New Delhi: A Hyderabad man suffered severe injuries after a train hit him when he was taking a selfie alongside the railway tracks. The accident took place near the Bharatnagar railway station three days ago but came to light on Wednesday, when a disturbing video of it went viral on social media.
In the video, the man, who looks to be in his early 20s, is seen recording himself with the front camera of his smartphone as an MMTS train approaches in the background. In the final moments of the video, the train appears to hit the man violently in the face as the video switches off.
Although the man escaped with injuries, the incident is an indicator of the worrying trend of selfie-related accidents in the country, which most often lead to very serious injuries, sometimes even death.
For several years now, India has recorded the most selfie-related deaths. According to Me, Myself and My Killfie: Characterizing and Preventing Selfie Deaths, a collaborative study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Indraprastha Institute of Information Delhi, between March 2014 and September 2016, 60 per cent of all “selfie deaths” – where a person dies while trying to take a picture of themselves – were reported from India.
Pointing to an increase in selfie related deaths, the study reported that more than 73 people died while taking extreme photos of themselves in the first eight months of 2016, up from 39 in 2015 and 15 in 2014.
The study also put the number of selfie deaths in India at 76 out of the 127 reported selfie deaths in the 18-month period. The main cause of the death, according to the study, was taking selfies with wild animals, on railway tracks and in moving vehicles.
According to the report, 68 % of victims who died while taking a selfie were under the age of 24. Around 75% of the victims were men. In more than 24 incidents of selfie deaths, multiple lives were lost.
The report also stated that the most common type of selfie death involved people falling from buildings, mountains, cliffs or other extreme heights. Water-related photos were the second most dangerous.
In 2017, about half of the selfie related deaths around the world – 27 ¬ occurred in India.
In January 2017, two teenagers were killed by a speeding train while they were doing stunts and posing for selfies near a railway track behind Akshardham Temple in Delhi.
In July, a 28-year-old man sneaked into a restricted safari area at the Bannerghatta Biological Park in Bengaluru with his friends and tried to take a selfie with an elephant. The animal trampled him to death.
That same month, four people were trying to take a selfie on a cliff at Nagoa Beach in Diu. As waves crashed into the cliff, they fell in the Arabian Sea and were swept away, drowning them all.
Comments
0 comment