Viveka Babajee’s diary ended with a disturbingly direct statement, ‘You killed me Gautam.’ In the supermodel’s death, there is the obvious tragedy of a human being so traumatised as to end her life, but it still begs the question: was it really Gautam Vora, the stock analyst who barely knew her for two months, who ‘killed’ her or was it not she herself who did it? When we hear about a suicide, the first instinctive reaction is to affix blame, to search for a culprit and then ensure punishment. In our minds, suicide is the result of a crime, not a mental illness.

But that is just not true in the rest of the world, says Dr Amresh Shrivasatava, an Indian psychiatrist who has worked on preventing suicide. “Abetment to suicide is a crime unique to our country. Everywhere else, suicide is a medical issue. More than 50 per cent of the people who commit suicide have a history of being treated for mental ailments, and would have visited their doctors less than a month ago. They reach out for help in various ways.” In Viveka’s case, she called her mother and close friend the night before she hanged herself. 

According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 65 million Indians suffer from mental illnesses. Yet, we know so little about it. This, along with a history of social evils like dowry and sati where others played a role in someone’s death, have led to suicide being considered a crime by the IPC. “We are unable to distinguish between suicide and murder,” says Dr Shrivasatava.

Viveka’s last line has turned into a public noose for Gautam Vora. But is there any legal crime committed here beside a love affair gone irreparably sour? Gautam may not go to jail for the moment, though just to be sure, he has sought anticipatory bail. But in large sections of the public mind, he is already guilty of a crime no one is clear about. 

Suicides are an ethically skewed territory. No matter how liberal a society may be, the right to take your own life isn’t a straightforward one. Which is why many suicide notes emphasise that they take responsibility for their actions, and hold no one else accountable. Some, like Viveka’s, turn out to be a cry for justice against perceived wrongs. But in both cases, there is often a mental illness ticking in the background.

West Bengal is no stranger to agitations, but this one is still unusual. Residents of Kasba in south Kolkata are opposing the construction of a law college campus because it would interfere with the lifestyle of civets in the vicinity. The vacant plot, which has many trees, belongs to the college. A community of 50-strong civets lives on the top floor of a four-storied residential building near the college’s land. The four-legged mammals, which look like mongooses, hunt and play on the college’s land. The locals are fond of them, and when labourers started erecting a boundary wall around the college land, protests started. The locals complained to the forest department, which asked the college ( which has a campus in another part of the city), to rehabilitate the civets. But the college is in a fix—it doesn’t have any land with fruit trees where civets can be relocated. And purchasing such land would be an expensive proposition. So construction plans have had to be shelved.

Following every earthquake, there’s the inevitable news story about how some animals started behaving strangely much before the event. Two researchers from the UK, one from Open University and the other from Oxford, studying this phenomenon, have found out that toads started changing their behaviour a full five days before an earthquake. For the study, they monitored reproductively active common toads for 29 days in L’Aquila, Italy, an earthquake prone region. Five days before an earthquake, the toads stopped spawning and reduced their activity. How they become aware is still not established, but it corresponds with changes in the ionosphere.

Doctors at Apollo Hospital, Delhi, attending to former Union Minister Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, are trying football therapy on the man who has been in a coma since October 2008 following a massive stroke. Das Munshi, who had been president of the All India Football Federation for nearly 20 years, is a die-hard fan. Doctors at the hospital have put up a LCD television set in his cabin on which matches  are shown live to him. During the last World Cup, Das Munshi had been in Germany cheering the Brazilian team. “The idea is that his brain cells may respond to images of his favourite team in his favourite game,” says Partha Bhowmick, Das Munshi’s childhood friend.

A soccer fan from Hyderabad has created a football-shaped tricycle. K Sudhakar Yadav’s creation, Trike, is an eight-foot diameter seven-seater with pedals for all riders, seated inside. Yadav uses a rack and pinion system to drive his green machine. “It’s eco friendly and can go upto a speed of 20 kmph. The riders can see through the round openings created in the football,’’ the creator says. Yadav has notched up some 170 such inventions dedicated to sport. All of them are housed at a museum he has created. They include 30 cars, replicas of trains, tricycles and double-decker buses. “It has been my hobby since the 1990s,’’ he says. All his creations are made from scrap, including the world’s biggest tricycle—four storeys high—which earned  him a Guinness Book mention.