Selfie Suicides

This post has been long pending and I am sure numerous people have written on it before but, what the hell, one more wouldn’t hurt. I was having a conversation one day with my cousin, my mother and my aunt about a relative who was sitting on top of a Mumbai local train and got electrocuted. It reminded me of a news report about a person who died the same way, only he was posing for a selfie while on top of a moving train. This got me thinking, how much is a selfie worth?

These days the selling features of a phone are not its call features but by how advanced the selfie camera is. They call it selfie phones. But the question is, how important should selfies be to a person, enough to risk their lives, or even worse, risk other people’s lives? I had read about an incident where two students climbed on to a rock that rise out of the sea during low tide to click a selfie with his friends and did not notice the that the tide came back. They were swept away when a man who lived nearby noticed this and dived. He saved one of the three youngsters but drowned himself. Human nature is such that people constantly need appreciation and acknowledgement. Selfies are a perfect way of demonstrating oneself before the world in the most daring, exclusive and exquisite ways. But is it okay to fall into water canals or drown in rivers or get hit by a train in this pursuit of appreciation? I doubt.

Maybe if we all took a little time off our busy schedules to appreciate the people around us for little things like a new haircut or a new recipe or an assignment well done or maybe just for providing good company people won’t feel the need to go to daring extents to be appreciated. Here’s hoping. J