kerala’s problems. I think this guy may have some form of the answer, but it will take a while to take root. There will be a lot of violence before that.

    BTW, most Greek philosophical positions (and its contemporary derivatives) don’t easily apply to the Indian context, given the rich history of ideas in India, and the rather different flow of its history. I would stay away from Aristotle and his friends when thinking about India. But I guess if all you have is a hammer….

  21. 14 · Keralite said

    If you meant me, I wasn’t using ‘big words’ to show off.

    no, no of course not. I meant that the big words being bandied were substitutable or could have been explained better in a post intended for a general audience.

    But I do have a US Master’s and will get a Ph.D. in June

    Congratulations! 🙂

  22. I don’t feel bad at all about not ever taking a philosophy course or about not being able to wax philosophical about everything. But I do have a US Master’s and will get a Ph.D. in June from a university that has produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other in the US, though my Bachelor’s is from Kerala.

    I would say you don’t know what you are missing. Especially if you are in NYU, which has one of the best philosophy departments in the world. You should at least sit in on a course by Thomas Nagel or Derek Parfit, just to see what philosophy is all about.

    In case you think philosophy is worthless, Boolean Logic comes directly from philosophy of language, and George Soros has a Ph.D. in philosophy. But it is not everyone.

  23. Aristotle and his friends when thinking about India.

    I’m curious why you think so. Aristotle is fairly general, and his ideas could be applicable to any society IMO (of course, you might want to leave out specific culturally Greek ideas from his work, but the general principle still stands). Nonetheless, Indian philosophers do say similar things (eg Buddha and moderation + ‘right’ conduct).

  24. Aristotle is fairly general, and his ideas could be applicable to any society IMO

    Sure, but I wouldn’t start from him when thinking about India, particularly because his philosophical positions discount idealism, which is a dominant undercurrent of life and thought in India. Buddhism would be a better starting point.

    I don’t know much about the Thymos concept, but from Vinod’s post, it appears to have a positive valence in Greek philosophy. Whereas it would have a negative valence in both Buddhism and the different schools of Hinduism. I personally think that the concept of dissolution of the self is deeply rooted in India. You don’t get respect for making money, you get respect if you make money and stay humble, and help other people. If you take an opinion poll, Infosys’ Narayanamoorthy would beat Mukesh Ambani any day. Anand is respected as much for his chess achievements as his down-to-earth manner. Kerala’s suicides are better understood from this perspective, as stemming from a four-way conflict between material goals, ideals, a lack of the ruthlessness needed to achieve the first, and the intellectual sophistication to know that the second is unachievable.

    You should go hang out in a Kerala bar sometime! 🙂

  25. 24 · HammerSickleStar said

    You should go hang out in a Kerala bar sometime! 🙂

    i have 🙂 buddha and aristotle are not that dissimilar — aristotle talks about the golden mean which is comparable to buddha’s path of moderation. both speak about virtuous conduct, and their views may not diverge that much. buddha is not about self-abnegation (he cares more about detachment) in the extreme way mahavira is.

  26. Maruai maintains that better-educated people, especially in countries in transition, are more conscious of their current lower social and economic positions and are therefore more likely to resort to suicide.

    To continue the point above, the problem is not of the position, but of the metric that is used to assess the self worth.

  27. Several times in the past few days, I’ve felt the urge to quote from Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis, and Teacher Man.

    When Melbourne desi talks about growing up in Pulionthope, I wanted to tell him about McCourt’s childhood in a Limerick slum and his later visitations and the resulting emotions; when the ‘don’t go desi’ brigades were up in arms, I wondered if they realized desis are not the only ones to be pulled back & forth; when we periodically complain about no one listening to our words the minute they hear our accents or having to bear the burden of representing the entire nation or ‘culture’, I remembered silently that we are not the first ones to complain about the unfairness of it all.

    So given the topic and the comments thread, I have to make connections.

    In ‘Tis, where we learn about McCourt’s early years in the US as an adult, there is a sizeable section about how he starts university at the age of 23, without a high school diploma, and with the feeling that he doesn’t belong among the younger, richer American kids with parents fret over their GPA and grad school options. On pages 155-156, he writes (and, I am afraid, my choppy picking & choosing of passages, sentences, phrases may butcher his gentle style and humorous look at his own life):

    Every day I’m learning how ignorant I am especially when I go for a coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich in the cafeteria at NYU. There are always crowds of students who drop their books on the floor and seem to have nothing to do but talk…Everyone talks and no one listens…the students argue about the meaning of everything, life, the existence of God, the terrible state of the world, and you never know when someone is going to drop in the one word that gives everyone the deep serious look, existentialism. They might talk about how they want to be doctors and lawyers till one throws up his hand and declares everything is meaningless, that the only person in the world who makes any sense is Albert Camus who says your most important act every day is deciding not to commit suicide.

    Needless to say, this “FOB,” who has actually lived longer in the western world than a North American-born student she taught recently at univeristy, loves McCourt’s gentle wisdom as well as his humor–enough to spend 40 mins typing while my kids are screaming for me in the background.

  28. buddha and aristotle are not that dissimilar

    Superficially not in ethics, but in epistemology and metaphysics, very much so. In my view, suicide is more a problem of the latter two than ethics, which is derived from the other two anyway.

    Even in ethics, the similarity is only at the word-level, as the “middle path” means totally different things in the two frameworks, and is built on very different assumptions about what it means to be human.

  29. I thought Seattle also have the highest suicide rate. That makes the theory more rain and moody climate sums up more suicidal rate and nothing to do with literacy. Kerala model literacy is always equal to read the stupid 1200 news papers which dishes out news from Antartica to Jupiter and less from Thiruvanthapuram.

  30. You have two choices if you are born in Kerala…1)get a good education and sit around and do nothing and eat of your parents rubber plantations or some farms. 2)get a good education and go outside work as the white man’s slave.. Both of this will result in severe depression.

  31. Thank you, Port. And Hammer…./unniappam(?), my “I don’t feel bad at all…..”, should have been “I do not feel that bad….” Guess, it was a knee jerk defensive response 🙂 Not on the eastcoast, but in the midwest and not a tech geek. And thanks Malathi, McCourt looks like an interesting read.

    Anyway, three representative (?) cases of suicides involving Keralite women that evoked some reaction, which hammer…might remember, if you keep up with Kerala news:

    1. A high school girl killed herself because her footwear broke, didn’t have money to buy another pair and was too ashamed to go to school barefoot the next day. A death that could have been avoided for Rs.50, if only somebody had known. (Felt guilty remembering how one day after middle school, I had thrown quite a decent pair into a garbage dump next to a ‘chaayakkada’ and walked home barefoot, in spite of the chaperone trying to prevent it, out of some stupid fear that mother might force me to wear it again after repairing the minor tear in it, if I took it home 🙁

    2. Parents died because of debt burden leaving behind three daughters of marriageable age. It so touched people’s hearts that around Rs.2.5 million were raised for them, and the eldest was married to one of the several men who came forward to marry her (properly vetted, I assume).

    3. A scheduled caste girl, an engineering student, jumped off a Govt. building. Speculated reasons: a. got admitted through affirmative action, grades were falling because the studies were beyind her capabilities, b. mental illness and c. a bank had denied her student loan application. There were massive student agitations, furore in the state assmebly etc. about nationalised banks’ lending practices (can’t remember whether anything came out of it.)

    The report linked by Vinod talks about 29 incidents of joint suicides in 2006. Feels like that is becoming increasingly common. That, I feel, is the saddest and scariest part of the phenomenon, that people lose hope so bad that they have to take the lives of their entire families along with theirs.

  32. 28 · HammerSickleStar said

    Superficially not in ethics, but in epistemology and metaphysics

    agreed.

  33. Breaking news: Another high profile Malayali suicide. Film director on the eve of the release of his third movie. Previous two movies were hits, University rank holder, son of a famous poet/director, father of a toddler…. Now, that’s a suicide fit for a philosophical investigation!

  34. Kerala’s problem? Traditional Indian family structures broken down by expatriation. This is caused by old fashioned Communism blocking any types of good jobs to be created in the state. Expatriates long to go back to Kerala due to nostolgia and the natives want to get out.

  35. 33 · Keralite said

    Breaking news: Another high profile Malayali suicide. Film director on the eve of the release of his third movie. Previous two movies were hits, University rank holder, son of a famous poet/director, father of a toddler…. Now, that’s a suicide fit for a philosophical investigation!

    Keralite, I assume you’re talking about the death of Telugu director Raj Aditya, who was born in Kerala, brought up in Chennai, and worked in the Telugu industry. I’m not sure his death can in anyway attributed to whatever problems exist in Kerala. For a director who had made two successful films, I’m not sure Kerala’s lack of opportunities is really his problem.

  37. Yes, I meant Rajakumaran Thampi, the son of Sreekumaran Thampi. Yeah, he is a Telugu director, but he has acted in quite a few Malayalam movies as a child artist and he learned film direction under Priyadarshan, a Malayalam director. So it is not like he is totally cut off from Malyalee culture and identity. His father is a Malayalam poet, he married a Malayali, and he grew up in Chennai where the entire Malayalam movie industry used to be based, so I would expect him to be more culturally Malayalee than an average Malayalee growing up in North India or the Gulf or the US.

    True, while Kerala’s lack of opportunities would not be behind his suicide, a Keralite’s high expectations would be. The opportunities that he had and their outcomes would not have matched his expectations, perhaps.

  38. Watch the recent episode of Akkarakazchakal on youtube. This episode discusses how DOB mallus create this fantasy about Kerala and wants to relive their golden days.

  39. When Melbourne desi talks about growing up in Pulionthope, I wanted to tell him about McCourt’s childhood in a Limerick slum and his later visitations and the resulting emotions;

    hmmmm

  40. Great post.

    25 · portmanteau said

    24 · HammerSickleStar said
    You should go hang out in a Kerala bar sometime! 🙂
    i have 🙂 buddha and aristotle are not that dissimilar — aristotle talks about the golden mean which is comparable to buddha’s path of moderation. both speak about virtuous conduct, and their views may not diverge that much. buddha is not about self-abnegation (he cares more about detachment) in the extreme way mahavira is.

    What is the difference between detachment and self-abnegation? Attachment comes from non-self-abnegation (desire) which is the root-cause of all evil according to Buddha. And isn’t forced self-abnegation (may be because that is society’s ideal or may be due to lack of opportunity) one of the main reasons for suicide? According to Buddha, the lack of desire should come from an actual self-realization that desire is meaningless etc etc… I suspect such a philosophy will lead to a civilization in decline, which abandons/devalues all things material. How much of this affected India is anyone’s guess.. This philosophy contrasts with the disinterestedness in the result of ones action (nishkama karma) but not in action itself and the importance given to all the four stages of human life – student,householder,retired and renounced – in Gita.

    I believe, the purpose or meaning of life does not lie in some end goal, but lies in the pursuit/action itself. And the job of any successful state is to facilitate this pursuit by all people with as few hindrances as possible.

  42. Santa Clara murder-suicide of six. One more to add to the rising trend of multiple suicides among Malayalees (due to financial difficulties?), though the mode of operation is more copy cat US-DBD than typical Mallu joint suicides.

  43. Generally, good people commit suicide, i guess. So what we are missing is good-minded people of Kerala. But this can be reduced considerable, if there are enough social support groups.