It was a collective suicide. A group of men, women and children vowed to perish together and stuck it out till the end. Taken by age, size and gender, it was a landscape of humanity, which took a single plunge and obliterated itself.

There is no reason to mourn their deaths. They had the choice to live, yet they squandered the gift of god in an awkward hurry. They chose to die in an anticlimax to the familiar world, which seethes with hunger and greed, the unquenchable thirst for more, the lust for life that surpasses everything.

There are those who will do anything to live, but nine people gave up their lives in the twinkle of an eye. They died many deaths in one form, suicide and sacrifice, at once violent, senseless and shocking, at once contemptible and lugubrious. Nevertheless, they died with an impact. Ordinary people died extraordinary death.

Mass suicides are not new to mankind and it has been practiced like a ritual of some sort across the world. When Bahadur Shah, the Sultan of Gujarat, attacked Chittaur, Rani Karnavati and other women immolated themselves in the fire. Rajput women practiced this ritual of Jauhar throughout history to avoid dishonor by an invading army.

A spiritual leader named Reverend Jim Jones gave poisonous potion to his followers in the jungles of Guyana and led 913 people to their deaths. David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians religious sect, believed he was the final prophet. He chose to die with 53 adults and 21 children when the US law enforcement agencies burned down his ranch.

There are many instances when distraught parents killed their children before taking their own lives. Suicide does its own calculation of the Internal Rate of Return. When the net present value of dying exceeds the expected return from all future streams of staying alive, the business liquidates itself.

Nobody seems to know enough about these nine souls except that they belonged to a family headed by a retired army man, who had a delusion that his family was the best amongst all. We also know that in his inordinate passion for humanity, he gave Adam as the last name to every member of the family.

The neighbors misunderstood it as his conversion to Christianity. He was a mystic of some kind, who had probably gone into cult practice. A recluse by nature, he stayed away from other people and kept others away from his family.

Still it isn't clear what pushed them over the top. What Freudian eclipse had darkened their minds? It couldn't be attributed to mental disorder alone, which afflicts one or two members, but highly unlikely to run in the entire family. There is one surviving daughter who shows no strain of mental illness. There were children amongst the suicides who were too young to lose their minds.

No coroner, police, judge or social thinker will ever know what happened. The secret, which they held within the bounds of their bodies vanished into the thin air as soon as it was released like compressed steam when the wheels of the train cut open their flesh. Is this what they wanted, to be chopped and mauled so that the secret which had soaked them was squeezed out of their flesh and bones?

May be that is why they chose such a grisly, gory death. Taking poison or slashing theirs wrists would have been less appalling and messy. Each of them would have gone to grave in one piece.

Instead they chose to be carted off like crudely sliced animals in a butcher shop. And one wonders what burial must have been like for them, lowered in grave as a jumbled mix of broken bodies. For as many reasons as we may think, it simply eludes the mind that they should have gone like this instead of taking a less painful course. But lots of people go like them these days, specially the suicide bombers, who disintegrate themselves in order to integrate a manifold revenge against their enemies.

But suicide bombers explode, while the regular suicides implode. These people take their lives when they are bombed, when their dreams are spent and hopes are lost, their inner strength depleted by doubts and despair, when the prospect of life looks grim in the face of escalating pain.

People always enjoy doing things with their families. They like to go to picnic, travel together, watch movies, and these days even go to jail. They work hard to support their families, raise children, then perpetuate the illusion that they will live in their children after they are gone.

But taking the family to the railroad, preparing them mentally to keep tight when a racing train comes in sight, rehearsing them step by step for the moment of truth so that adults and children will perish at the same time, the whole thing was outrageously pathetic.

Albert Camus writes that there is only one serious philosophical question and that is suicide. Whether life is worth living or not answers the fundamental question in philosophy and everything else follows from that. And that question gets louder when a group of people commit suicide.

It gets even louder when that suicide takes place on the railroad, when the tragedy of someone taking his own life is multiplied by headcounts and compounded by the brutal intensity of meat-grinding death.

It was Socrates who said that an unexamined life wasn't worth living. But those nine people proved it wrong. They found it meaningless and hollow, unworthy of further examination. Freaked out, they looked for the fast way out. They took the train.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.