Making their owners immortal does not happen to be among the many magical qualities of smartphones - at least, not yet. This is unfortunate, since smartphones seem to inspire a bravado (not unmixed with vanity) in situations where the smarter option ought to be utmost carefulness. And such daring often has dangerous, or even fatal, consequences. In September, last year, a British newspaper had calculated that more people had died of trying to take selfies in perilous situations than of shark attacks. India has not been spared this trend. A college-going teenager in Mumbai was hit by a wave and swept away into the sea from a rock on which she had been posing for a selfie. Two of her friends, together with a local person, jumped in to rescue her. The friends managed to swim ashore with help from the local, who drowned soon after. Around the same time - though on a lesser, but no less tragic, scale - a 20-year-old picnicker fell off the rampart of a fort in Jammu while trying to take a selfie. The Wikipedia page on selfie-related deaths and injuries lists more than 40 instances (most of them deaths) since 2014, many of which have taken place in India. Most of the casualties are young, and the settings include posing in front of an approaching train, or on top of a bridge or cliff, in a boat on a lake, or on the slippery banks of a canal. A Japanese tourist fell off the steps in front of the Taj Mahal while taking a selfie, and died. Elsewhere in the world, loaded guns, fierce animals, airborne cockpits and risky machinery have provided backdrops for terminal selfies.

The devil-may-care mindlessness that speeding vehicles and commodities of vanity inspire usually (but not always) in the young is peculiar to the relationship between human beings and their cherished machines. Technology ought to bring progress, but it could, in certain situations, be regressively yoked to a mysterious sort of death wish. This is true all over the world, but particularly in countries where safety regulations - the wearing of helmets and seat belts, speed limits, and cellphone-related prohibitions - are not enforced strictly in public spaces. Russia has issued safe-selfie signage and guidelines; India should be thinking along similar lines.