Selfies go before the Fall

Mirror Selfie, Circa 1900   (Public Domain)

It is often said that pride goes before the fall, and what more obvious manifestation of pride is there than a preoccupation with selfies?

If your main goal while participating in sacred events is to highlight yourself, then instant karma might come to pass.  Tobias Salinger of the New York Daily News reports that a Hindu festival space in Mumbai was declared a no-selfie zone because of potential crowd bottlenecks and stampedes.

Secular sites are also quite prone to selfies, sometimes with disastrous results.  Such foolhardiness can lead to a literal fall, as was the case at India’s Bandra Bandstand.

Salinger states that an 18-year-old and two of her friends recently “slipped off rocks by the sea in the Bandra area while snapping pictures.”  A bystander managed to save 

the two friends, but drowned while trying to save the also-doomed 18-year-old.

Salinger adds that “a 66-year-old Japanese tourist who was snapping a selfie tumbled down stairs to his death at the Taj Mahal in September.”  There are far nobler ways to utilize and memorialize the precious gift of a human body.

Resources

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/most-of-world%E2%80%99s-27-selfie-linked-deaths-happened-in-india/ar-BBod4FV?li=BBnb4R7 

Copyright January 17, 2016 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved