How Facebook break-up drove her to suicide

On September 19, 2011, Malini Murmur, a student of IIM-Bangalore committed suicide following a status update on her boyfriend's Facebook wall. The author decodes the girl's likes and dislikes, her passions and psyche through her profile.

A student of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM B), twenty-three year old Malini Murmu committed suicide in her hostel room on Monday, September 19.

Security guards had found her hanging from the ceiling fan of her first floor room after concerned classmates came to check on her.

The official medical report says that the death was caused due to asphyxiation as a result of hanging. The words she wrote with a marker pen on a whiteboard found in the room and a printout of her boyfriend's Facebook status message has led the police to suspect her boyfriend, Abhishek Dhan, to have abetted this act.

According to the police, it was allegedly Abhishek's harsh words and abusive language that pushed her to take this extreme step.

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"We are booking him for abetting suicide under section 306 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) after her father filed a case against Abhishek Dhan," said inspector Mohan Kumar of the MICO Layout Police station in Bengaluru.

The police is still trying to locate Dhan's residential address. A team will be sent to Delhi, but there still is no lead on his whereabouts. Facebook was their only source of information but he has deleted his account now. The police also found about 10-12 abusive words disrespectful to womenkind scribbled on her white board. Under that she wrote, "Worst person ever. I hate you".

Malini had further added on the board, "Revenge is best served when it is cold." Biswanath Murmu, her father, who is a senior manager at HPCL told that he was convinced that this was tantamount to murder.

"It is definitely a cold-blooded murder," said Murmu. "He used very vulgar and unparliamentary language and my daughter was very sensitive to this type of language."

The status message posted on Abhishek Dhan's Facebook wall on Monday, September 19, read, "Feeling super cool today. Dumped my new ex-girlfriend. Happy independence day."

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Facebook's connection with being dumped and relationships goes back to its days of inception.

In the Hollywood movie The Social Network which is loosely based on Facebook's creation, director David Fincher shows how Mark Zuckerberg was dumped by the girl he was dating and in a coding and blogging rage he hit on the idea of creating a social networking platform like Facebook.

Zuckerberg later also added the 'relationship status' attribute to a user's profile when a friend asked him whether he knew a certain girl in class was single or not. That was the first thing on the minds of college students, he figured. Who was available, who was dating whom? While this was always a part of college life, social networking puts this out on the public domain. The humiliation is manifold.

I did not know Malini Murmu, but when I went on her Facebook page's info section, I got to know her better. She was like any other young person active on Facebook, with 726 friends on her list. Among the list of things she 'liked', the PaGaLGuY.com Facebook Page was one of them.

But apart from that, Malini and I could have had a long chat on any of the things she listed there. I tried to sketch a portrait of her through her Facebook page and her Twitter account.

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Malini was 23 years old and hailed from Jamshedpur. She had worked with Infosys after completing her engineering degree from the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), Bhubaneshwar. Among the languages she spoke, was her mother tongue, the tribal language of Santal.

Her interests included dance, films and music. Her Twitter page has a picture of her fiddling with a guitar. You could make out that she was a romantic at heart -- among the books listed was Stephenie Meyer's The Twilight Series. She tweets on April 7, "feel like Bella".

Her music taste included Indian singers Mohit Chauhan and Lucky Ali as well as Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift and John Mayer.

On another tweet, she says to Lucky Ali, "@Lucky Ali Wish like hell to see you perform, your songs make me feel like what I am." She specifically liked the song "Afterglow" by INXS. I know the song well, a haunting melody, it was once my caller tune for a very long time.

She also listened to teenage sensation Miley Cyrus; a tweet says, "anyways... listening to when you look at me by Miley Cyrus... makes me fall in love all over again."

If it was films we would have spoken about, then the conversation would have been long. She was a fan of the film 'My Sassy Girl' -- a Korean film about a strong and sassy girl and how she falls for a guy who always ends up being her punching bag. 'Udaan' -- the coming-of-age film about a young boy from Jamshedpur must have also been close to her heart.

'Inception', 'Die Hard' and 'Step Up 2′ find a place in her list of films she liked. That she liked to dance, is visible in her choice of television series as well. 'So you think you can dance?' is one of the shows on TV that Malini has listed.

Another favourite show displayed on her FB info page is 'How I Met Your Mother'.

'I still remember the time in college, when a friend and I stayed awake through the night at our hostel and watched all the seasons of this show. Our assignments were due soon, but what did we care? Barney, Lily, Marshall, Ted and Robin had kept us company all night. If only someone had kept Malini company as well, who knows, maybe we could have had a real conversation sometime.'

After performing his elder daughter's last rites at the burning ghat today, Mr Murmu told me, "She was a brilliant student and had qualified for IIM Lucknow, Indore as well as SIBM Pune and several other management institutes. But she chose IIM Bangalore as it was the best. She was also very social."

Sounds like we would have got along just fine.