On Monday night, 30-year-old Indian DJ Arun Valmiki was shot dead at a birthday party by one of its younger attendees for not playing a song request on demand. The youth, Ashu (alias Ishu), opened fire at Valmiki during the birthday party of a jeweler’s granddaughter at Sidhauli village in the Meerganj area of Uttar Predesh after he failed to play the young patron’s request. Upon experiencing fatal gun wounds, Valmiki was taken to the community health center, where he was soon after declared dead. After the incident, police raided Ishu’s house, but he had already fled by then. Although it’s unclear as to which song Ishu requested at the party, it’s hard to believe that the absence of hearing it played on the spot was worth the loss of the DJ’s life, and at the expense of disrupting and traumatizing a young girl’s birthday celebration nonetheless.
This isn’t the first incident of this breed that has been reported, as a DJ was shot outside of a nightclub in the Los Angeles area in 1993, another upon returning home from the Club Raven in Baltimore in 1997, as well as another killed in Philadelphia in 2012. With heightened sensitivity towards the prudence of gun availability, innocent travesties such as these really illustrate the extreme unfairness experienced by the victims who are unjustly placed at the receiving end of gun fire. Who knew that a career in DJing and party entertainment could turn into such a life threatening profession. Stay safe, music lovers.
Via Hindustan Times