Wrath and Tears...

The date is 06th August, 1945. The entire United States glistened with the lights of victory! Almost everyone on the streets was a little bit inebriated. In the midst of all that, one man, clad in a grey suit, with a cigarette between lips and a hat lowered slightly to cover his face, walked steadily towards the southern end of the Castillo Bridge station in Santa Fe.  He stopped at the end of the station area, lit up a matchstick and ignited the cigarette. As soon as his face lit up in the light of the matchstick, another man emerged from the darkness, and walked towards him. The stranger asked the man how to get a train to go to the east side, the man replied “I don’t know. Where are you coming from?” while carefully noting the dress of the stranger. The reply came in a measured tone, “I am coming from Julius” and the man with the cigarette extended his hand.  “My name is Dexter. You?” “Charles Raymond. How do you do?” “Can we sit somewhere?” “Come, I know a place just next to the st

Not all books one comes across can be audacious enough to start with a line as bold and provocative as this - “ There is but only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide… ” but then again, not all writers are Albert Camus. As provocative as the opening line is (in " The Myth of Sisyphus "), Camus’s logic behind bringing up suicide is based not on an emotional but rather a rational, calculative look at the purpose of existence itself. As per Camus and many other existentialist philosophers, for the most purposes, the very existence of life seems to be pointless (or, as Camus calls it, absurd). We are all meant to die eventually and even the very Universe with all its complexities and all its unimaginable vastness is destined to end (in one way or the other) at scales of time far beyond what our primitive minds can comprehend. But if that is so, and if science fails to provide much optimism in this regard, then the proposition Camus makes seems logical enou