Have You Taken A Selfie Today?

I recently found out that Yale and Harvard Universities will be offering Master and Ph.D. courses on ‘Taking Selfies’ starting fall semester 2014. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but owing to the word ‘selfie’, the Oxford English Dictionary guys have stopped printing its paper version. They say it’s now too big to be printed but they’re just 1 word over the limit. Of course, a critical word like selfie can’t be taken out of the dictionary for sure.

I was in the upmarket Vasant Vihar area in Delhi a few days back where I witnessed a very strange incident in front of my eyes. There was this group of young kids, a healthy mix of boys and girls, unlike my childhood group which was only full of boys and dirty boys at that. So these kids were trying to take a group selfie. A kind old lady was walking by when she saw that these kids were having difficulties in clicking a group photo themselves. She went up to them and offered to click their photo. A little girl of no more than 14 years instantly yelled at her and shoved her away. Another boy from the group asked the lady to calmly walk away lest she wanted trouble. The old lady was shocked and start moving away slowly, fearing for her life. I followed suit and quickly disappeared in the shadows.

I came back home shivering and terrified. I went to the bathroom and opened the shower and sat in the corner getting wet. I cried and cried and I was under the shower so that even I wouldn’t feel my tears falling down. I even peed and it all got mixed and went down the drain. I felt so naked. I came out after 1 hour and felt a little calmer. That night I couldn’t sleep.

I lay on my bed all night long just twisting and turning and thinking what had happened to the world. I was afraid what was going to happen in the future. I started imagining things. I could so clearly picture how the smartphones of the future would have a primary front camera with flash and the back would just have a secondary camera. It would become nearly impossible to click a picture of someone else. Wedding photographers of the future would walk around with a smartphone clicking selfies with all the guests. Imagine the guy being in all your wedding photos, oh, the horror! Passport photos would soon become mandatory selfies and imagine the ordeal for someone like Thakur in a situation like that.  

The world is divided into two kinds of people. The ones who take selfies and the rest who don’t. The number of people take selfies is increasing by the day. In fact, if my sources are correct, selfie-takers are increasing at a faster rate than the human population. If we continue at this rate, soon, all will go to the dark side. We all wanted a zombie invasion, right? Here it is. But this one is a different sort of a zombie. This zombie only takes a selfie and wants everyone else to take selfies too. If you don’t already, then this selfie-zombie will hunt you down and forcibly take a selfie with you and convert you.

Click. Click. Doom.