NEW DELHI: On any given month, Delhi-based cosmetic surgeon Dr Anup Dhir gets about 25 customers who want him to do one thing: make their selfies picture-perfect.Requests from his clientele, which varies across age groups, range from ‘skin peeling’ for skin colour enhancement to ‘fish lips’, a lip augmentation procedure which makes thin lips look shapelier.“The problem with selfies is that they are done with a flat lens, not with a high focal length lens, so facial features are not that pleasing. The profile of cameras is changing and people end up taking 7-8 photos every day, just for posting,” says Dr Dhir. “The pressure of posting on social media is definitely very high,” he adds.The obsession with selfies doesn’t end there. Indians are risking life and lip to capture that perfect selfie. In the past two years, a total of 127 deaths globally were caused due to reckless behaviour while clicking selfies. Of these, 76 occurred in India alone — the highest in the world, according to a recent research by Precog at Delhi’s Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology.The team working on the study examined more than 62,000 selfies posted worldwide on Twitter, and went through the most common reasons of deaths caused by selfies.The causes are myriad: falling from heights, trains, drowning or losing balance near a water body, weapons, vehicles, electricity and animals. While it may be tempting to attribute the high number of selfie-related deaths to India’s large population, that does not explain why highly populated countries such as China and Philippines have just four reported selfierelated deaths.The larger question though is: why are we so obsessed with what is, essentially, a photograph taken of oneself?“First you are taking normal selfies that get a lot of ‘likes’, then you feel you should do something ‘different’. When you take selfies in a dangerous position and put it on Facebook , what happens? You get a lot of ‘likes’, your self-esteem increases, and you feel important,” says Dr Arti Anand, clinical psychologist at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi.Clinical psychologist Dr Arti Anand characterises the urge to keep taking newer and better selfies as an “addiction” and “obsession”. The low self-esteem argument is an oft-repeated one, but young people see it differently.“I like selfies. You don’t have to smile, you can pose as you like and you always know the right angle. If people are self-obsessed, selfies are the best way to love yourself even more,” says 13-year-old Tia, who lives in Gurgaon and loves taking selfies and making short videos of herself using apps such as Dubsmash and musical.ly. All her friends, she says, are on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.Last year alone, 24 billion selfies were uploaded to Google Photos.That’s three selfies for every human being on the planet. On Instagram, a search for selfie throws up 28 crore public posts. The top trending app of 2016 in the Google Play Store — the Android app store — is BeautyPlus Me-Perfect Camera, which claims “edits are so subtle that no one will ever suspect you’ve used an app and designed exclusively for daily selfie takers”.In a paper titled ‘The Selfie Culture: Narcissism or Counter Hegemony? Journal of Communication and Media Studies’, Lakshmi AK, an English professor at Government Victoria College, Palakkad, Kerala, explained how the number of likes, comments and shares are the social currency for the youth.“The social media etiquette demands appreciation in the form of ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ of the statuses and photographs posted by those belonging to one’s circle. When the photographer and the photographed are the same, one is entitled to more ‘likes’,” she notes.The study by Precog hopes to “inspire and provide footprints for technologies which can stop users from clicking dangerous selfies, and thus preventing more of such casualties”.