Cyber Suicide.

A few weeks back I started my day, like any other. Picking up the Times Edition for the day and skimming through the headlines. One particular article on the front page caught my eye. The headline itself passed a shiver through my spine. It said ‘Youth hangs self on webcam for his girl’.
I was aghast at this act, completely disgusted.

The act in itself is such a horrifying one. It is one thing to commit suicide and another to broadcast it to the girl you love. I cannot imagine the nerve of the boy to make his helpless girlfriend watch the entire act. What a state of shock the poor girl must be in. I fail to understand what the boy had wanted to achieve by killing himself. All people no matter what kind of life they lead face problems. Problems or any kind of obstacles in life can be solved when you are alive to solve them. The only thing a person achieves by choosing to kill himself is to not face the problem, but to find refuge in death.

In the case of this youth, I wonder whether if he had thought twice about how his parents would feel on seeing his lifeless body. Had the youth even thought about the life he could have lived in the future, of having a flourishing career? I wonder if he felt a sense of responsibility towards his parents and sibling at that point of time. It is difficult to understand what prompted him to commit such an extreme act, and that too in front of the girl who was the center of his world!

Another aspect of this act which makes it so shocking is the use of cyber technology in this fashion. Who would’ve ever imagined that a webcam could be used as an instrument to telecast a suicide? What irks me further is the presence of sites on web with step by step instructions on how to commit suicide. Though it is difficult to say how many people actually indulge in using such websites, their mere presence is irksome. Though we have laws governing the use of cyber space, it’s a question of how effectively will they be enforced. How is it possible to stop a person to access information on the net? How is it possible to figure out who uses such services and who doesn’t, when everybody uses secret screen names?

Though this one boy is not the representative of the entire population of youngsters in our country, he is definitely one amongst them. He’s one amongst us. It is indeed pitiful to see anybody resort to such an act of desperation.

This article is just a request to all those people out there to think at least once about the consequences their impulsive acts bring about. I’d like to make a point that such people escape the clutches of life and its problems, but the people who loved them are now in the clutches of death without even facing it.