A youth, with complete ‘concentration’, attempts to take a selfie on the railway tracks against the background of an approaching train, without gauging the speed of the train. He is run over. Another, while attempting to take a selfie with an elephant, resting after a long day’s toil, is gored to death by the irate animal bewildered by the strange contortions of the selfie enthusiast.
A diehard fan of a movie star who passed away recently found nothing wrong in ‘posing’ before the body of the ‘icon’ to obtain a selfie, oblivious of the sensibilities of the bereaved family and friends that his distasteful act would surely affect.
To top it all, the Kerala Chief Minister recently injured himself on his toe by a piece of a window pane that broke in the mêlée of attempting to get himself ‘selfied’ with his party men at a meeting. The nation’s Prime Minister, in fact, champions this relatively new vehicle which furthers to the extreme, the ‘I-me syndrome’, by posing for and clicking selfies with world leaders during his innumerable jaunts abroad, thereby providing ample fodder for lighthearted banter on social media!
This newfound expression of the ‘I-me syndrome’ caught my attention while I was on a trip to Dubai in 2013. While visiting the Magic Garden there, I was surprised to witness people of various races, sizes, age and gender cuddling before their mobile phones against the background of the ‘magical’ garden. They were lost in the process of capturing their images, alienated from their whereabouts and surroundings in the process of capturing the best images they possibly could. They stepped on the feet of other passersby. Some even fell down, losing their balance.
‘Selfieism’ is a relatively new concept. The Oxford Dictionary, including the word to the dictionary in 2013, defined a ‘selfie’ as ‘a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a Smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website’.
The selfi represents the current trend of taking ‘love of oneself’’ to the superlative. A selfie, to the person who takes it, supposedly places him or her on the pedestal of gleeful aggrandisement. Putting even Narcissus to shame, the selfie takes the peculiar ‘I-me Syndrome’ of the times to the extreme.
The Oxford Dictionary named the word ‘selfie’ as the ‘Word of the year 2013’. Based on what I had witnessed in Dubai, this decision did not surprise me. That this word is relatively new is evident from the fact that the spell-check of the Microsoft Word programme on my computer has tirelessly underlined it each time I typed the word!
The modern-day mobile ‘phones’, which are everything but phones, have furthered the cause of the selfie enthusiasts by creating the front-facing camera on the devices, and have been suitably aided by accessories such as the ‘selfie stick’. So much so that the whole exercise closely resembles a person on a leisurely holiday attempting to shoot down a stork beside a lush paddy field in the countryside at daybreak!
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