It was a regular evening and at around 6:30PM my cellphone rang with a WhatsApp notification sound. I was working on a very important module for my project. But then I could not resist myself from checking the message as I thought it could be one of those hilarious husband wife jokes or one of AK's memes my friends post on our college batch-mates group.

I checked the message, it was a video. I have kept the settings ON for which the videos that I receive gets downloaded automatically. I made the mistake of playing the video.

First few seconds were vertical colored stripes like the one we used to see in Doordarshan as kids. After a few seconds, as the video progressed I couldn't stop myself from abusing the guy who had posted that video on the group. I closed the video player, went to gallery and deleted the video. Next step was to vent out my anger but then I thought, would that educate the person enough to refrain from doing something that he did just now? May be he just did it for some pleasure or may be he wanted to act as a hero in front of his friends. May be he also got this video as a Whatsapp message.

But that doesn't mean he was not adding a drop of poison in the bottle, which the victim would take after knowing that her most intimate moment with her partner has now reached the masses. What she shared as an act of love with her partner had now become a 'sharing material' for others and is being watched by many people.

I still politely explained the consequences of sharing such videos to everybody on that WhatsApp group. The person who had posted the video felt embarrassed and was sorry for his deeds and agreed that he wouldn't do this again and would educate others too about this. But after a few days again there was a similar video on the same group posted by someone else.

The best I thought I could do would be to exit the group and did exactly that. But these incidents have happened time and again, and they haunt me a lot. What if it were me or one of my loved ones? I wanted to do something so that people stopped sharing such videos. I finally came up with a solution. Next time I get a video like this one, I would report it to the legal authorities.

This is the most overlooked issue of current times, where technology is being used more for spreading negativity rather than positive things.

Such callous actions have costed people lives in the past and no it's not funny.

The best way we can stop this from happening is to stop sharing such videos ourselves and educating others to do so. This would break the sharing chain. I know this would take a long time but it's best to act now before it is too late.

Before it causes another suicide attempt and yet another death of an innocent human being who 'dared' to love someone and express it as well.

I pledge to do this. Do you?

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