Families protest affair: Kerala youth hangs himself, webcasts death to his Delhi girlfriend

In a tragic dimension to love in the time of the internet, a young college student here killed himself...

In a tragic dimension to love in the time of the internet, a young college student here killed himself, attempting to podcast live his suicide to his girlfriend, over a couple of thousand kilometres away in New Delhi. While the incident happened on Thursday night, the body was only found last evening.

Twenty-year-old V S Karthik, a BDS student at the Pariyaram Medical College here, was found hanging from the ceiling fan in his hostel room. His computer’s web camera was still on and tight-focused on his hanging body, the trail of a long chat that he had with his girlfriend ending about dying, still bright on his computer screen.

Karthik, says the local police, was in love with his cousin, also a BDS student in New Delhi. An introvert, he had few friends in the medical college. But a couple of his friends told the police that he had often talked to them about his girlfriend. He used to spend a lot of time shutting himself up in his hostel room, chatting to her on the Net for hours.

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Their affair ran into trouble with relatives, who apparently put pressure on them to call it off. Pariyaram Circle Inspector of police, K Kunhiraman, says the chat trail on Karthik’s computer showed he had been chatting with her for a long time on Thursday evening, until he keyed in his last message at 7:40 pm.

The chat went from pouring out each other’s anguish over having to part, to the last portions where the boy insisted that he would die and she should live on. “The girl kept dissuading him and insisting it would be better if she died instead — she kept arguing that a lot more people would be saddened by his death, than hers,” said Kunhiraman, who copied the transcript of the chat.

Nobody in Karthik’s hostel suspected anything when his door remained shut yesterday, since he often remained indoors. But in the evening, someone opened a window that had not been latched and found him hanging.

It’s still unclear if his girlfriend watched his death over the webcam. “He apparently hanged himself soon after 7:40 pm. His mobile phone showed dozens of missed calls from his girlfriend. She called on his phone over a dozen times while we took down the body. We didn’t pick up the call, fearing the worst if we told her about his death,” said Kunhiraman.