One of my favourite films, the 1999 Hungarian movie Gloomy Sunday, is about a song by the same name composed by pianist and composer Rezso Seress. It inspired hundreds of suicides in Hungary. Young lovers and lonely people started jumping, hanging, convulsing to their deaths keeping the radio on, or leaving their long-playing records to slip into a long, hopeless whirr.


Gloomy Sunday, which captured the dreadfulness of modern culture, soon came to be known as the saddest song in the world. The BBC banned Billie Holiday's version of it. Seress, who wrote the song in 1933, killed himself years later, apparently driven insane by tales of his composition inspiring youngsters to end their lives.

Did the song really kill so many?

The twilight of life and death is too profound, opaque and mysterious for us to know for sure. But I'll hazard a guess. I think humans, like swallows in flight, catch on to wavelengths and go on to form patterns. Instinctively.

And so, the news of somebody jumping off the window while listening to Gloomy Sunday may have made somebody else, who had for months hid that bottle of poison away from sight but never from her mind, decide to bring it out for use. That news spread too, and even others caught on to the wavelength, and set out to join the dark, terrible pattern.

Just as Viveka Babaji's death, directly or very subtly, might have given courage to Natasha Padubidri to let go, finally. To Natasha, the vibrations around Viveka's death might have felt similar: both from the glamour industry, possibly from a shared world of loneliness, empty relationships, exploitation and struggle.

I'm obviously speculating about this one; facts are still coming in. But it is true that, for instance, news of a student's suicide, especially when descriptions of the final act are carried in the media in detail, spur other student suicides. We've seen that lately. And it is not just the media; news travels through neighbourhood gossip, peer talk, and other potent vehicles of popular culture too. One cannot stop it.

It is ridiculous to expect media not to report the news. Information fills our lives faster than air fills vacuum. If channels don't report it, blogs will, Twitter will, Facebook will.

But at least the mainstream media should exercise caution in not making descriptions of suicide graphic, focusing on interventions and helplines instead, generating debates on those parts of society and popular culture that propel suicides.

When my maternal grandfather was going through prolonged illness in his eighties, I always thought he, a very cautious man, was scared to take the leap. It seemed he came back from the edge of a very deep pool every time, unsure how the experience of leap would be, how it would be to not have ground under his feet, to be engulfed by an entirely different medium.

Then, one day, he took the plunge, in his sleep. Possibly after being told that he can't be home soon; he will have to be in the hospital for a long, long time.

An 83-year-old, ill man has not much option of situations. He didn't kill himself, just quietly embraced death.

But for 20-, 30- or 40-year-olds to bring violent death upon themselves is our culture's abject failure to show its youngsters alternatives, to make them see outside one narrow, terrible situation.

It warrants debate. It warrants a lot of talk.

Till then, these chilling lines from American poet Edna St Vincent Murray:

Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.

Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.

The writer is the Executive Editor of MiD Day