Videos above human emotions

Minna Zutshi

You witness an act of violence in the city. What is your first reaction? In most cases, the instant, spontaneous, unthinking reaction is to reach out for the mobile phone to record the incident. We, actually, have become adept recorders of events. We are physically there on the spot, yet we are not mentally present,  since our priority is to shoot the spot of accident. The victim may be writhing in pain, but we see an opportunity to shoot a video – a live video that has the potential to go viral. The more the shocking value of the scene, the more engrossed we get in recording. Whether the victim – the subject of our video-shoot – is crying desperately for help is not our concern. We would rather blithely go ahead with our recording – after all virtual reality grabs more attention. It all sounds very logical – emotions have no place when mobile phone camera is recording the events. This is fine until we find someone dear to us waiting for an agonisingly-long video-shoot to end, so that, the person recording the incident may see ‘him/her’ – a human being battling for life.