REELS, RAGE AND REALITY When the Madurai Bench Spoke to a Generation Lost in the Scroll NARASIMHAN VIJAYARAGHAVAN JUN 20, 2026
[20/06, 11:30] sekarreporter1: ”
Narasimhan’s Substack
Read distraction-free on Substack
REELS, RAGE AND REALITY
When the Madurai Bench Spoke to a Generation Lost in the Scroll
NARASIMHAN VIJAYARAGHAVAN
JUN 20, 2026
Preamble: The Courtroom Meets the Campus
On 15 June 2026, a Division Bench of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court — comprising the Honourable Mr. Justice N. Anand Venkatesh and the Honourable Mr. Justice K.K. Ramakrishnan — pronounced judgment in Udayakumar v. The State through the Inspector of Police, Karur Town Police Station (Crl. A. (MD) No. 301 of 2023, 2026:MHC:2128). Dismissing the criminal appeal, the Bench confirmed the life imprisonment awarded under Section 302 IPC to an accused who, enraged by a severed relationship, had barged into an Engineering college classroom in broad daylight and bludgeoned a third-year student to death with a wooden log. What made the judgment reverberate beyond the courtroom was its searing observation on the students who witnessed the murder yet turned hostile: that social media outrage translates into nothing if it does not translate into action — that the young had become, in the Court’s own words, mere “paper tigers in real life.”
The Anxious Generation: What Prof. Haidt Warned Us
Professor Jonathan Haidt’s landmark work The Anxious Generation (2024) marshals vast empirical data to argue that the smartphone-and-social-media revolution that descended upon adolescents after 2012 triggered a catastrophic collapse in mental health globally. Four foundational harms, he identifies: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction to algorithmic dopamine loops. Platforms engineered for engagement optimise for outrage. The brain’s reward circuits — still maturing in the adolescent — are hijacked. The result is a generation high on digital stimulation and low on the impulse-control, empathy, and civic courage that real life demands. Haidt’s prescription — delay smartphones until 14, social media until 16 — was prescient. Australia acted first. On 15 June 2026, the United Kingdom followed, enacting a statutory minimum age of 16 for social media access.
The Social Dilemma: Tristan Harris and the Algorithm We Never Chose
Tristan Harris — co-founder of the Centre for Humane Technology and a former design ethicist at Google — gave us The Social Dilemma (Netflix, 2020), a documentary viewed in over 150 countries and translated into scores of languages. Harris’s central insight: the product is not the platform — the product is the human being, whose attention is sold to the highest advertiser. The algorithm is indifferent to truth, virtue or dignity; it amplifies whatever provokes the longest engagement. Rage, fear, envy and humiliation are its preferred currencies. Young minds raised on this diet confuse viral performance with genuine moral agency. They sign petitions, post outrage, share reels — and then, when summoned to the witness box of life, they go silent.
Reels Are Not Innocent: Where the Screen Enters Real Life
The Karur tragedy is a parable of our times. A boy, debarred from examinations, still had unfettered access to the campus of entitlement that social media constructs — where rejection is intolerable and masculine grievance is relentlessly amplified. A classroom of engineering students, many of whom recorded their Section 164 statements truthfully, crumbled as witnesses.
The anguish of the Bench on this score is direct, unsparing, and must be read in the judges’ own words. In paragraph 39 of the judgment, the Court declared:
“In the first place, no attempt was made by any student to prevent the accused person from carrying out the attack. Even after the incident, no attempt was made by the students to overpower the accused person. Even if the students were not forthcoming to act in this manner, the minimum they should have done is to have spoken before the Court. All their statements were recorded under Section 164 Cr.P.C. and depose to the contrary in the dock. The student community must understand t
[20/06, 11:31] sekarreporter1: Narasimhan’s Substack
Narasimhan’s Substack
Read distraction-free on Substack
REELS, RAGE AND REALITY
When the Madurai Bench Spoke to a Generation Lost in the Scroll
Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
Jun 20, 2026
Preamble: The Courtroom Meets the Campus
On 15 June 2026, a Division Bench of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court — comprising the Honourable Mr. Justice N. Anand Venkatesh and the Honourable Mr. Justice K.K. Ramakrishnan — pronounced judgment in Udayakumar v. The State through the Inspector of Police, Karur Town Police Station (Crl. A. (MD) No. 301 of 2023, 2026:MHC:2128). Dismissing the criminal appeal, the Bench confirmed the life imprisonment awarded under Section 302 IPC to an accused who, enraged by a severed relationship, had barged into an Engineering college classroom in broad daylight and bludgeoned a third-year student to death with a wooden log. What made the judgment reverberate beyond the courtroom was its searing observation on the students who witnessed the murder yet turned hostile: that social media outrage translates into nothing if it does not translate into action — that the young had become, in the Court’s own words, mere “paper tigers in real life.”
The Anxious Generation: What Prof. Haidt Warned Us
Professor Jonathan Haidt’s landmark work The Anxious Generation (2024) marshals vast empirical data to argue that the smartphone-and-social-media revolution that descended upon adolescents after 2012 triggered a catastrophic collapse in mental health globally. Four foundational harms, he identifies: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction to algorithmic dopamine loops. Platforms engineered for engagement optimise for outrage. The brain’s reward circuits — still maturing in the adolescent — are hijacked. The result is a generation high on digital stimulation and low on the impulse-control, empathy, and civic courage that real life demands. Haidt’s prescription — delay smartphones until 14, social media until 16 — was prescient. Australia acted first. On 15 June 2026, the United Kingdom followed, enacting a statutory minimum age of 16 for social media access.
The Social Dilemma: Tristan Harris and the Algorithm We Never Chose
Tristan Harris — co-founder of the Centre for Humane Technology and a former design ethicist at Google — gave us The Social Dilemma (Netflix, 2020), a documentary viewed in over 150 countries and translated into scores of languages. Harris’s central insight: the product is not the platform — the product is the human being, whose attention is sold to the highest advertiser. The algorithm is indifferent to truth, virtue or dignity; it amplifies whatever provokes the longest engagement. Rage, fear, envy and humiliation are its preferred currencies. Young minds raised on this diet confuse viral performance with genuine moral agency. They sign petitions, post outrage, share reels — and then, when summoned to the witness box of life, they go silent.
Reels Are Not Innocent: Where the Screen Enters Real Life
The Karur tragedy is a parable of our times. A boy, debarred from examinations, still had unfettered access to the campus of entitlement that social media constructs — where rejection is intolerable and masculine grievance is relentlessly amplified. A classroom of engineering students, many of whom recorded their Section 164 statements truthfully, crumbled as witnesses.
The anguish of the Bench on this score is direct, unsparing, and must be read in the judges’ own words. In paragraph 39 of the judgment, the Court declared:
“In the first place, no attempt was made by any student to prevent the accused person from carrying out the attack. Even after the incident, no attempt was made by the students to overpower the accused person. Even if the students were not forthcoming to act in this manner, the minimum they should have done is to have spoken before the Court. All their statements were recorded under Section 164 Cr.P.C. and depose to the contrary in the dock. The student community must understand that it is only a matter of time that a similar incident may happen to any student in a college in such a gruesome fashion. There is no use in merely expressing dissent and expressing views in social media and it has to translate itself into action or else the students will only become paper tigers in real life.”
The Court continued, with unconcealed sorrow, in paragraph 40:
“This Court has to hold that the students had let down the deceased by not supporting the case of the prosecution and thus they failed in their duty to uphold truth. This is the type of attitude that was exhibited by the so called educated students, who were doing Engineering Course. The education did not really build up a character to the students and rather each of the student, who turned hostile exhibited pusillanimity.”
It is not merely legal failure — it is civilisational failure. The reel of outrage plays endlessly; the courage to act, to speak, to testify is scrolled past. “Reels” are no longer innocent diversions. They are architecturally designed to manufacture a passive audience, not active citizens.
India at the Crossroads: Do We Even Care?
India is the world’s largest consumer of short-form video content and among the youngest. Yet regulatory response has been glacial. No minimum age statute. No enforceable digital literacy mandate. No serious parliamentary debate on the Haidt framework or the Harris warning. Where Australia and the UK now legislate, India merely deliberates. GenZ is not irredeemably lost — the platforms carry genuine positivity: information access, creative expression, community for the marginalised. But the architecture of exploitation must be confronted, not celebrated. The question is not whether the positives outweigh the negatives in the abstract. The question is whether the State has the will to impose guardrails before another classroom becomes a crime scene because a wounded ego found its rage algorithmically amplified.
Final Summation: The Lament of the Law Lords
No one — not Haidt, not Harris, not the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton himself, who warned that we may have created something we can no longer control — knows with certainty where we are headed. The lament of Justices N. Anand Venkatesh and K.K. Ramakrishnan in the Karur judgment is not merely juridical commentary. It is a rude, timely and necessary reminder that we stand at a crossroads with no safe path clearly marked. We the People — parents, educators, legislators, judges — must choose between designing a digital environment that serves human flourishing, or presiding over its slow, scrollable undoing. The reels roll on. The question is whether real life will fight back.
Full text of judgment: Udayakumar v. State — Crl. A. (MD) No. 301 of 2023, 2026:MHC:2128 (Madurai Bench, 15.06.2026)
— Vijayaraghavan Narasimhan
(Author is practicing advocate in the Madras High Court)
Subscribe to Narasimhan’s Substack
By Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan · Launched a year ago
My personal Substack
Type your email…
Subscribe
By subscribing, you agree Substack’s Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy.
Discussion about this post
Write a comment…
The Gilded Shackle: A Decree of Fated Silence
As the celestial curtains rose upon the hallowed dawn of the Music Academy’s winter season, a thunderous decree echoed from the marble halls of the…
Dec 20, 2025 • Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
5
When a Child Wept and Music Stood Still: A December Twilight at Narada Gana Sabha
On the twenty-first evening of December 2025, the venerable halls of Narada Gana Sabha were not merely filled with sound; they were suffused with…
Dec 21, 2025 • Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
1
1
The Boy Who Arrived Already Complete
A reverie on Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, cricketing phenomenon
Apr 12 • Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
2
Ready for more?
Type your email…
Subscribe
© 2026 Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your Substack
Get the app
Substack is the home for great culture
