Is killer game Blue Whale Challenge skimming the cyberspace of Kerala teens and youthsIJ The answer could be yes if there is any truth in the reports coming out almost on a daily basis about suspected cases of game-induced suicides by youths and teens but the Kerala Police say they are yet to get any proof of such a lethal invasion into the State’s cyberspace.
The latest case of suicide due to suspected Blue Whale influence has come from Piriyari, Palakkad where a BCom student hanged himself to death about five months ago for no understandable reason than probably the addiction to the game which through fifty horrible tasks is said to lead the player into fulfilling the ultimate task of taking own life.
The police booked a youth in Idukki on Friday under relevant sections of the IT Act over the allegation of posting details of the game on his Facebook page and trying to propagate it. A day before that a student of a private college in Paravur near Kochi claimed that her friends and classmates had been playing Blue Whale Challenge.
Suspicions about the deadly presence of the killer game in Kerala’s cyberspace were first aired by Anu, a mother from Thiruvananthapuram, whose son Manoj Chandran (17) had committed suicide by hanging on July 26 after going through a series of irrational and horrific acts like inflicting injuries to himself and wandering through places with horror-inducing settings.
A mother from Thalassery, Kannur came to think about the possible links between the killer game and the suicide of her only son MK Sawant on May 19 only after watching Anu on the TV describing Manoj’s behavior before committing suicide. Sawant also had gone through painful phases of self-persecution and loneliness like Manoj had done, she said.
“He had jumped from the top of the house two or three times and once he suffered a fracture in his hip,” says Asmabi, mother of Aashiq (20), a BCom student of Government Victoria College, Palakkad who committed suicide on March 30, the day his course had ended. He had ended his life after a brief duration of committing weird acts like Manoj and Sawant had done.
“There was a photograph in which he was seen standing on the beach with bleeding arm. He used to go to the precipice of dangerously deep stone quarries and neighbours once told me about seeing him standing in a totally deserted Khabarstan nearby,” Asmabi, a poor widow who is still unable to overcome the shock of her only son’s tragic death, said.
Friends said Aashiq, who had earned A-Plus grades in all subjects in Plus II examinations, was a very bright student but had begun losing interest in studies toward his last days. For Asmabi, who is confined to her 300-square feet house, a donation from local people, life has virtually reached a dead end with her only son in whom she had invested all her hopes gone forever.
As anxiety keeps spreading among the parents of mobile-addicted teens, the police are saying that they are yet to get solid evidences establishing an invasion by the game into the State’s cyberspace. They have already termed the suicides of Sawant and Aashiq as cases of failure in love affairs but relatives are not convinced.
“We can’t still say that these suicides have been caused by the (Blue Whale Challenge) game,” says State Director General of Police loknath Behera. “Investigations are on. There shouldn’t be efforts to create panic though care and alertness are necessary. It seems that people haven’t yet understood what Blue Whale Challenge is,” he said.
A top-ranking official with the Cyber wing of the Kerala Police said there was no need of panic about Blue Whale as yet. “But it is a fact that there are several people, especially teens and youths, in Kerala who can be termed as Internet-addicts. Also, there are enough reasons to believe that they can develop suicide tendency sooner or later,” he said.
However, IT experts say Blue Whale or similar killer games are a reality. “I’d say it is a trap sans wires. Once you are caught in it, there is no escape. It is not a game or application in the usual IT sense. These are plans and they leave no trails. You can stop it somewhere but it will sneak out through some other hole,” says Jayakumar, an IT professional from Kochi.
According to psychologists, Blue Whale and its likes are not games but digital drugs. “These digital drugs act on human brain and human life exactly like cocaine and other narcotic substances. Even their physiological effects on the nervous system are similar. Therefore, a person getting hooked to it can act like a drug addict,” said a Kozhikode-based psychologist.