It seems the Virginia Tech massacre took its own toll on me. I mean I agree I do come across such daily news involving heinous crimes almost regularly(bane of modern time I guess), but this one in particular had a little more than the deserved melancholic effect on me. It really made me wonder where we are heading after all. Agreed every society will have some psychopaths in its pack of cards but doesn't get to comprehend a crime of this nature and magnitude. I even thought of reading the banned book 'Rage' to understand the deranged mentality of a loner but then thought it wouldn't really serve the purpose.
What caught my attention was a poignant story of a Mumbai girl Minal who died in the shootout. It wasn't really the fact that she was killed cold-blooded, but more so to discover that she had an online Orkut profile and it was flooded with consoling messages from all across the world. I mean it was eerie, as strange as it can get to see the scrapbook of a dead person who was all alive just a few hours back and getting thousands of messages about her own death. Netizens who were leaving the bereaved messages knew that there is no one at the other end to read those messages and the fact that the owner of that profile is never going to return back ! Later I discovered that the profile was deleted by Orkut but it left me with a bizarre feeling in my mind and a bigger question to ponder over – what happens to the online identity of a person(including email, blogs etc) when he/she is no more and are there any international rules/regulations governing the issue.
My heartfelt condolences to the Panchal family and also to the family of the Indian professor who was a victim in the shootout.
Peace.
1 comment:
In a strange way it made me re-think on my critical attitude towards our police; with a lot more infrastructure, gadgetry and support as compared to our folks, the authorities in Vriginia could neither prevent in stopping a guy with a questionable mental history from buying 2 guns and over 250 rounds of ammunition, nor could they get hold of him in 2 hours after the first shooting.
As for the Indian girl, the world is indeed getting flatter, nowadays even tragic events like these have an impact cutting across national boundaries. I would be intrested to see what explanation google has on the deletion of profile - whether it was due to heavy inflow of scraps or a policy to no longer maintain profile of someone who's dead !
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