By Nilanjana Bhowmick

I do not think anything in recent years has shaken me more than seeing images related to actor Rahul Arunoday Banerjee’s death circulating across social media these last few days. Within hours of his death, this unthinkable tragedy was turned into a “trending topic”. Cameras chased his family’s grief. They pointed the lens directly at his wife Priyanka, also an actor, scrutinising her grief, turning it into content on everyone’s phone to be watched, dissected, and criticised.

The trolls came soon after: Why is she not crying? How can she be so composed? Did she just smile? What is she wearing? In this country, women are watched closely even in ordinary life; in public grief, they are watched even more cruelly. And that is exactly why the cameras have been following her, because a great deal of this content is aimed to provoke trolls who actually power the influencer economy — the more trolls, the more attention, the more views, likes, and comments.

What is most dispiriting is how quickly social media erupts into the same script every time a tragedy like this strikes: Morphed videos and pictures, people faking last moments for views and likes, the constant hounding of family members, private pain turned public and profitable before those closest to the dead have even had time to process the loss. We have seen this before, too, a few months ago, when singer Zubeen Garg died in a similar tragic accident, and years earlier, after Sushant Singh Rajput’s death by suicide.

The fixation with celebrities in India has always been all-consuming, but it once had some boundaries. What is disturbing now is how completely those boundaries have collapsed. And it is no longer only the famous who are denied dignity and privacy in death. Everyone, it seems, is fair game now because the algorithm rewards the most voyeuristic, vulturous material by pushing it everywhere. Open the analytics on any social media app, and it shows you what performs well, your content and everyone else’s, then nudges you to make more of the same.

And once someone is drawn into that economy, it becomes difficult to leave it behind: They keep making the kind of content that earns.

Recently, a popular daily vlogger documented her mother-in-law’s last journey in detail, even using an image of her dead body as the thumbnail for one of her videos. She said she wanted to document it for her children. I am left wondering: Why do we need to document everything? What happened to keeping some things in memory? Who would want to keep returning to the visuals of a loved one’s funeral?

But that instinct, to keep some things private, unrecorded, held in memory, now feels incongruous with the world social media has built.

Every time I open Facebook, my feed is full of some new version of the same violation. What disturbs me most is not only that people record and post these things. It is that so many others watch, share, comment, and help keep them alive. Often, even those who do not want to see them are pulled in because such images take over the feed, whether you like it or not.

The commercialisation of tragedy is not new, though. Indian television media has been doing that for decades now. That is where this became normalised: Television eroded whatever shared understanding remained that death demanded some dignity — because the person is no longer here to consent, object or defend themselves — all in the hunt for TRP. Social media has finished the job in its hunt for virality.

Dear all, we have now moved from commercialisation to monetisation. And anyone with a phone can monetise tragedy — yours, theirs, or someone else’s.

Bhowmick is the author of Lies Our Mothers Told Us and How Not To Be A Superwoman