Indian community torn apart by tragedies

WEEK in and week out, our newspapers are the couriers of indigestible news – murder and suicides.

We are still reeling from the shocking murder of a young Shallcross woman who was allegedly bludgeoned to death by her boyfriend, who later committed suicide by shooting himself.

This comes on the back of a horrific double suicide shooting. Weeks earlier a Phoenix man shot his wife and then himself.

They are now statistics and so are their children, who are now orphans. This was followed by another fracas in Clairwood in which a man shot his girlfriend and then himself.

For too long we have blamed rifts and failed relationships on flirtatious behaviour, alcohol, drugs, narcissism, parental intrusion and disapproval, religious beliefs and downright incompatibility.

The problem seems a much deeper one – a ferocious amalgam of deepseated jealousy, hatred and rage, which spawns an ineluctable crescendo of blood-curdling violence and death.

The South African Indian community is being besieged and torn apart by these inconsolable tragedies.

Every parent whose young child is in the throes of a relationship is on high vigilance.

As parents we sometimes wonder: are these really our sons, born of our wombs and reared with care and love, only to graduate into macabre monsters fighting the irresistible convulsions of love in a convoluted world of warped reality?

The whole modern world is, in fact, coming apart as never before, because man blindly pursues wealth, fame and personal power regardless of the consequences to anyone and even to themselves.

KEVIN GOVENDER Shallcross