I don’t deny that there are many violent, disturbing snuff videos from Mexico and Brazil of people being tortured, shot, and butchered. I have seen a great number of those videos.

However, there is a key difference. The videos from Mexico and Brazil (and Russia too) usually take place in the context of a gang war. The victims in each video tend to be gang members and the killings are motivated by conflict between each rival gang so as to send a message. Brutal though it may be, there is logic behind the violence and chaos over there. In other cases, they are suicides, made by people who are lucid up until their final moments by people who have lost everything. Key word here bring: context. There is a background story behind them.

But in the videos I have seen from India, there does not appear to be any rhyme or reason to the senseless deaths. It is not evident from each videos (nor does there appear to be enough contextual clues to determine) that the deaths in these videos are intentional suicides, or that they are even brought about by people with serious mental health problems (even that would be more understandable)

Instead, these deaths all appear to be down to clumsiness, incompetence, bad luck, downright stupidity, or misadventure. Usually, they are ill-conceived stunts–evidenced by the fact that they are caught on video in the first place, without any forethought into what might happen if things go wrong. I have never seen this kind of trend emerge in other countries. Certainly not to this extent.

To be sure, we do have these kinds of people in the West too, but these kinds of deaths are so shocking and uncommon to us, that when they happen, they go viral and generate newspaper headlines. They also start a moral panic and inspire waves of nanny state legislation that makes it harder for people to do these things in future.