NRI puts selfie before self, comes within touching distance of death

NEW DELHI: An Indian settled in Australia suffered 60% burns when his hands touched the high-tension power line overhead while attempting to take a selfie atop an electric train. Doctors said it took more than two weeks after the incident in Amritsar on December 9 to nurse the youngster back to good health so he could go back to Australia.

“The patient was referred to our hospital on December 11 with deep burns on around 60% of the body surface, including the right upper limb, back, gluteal region and both the lower limbs,” said Dr Mahesh Mangal, chairman, plastic surgery department, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. “Initially, he was managed by the critical care team in the intensive care unit. After that, multiple skin grafting was carried out to cover the burnt areas.”



The 20-year-old NRI was lucky to survive. In the past, there have been incidents involving young men attempting to take selfies on train roofs and dying after being electrocuted by the power lines. Last year, a 22-year-old man was charred to death when he was trying a similar stunt atop a stationary goods train in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district.

“In my practice, I have come across several cases of burn injuries sustained during electricity work and by children accidentally touching wires, among others. But electrical burn injury while attempting selfies is a new, and totally avoidable, trend,” opined Dr Mangal.

In the past there have also been reports of people suffering serious spinal injury while trying to take their own photographs from a precarious position, say the edge of a mountain cliff, or getting themselves killed by oncoming trains.

Many would say that the obsession with selfies is a disease. So much so, that recently it reached Parliament too when two MPs asked the central government about the steps it was planning take to “cure those afflicted with selfitis”, a term coined to 2014 to describe the constant need to take selfies. The government’s bland reply was that selfitis wasn’t yet categorised as a disease.

Notwithstanding the government’s view, psychiatrists Janarthanan Balakrishnan of the Thiagarajar School of Management in Madurai and Mark D Griffiths of UK’s Nottingham Trent University claim to have proven through research that the obsessive need to post selfies is a mental condition and those suffering from it may need professional help. Their study was based on the responses they got from 400 young students pursuing management courses in two colleges in India.

In their research, the results of which were recently published in International Journal of Mental Health Addiction, they claimed selfieitis was of three levels: borderline, acute and chronic.

Borderline cases include people who take selfies at least three times a day but don’t post them on social media. Acute obsession involves people who constantly post their self-taken photos on social media, and the chronic sufferers are those who feel an uncontrollable urge to take selfies and post them more than six times daily. In their study — the students were aged between 16 and 25 years — 40.5% of the respondents fell in the acute category, 34% in the borderline category and 25.5% were deemed to be chronic sufferers.