LOVE, MURDER AND OTHER THINGS

Love, that primal force, is both a sanctuary and a battleground. It promises transcendence but often delivers tragedy. Passion fuels its fire, trust binds its fragile threads, and betrayal, like the Biblical serpent in the garden, forever waits to strike. Murder, the ultimate act of severance, is betrayal’s darkest bloom. The case of Raja Raghuwanshi, allegedly killed by his wife through hired contract killers, is a grim modern parable of these forces. To explore this horrifying contradiction, it is important to weave philosophy with stories—ancient myths and contemporary catastrophes that reveal the eternal interplay of these human impulses.

Love is the dream of unity. Plato imagines humans as split halves seeking their other, chasing wholeness through love. Yet, this pursuit is fraught with illusion. In mythology, Psyche’s love for Eros is a journey of trials, her devotion tested by doubt and betrayal. Today, love, is not a destination but a crucible. In the modern world, love often wears a veneer of romance but also masks deeper, darker shadows. Raja and his wife Sonam, like countless couples, vowed eternal devotion, but on her part it was a lethal lie. Passion is love’s wild sibling, untamed and insatiable— Sonam’s relationship with her lover Raj was ignited but also blinded in an inferno of toxic passion. Consider the 2018 case of Chris Watts, who murdered his pregnant wife Shanann and their daughters in Colorado, driven by a passionate affair with another woman. Passion, unchecked, can distort morality, turning devotion into destruction. The philosopher Nietzsche warns of passion’s Dionysian excess, where reason drowns in unreasonable desire. In Sonam’s case, we might speculate: that passion for another, for power, or for escape was the catalyst that led led to orchestrate her husband's death. Passion, without restraint, is a blade that cuts both ways.

Trust is the foundation of love, a silent pact that vulnerability will not be weaponized. Philosopher Hannah Arendt saw trust as the bedrock of human connection, fragile yet essential. In mythology, the story of Sita and Rama in the Ramayana hinges on trust. Sita’s fidelity is questioned, her trial by fire a testament to the high cost of trust. In modern relationships, trust is often precarious. The digital age amplifies doubt—texts misread, secrets exposed. Sonam wife shattered trust not just through betrayal but by outsourcing his murder, a chilling act of detachment. A 2023 case in Delhi, where a woman hired killers to eliminate her husband over financial disputes, echoes this pathology. Trust, once broken, becomes a wound that festers, birthing vengeance or violence. As Sartre notes, human freedom includes the terrible choice to betray, making trust a gamble with existential stakes.

Betrayal is love’s shadow, the moment trust is sundered. It is not merely an act but a revelation of the other’s hidden self.  Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, her husband, is betrayal born of grief and rage over his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. Her act is both retribution and a reclaiming of agency, yet it spirals into further tragedy. Betrayal in the modern world often lacks such mythic grandeur, cloaked instead in deceit or greed. The 1997 murder of Gianni Versace by Andrew Cunanan, driven by envy and obsession, reflects betrayal not of love but of idealized connection. To betray is to assert power, but it is also to sever the self from shared humanity. Murder is betrayal’s apotheosis, the irreversible erasure of the other. It is the ultimate denial of love’s promise. The tale of Medea, who kills her children to punish Jason’s infidelity, is murder as both vengeance and self-destruction. Her act is horrific yet pitiable, a mother undone by love’s betrayal. Raja’s murder, orchestrated by his wife, joins a grim lineage of domestic killings. A similar case in 2020 of Amy Hill, who hired a hitman to kill her husband in Australia over an affair, mirrors this pattern. Murder, here, is not just an act but a statement of rage, despair, or liberation. To kill is to reject dialogue, to silence the other forever.

What do these stories teach us? Love, passion, trust, betrayal, and murder are not isolated acts but a continuum, a theater of human frailty. The Stoic Seneca advises temperance, urging us to govern passion with reason. Yet, as Raja’s case suggests, reason often falters in illicit love’s heat. Mythology offers no solutions, only mirrors—Psyche’s trials, Medea’s rage, Sita’s endurance reflect our own struggles. To love is to risk betrayal; to trust is to court destruction. Yet, without love or trust, we are islands, severed from meaning. French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argues that ethics begins in the face of the ‘Other,’ in recognizing their irreducible humanity. Murder, then, is the ultimate ethical failure, a refusal to see the other’s face. Raja’s senseless death, like all such tragedies, is a call to confront our own capacity for love and destruction. "Why couldn't she just have eloped? What was the need to kill him?" his sister lamented.

In the end, we are left with a paradox: love is both our salvation and our doom. To navigate its perils, we must embrace its fragility, temper passion with wisdom, and guard trust with vigilance. For in the space between love and murder lies the human heart: flawed, yearning, and eternally at war with itself.