Infanticide might not rank as the most startling of crimes though heartrending it is to think a human being, that too the mother of a child she had conceived, could stoop so low as to kill a dear one.
What makes unique the case of Bengaluru woman Suchana Seth, caught transporting the body of her 4-year-old son from the holidaymakers’ paradise of Goa towards the IT capital, is a polyglot, fluent in quite a few languages and a top Sanskrit student, comes with the highest possible education and work credentials imaginable being hauled away by the police to court.
What the gruesome incident highlights is there is only a thin red line between sanity and a person flipping to complete madness in which homicidal rage takes over, transforming even the most intelligent person into a senseless killer.
While the world is fearing over what artificial intelligence may hold by way of unintended consequences, the chief of which could be machines becoming sentient enough to transform into destructive avatars, here is a lady who has studied the subject in depth as to become a judge of how ethical AI should be groomed and yet she turns out to be the destroyer of her young son.
There is situational irony in how even an understanding of IT and AI did not point to her a devious path to try and hide her heinous crime. Just imagine how crazed she may have become under the stress of marital discord and a court ordering weekend rights to her estranged husband to not only commit murder but also travel a great distance with her son’s body.
It is inexplicable what happens to the human mind under pressure and there is no standard excuse to trot out like there being too much violence in society as well as all that gore magnified in media like films and news headlines.
The police needed no great deductive capabilities to solve the crime as the killer mother was caught with the remains after smothering the boy with a pillow, but they had help from staff of the service apartment she had rented who spotted bloodstains and the taxi driver on whom she had thrust the task of carrying a horrific ‘suitcase.’
There are no great moral lessons to be drawn except that the highest education and professional credentials do not always guarantee the making of great and gentle human beings.
