A 24-year-old student livestreamed a sunset and spoke about how to commit suicide before tragically jumping to his own death from the 19th floor of a hotel in Mumbai.
Arjun Bharadwaj had streamed the 1-minute, 44-second tutorial “How to Suicide” on Facebook from Bandra’s Taj Lands End Hotel. Reports suggest that he had checked in at 3 am on Monday and his body was found soaked in blood on the 11th floor terrace at 6.30 that evening.
In the video, now taken down by Facebook, Bharadwaj adorned a bathrobe while smoking a cigarette and held a bottle of wine, saying, “Today's tutorial is about how to suicide (sic), like about if you want to jump off from Lands End.”
He follows it by saying that detailed notes should be left behind for loved ones and pans the camera to seven notes lying on a table. He then says the next step is to enjoy the sunset while “enjoying bacon pasta”.
Bharadwaj loses track of his ‘steps’, and then at the end says, “Ok, I don’t think I can record this while doing it. But f*** it, okay cool... See you guys on the other side.”
Bandra police claims that Bharadwaj used a chair to smash the window of the room to jump. The noise alerted the security, who took an hour to reach the terrace on the 11th floor as there was no way to access it.
We had to crawl our way onto the terrace using the ventilation shaft since there didn’t seem to be any way one could get there.Pandit Thackeray, Senior Police Investigator to Mumbai Mirror
Bharadwaj was later rushed to Bhabha hospital where he was declared dead on arrival.
Police said that Bharadwaj’s father had come to Mumbai from Bangalore after speaking to him a week ago.
His father said that he had sounded disturbed and he had come down to Mumbai out of concern. He had been staying with a relative in Chembur for the last three days.
According to police, Bharadwaj appeared to be a drug addict and someone interested in macabre as his browsing history had a lot of searches pertaining to death.
There were lots of sites that he visited that had to do with dying and “celebrating death”...he had evidently come prepared. The notes were addressed to several people, including family members, but were mostly about how death was a celebration.A police official
About four days ago, he had vacated his apartment and posted its vacancy on Facebook. "Guys , the deposit has been reduced to 5k , please share and make something happen. (There) is a room up for grabs in Andheri West , in a fully functional 4bhk. No attached bathroom and not furnished, but the house has every amenity needed to live peacefully. No restrictions whatsoever and peaceful housemates...", his post read.
Police also issued an advisory to the media to not run the video on their portals due to the sensitive and impressionable content, which could impact the youth negatively.
Join The Quint on WhatsApp. Type “JOIN” and send to 9910181818
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)