Until Death Etc Etc

The WTF opening sentence of the day comes from a Rediff report:

According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) one married man commits suicide every nine minutes in India.

That sentence makes it sound as if marriage is the cause of these suicides, which is surely unjust to the 57,639 wives whose husbands offed themselves. Causation is often complex and not easy to pin down when it comes to suicide, and the following sentence would make quite as much sense: “According to Cricinfo, 13 married men have made scores of 250+ in Test cricket in the last 10 years.” Huh, no?

Given that life is a fatal disease, it’s not unnatural for some of us to want to get it over with quickly. Marriage, like most of what we seek in life, is a palliative. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it can’t cure nothin’, and it ain’t the cause.

(Link via email from Poornima.)

Update: Here’s the NCRB report (pdf link).