Earning Money By Uploading Videos About Suicide Is Nothing Less Than Cannibalism
Umran Hussain
Psychologists believe that youth tend to follow the trend, be it fashion, movies, hero worshipping or any dangerous thing that they come across. Science too says that you have no control over your hormones and 15-20 is the age when hormones take a full control over you. You don’t probably do what you wish to, because at such age emotions too start driving you away from the harsh realities of life.
At such age, one believes in virtual world, one tends to be in a dream that takes him into an unimaginable world and a small hurdle at this stage proves lethal.
The trend of posting videos before committing suicide has taken an ugly turn in a last couple of month’s. We first witnessed an incident where a young boy recorded a video before committing suicide just because of his fathers financial constraints. The boy couldn’t withstand a short lived financial trouble and finally ended his life.
In yet another heart breaking incident a teenager from Kupwara jumped into a river and ended his life and before taking this harsh step, he too recorded a video and posted it on Facebook.
One wonders how such people gather the courage to take such a drastic step. They leave behind the un-erasable traces for our younger generation to follow and unfortunately our Facebook warriors leave no stone unturned to circulate the video and ensure that it reaches every household in the valley.
The Un-Erasable traces are definitely going to act like pheromones which are enough to lure and motivate other youngsters to follow the path because our youth seen to crave for fame and fortune even at the cost of their precious lives.
Hero – Worshiping has already taken millions of lives all across the globe. Youth are the primary and an easy prey to this menace. Our youth love going crazy for anything they think provides them relief, be it drug abuse, alcohol, smoking, gambling or suicide. Have we not come across such cases in our valley when a wife was mortgaged in gambling, when drug addicts sold the valuable items stolen from their parents to receive an injection or a dose that makes him high, or a youth who puts his life a risk just to upload a video on social media and send out a message of his might, of being a superhero.
This is called “being blind to reality” and we as a society need to use the pulpits of our mosques to raise awareness about “how precious ones life actually is.” If we keep on preaching about the Harams and Halals of suicide, nothing is going to change. We need to put our psychologists to task just to spread awareness about the “beauty of being alive even in harshest conditions.”
Finally, let’s categorise such videos as “graphic content” and let’s not share such videos for our own good. One fails to understand, what purpose does it serve when a Facebook page or an individual account shares such videos. If you share them with an intent to earn money from social media media platforms by gaining millions of views, then it is a pure case of “cannibalism.”
Umran Hussain is a blogger and works as an online editor for The Kashmir Radar. He can be reached at umranhussainkr@gmail.com
