Kiki challenge: Everything that's wrong with the world

On Tuesday, Kochi resident Jawahar Subhash Chandra was in for a shock. He was inundated with calls, from relatives and friends concerned about his well-being; unbeknownst to himself, Chandra had become a casualty of the viral Kiki challenge that has all but broken the internet.

For the uninitiated, the challenge is a reaction to musician Drake's global chartbuster In My Feelings. The trending #InMyFeelingsChallenge—kicked off by comedian Shiggy who danced to the song on a busy road—featured social media users hopping out of a moving car, dancing alongside the car to Drake's song, before jumping back into the vehicle. It was Shiggy's line at the beginning of the video, 'Keke, do you love me?', that morphed into the now-infamous online sensation.

Chandra had become an unwilling martyr after the Jaipur police posted on Twitter a stock photo of Chandra from Shutterstock; he was a symbolic victim of the challenge, an urban legend meant to deter careless teens who thought it would be fun to prance along a busy street keeping time with a moving car. Who cared if truth was the real roadkill.

In a nutshell, it was everything wrong with the world, encapsulated in neat one-minute videos for the whole world to see—cyber time capsules for future sociologists and anthropologists to study where exactly the human race lost its way. A hashtag search takes us to the belly of the beast: cringeworthy videos of challenge fails, of users sustaining serious injuries after unsuccessfully trying to alight a moving vehicle or tripping on potholes, and of livestock, goats and bulls becoming unsuspecting participants. Then, of course, there was the staple—fake videos of people getting hit by vehicles, doctored, dramaticised and with just enough spice to end up as a WhatsApp forward on my mother's phone. Then came reports that a woman was robbed while she was busy completing the challenge, and voila, the ridiculous had just become the absurd.

Then, the 'adults' reacted, with as deep an insight and knowledge of technology as of a monkey humping a video camera. Abu Dhabi arrested three social media 'influencers' for public endangerment; Egypt made the challenge a crime punishable by law; Spanish police released warnings against the dangers of the challenge. Back here, in India, there were two main nominees for the 'Epic fails: Uncles trying to act cool'. Jaipur police, not content with just posting a random stock photo, tried its hand at edgy humour that bombed faster than a Sajid Khan flick. Mumbai police decided to go for its tried and tested bad pun, with a video that could have been edited by my 90-year-old grandfather the cherry on top.

And, this is just the tip of the Mount Everest of bad ideas that the YOLO-generation have embarked upon in the past few years. We have been subjected to viral videos of youngsters choking themselves to experience a feeling of near-death-experience high, social media users snorting condoms through their nose to pull it out through their mouths again, and pouring flammable liquid on their bodies and setting themselves on fire. Millennial philosophers have even given this trend a name—Darwinism challenge, where they hypothesise that a stunt activist clambering up a skyscraper for a selfie, or a woman jumping into a pool of sharks for the perfect Instagram moment, are all part of an intelligent design. Only the fittest shall survive in this overpopulated world, and these instafamers were nature's way of weeding out the rest, a la Darwin.

For any alien or terrorist out there, bent on destroying the human race, I have three words: Free fall challenge. Better still, you could even associate with GoPro for a high quality live stream; name it something catchy like 'Extinction in Real Time' and sell its rights to Netflix. Thank me later.