this entry is not about cultural relativism

If I had been looking for something more diametrically opposed to my normal entries in this journal, I'm not sure I could have found one, but I'm still thinking about this a few days later. As usual with things that concern Real Life, I'm not sure that I have anything to say about it, just that I can file it under things that I never would have imagined.

Suicides, Some for Separatist Cause, Jolt India

With that, Mr. Meegada became one of a surprising number of people — many of them young and educated, with bright futures awaiting them — to have committed suicide over the battle to carve out India’s 29th state. Some estimates have attributed more than 200 suicides to the cause.

But these politically motivated deaths are just one aspect of a troubling trend. Suicide has become something of a phenomenon in India, especially in the south, which now has one of the highest suicide rates in the world — a fact that has both puzzled and alarmed public health experts.

This was, of course, published shortly after the suicide bombings in Moscow on Monday.

I can understand, intellectually, the forces that act on people and the motivations they have to martyr themselves a cause. I am, as ever, grateful that I do not understand them emotionally.

In other News:

Obama's Half-Brother Lives A World Apart

President Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., married four times before he died. To this day, not all of his children have met one another.

The seven surviving children are scattered from Kenya to China to the White House. The youngest of them has written a book about his life in Kenya — and the life he describes is altogether different from that of his half-brother, the U.S. president.

At the very least, George Obama's memoir answers the perennial question: Why can't you be more like your brother