A boy, a borrowed iPhone, and a culture that led to death

Ishayat Shahriar Apratim was thirteen years old. He was a seventh grader at Border Guard Public School in Cumilla, the only child of a Comilla University associate professor. On the afternoon of 18 September, he left home carrying his mother's iPhone, telling his family he was going out to take photographs with friends. He never came back. His body was found the next day in a wooded stretch of the Lalmai hills, blunt-force injuries to his head and face. The phone was gone.

According to police, the plan was not to hurt him. It was to take the phone. When he resisted, three young men, one nineteen, two of them fifteen and sixteen, beat him with a bamboo stick until he stopped moving. Then they took the phone anyway and went home.

I want to be careful here. This is a family's unimaginable loss, not a symbol for me to make an argument with. But the Cumilla police superintendent said something at his press conference that I cannot stop thinking about. Asked about the case, he told reporters that over 250 teen gang members have already been arrested in Cumilla, and that his officers are investigating whether Apratim's killers were connected to one. He urged parents to be more vigilant, to know where their children go, who they spend time with, and to think carefully before handing a child an expensive phone.

That last piece of advice is where I want to sit for a moment, because it points to something larger than one case.

I often get asked why I have not upgraded my phone in years. My honest answer is simple: I do not feel any need to upstage myself, and I have not seen a newer model offer me anything I actually want. That question, and the assumption behind it, points at something worth naming directly.

A 2025 study of digital literacy in rural Bangladesh found that 84 per cent of respondents own smartphones, yet only 2 per cent use a personal computer, and 60 per cent of their smartphone activity falls into what the researchers call "non-functional" use, meaning social media and entertainment rather than anything productive (Understanding the Nature and Impact of Digital Literacy on Rural Community Development in Bangladesh, 2025).

In my own observation, and this part I want to flag as mine, not something I can point to a study for, that pattern seems to hold even among iPhone owners specifically. Apple builds a genuinely useful ecosystem into every iPhone: News, Books, Wallet, Health, Podcasts, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, iMovie. Most iPhone owners I have encountered in Bangladesh have never opened half of these. The phone is a camera and a badge. The rest of what it can do goes largely untouched.

I also do not use Facebook anymore. Facebook in Bangladesh has largely become a showing-off platform, and often a faking one. People carefully filter what goes up: the promotion, the vacation, the new car, the plate at an expensive restaurant.

The struggles, the bad days, the ordinary difficulty of being a person, almost never make the cut. The effect is that everyone around you appears to be thriving while you know, privately, that you are not always thriving yourself. Nobody is entirely happy all the time. But scrolling past a feed of curated happiness invites comparison, and comparison is where the trouble starts. It quietly convinces a person that everyone else has more, deserves more, is worth more, and that they themselves are falling behind.

I do not think this is a small cultural quirk. I think it is the water a great many of us are swimming in now, and it was not always this water. I was a child in Bangladesh in the 1990s. Status existed then too, but it was not organised around a phone in your pocket broadcasting your net worth to a stranger on the street, or a curated feed inviting daily comparison. Something shifted in the years between that childhood and this one.

This is not unique to Bangladesh, but the region shows a real pattern worth naming honestly. On the World Values Survey's long-running cultural map, which places societies along axes running from traditional to secular-rational values and from survival to self-expression values, Bangladesh and Pakistan sit close together in the "survival values" quadrant, the corner associated with an emphasis on economic and physical security over individual self-expression.

India's own consumer data tells a related story at a different income level: in 2025, India's overall smartphone market grew by roughly one per cent, while its premium segment, phones priced from 600 to 800 US dollars, grew by 96.4 per cent in a single year, according to IDC's tracking of the market. Apple's volume share in India is projected to reach 10 per cent in 2026, up from just 4 per cent in 2022, according to Counterpoint Research.

People are not simply buying more phones. They are disproportionately buying the ones that say the most about them. I do not have equally sharp consumption data for Nepal or Sri Lanka, and I want to be honest about that gap rather than invent a number, but the broader regional pattern, of status increasingly expressed through visible consumption, is not something Bangladesh is experiencing alone.

Nordic countries operate on something close to the opposite social contract. There is an old cultural code called the Law of Jante, first written down by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in 1933, that boils down to a single instruction repeated ten different ways: do not think you are better than anyone else. It is not a law in the legal sense, but it shapes real behavior. Driving an expensive car or renovating a lavish kitchen in Oslo or Stockholm is more likely to draw quiet disapproval than admiration. Displaying wealth is read as a character flaw, not an achievement.

In social circles I have encountered in the United States as well, among people with stable, comfortable incomes, what phone or car someone owns simply never comes up in conversation. It is not a virtue people perform. It is just not a subject anyone treats as interesting.

I am not arguing Bangladesh should import Scandinavian social norms wholesale, and I know Bangladesh's history and constraints are its own. But I am arguing that a culture's answer to the question "what does a good life look like" shapes what a teenager thinks is worth having, worth taking, and in the worst cases, worth killing for.

There is a particular hypocrisy in how we talk about the West that I think is worth naming. We are quick, in everyday conversation, to call Western culture morally loose, materialistic, family-eroding, bad for children. And yet look at what we have actually imported. Not the modesty of the Law of Jante. Not the circles where nobody asks what phone you carry.

We imported the worst of it: the branding, the status display, the performance of a curated life for an audience of strangers, without importing the parts of that same culture that might have tempered it, the privacy norms, the discomfort with showing off, the professional cultures where your work speaks for you and your car does not.

We criticize the West for its excesses while quietly practicing a more anxious, less self-aware version of the same excess ourselves. That is not resisting Western influence. That is absorbing its weakest export and calling it tradition.

Two things are true about Apratim's death at once. It happened inside a specific, local crisis, Cumilla's documented teen gang problem, the same city where police have made 250-plus related arrests. And it happened inside a broader culture where a smartphone is not just a communication device but a publicly legible score of status, one that a struggling teenager with no other route to that status might see as worth an enormous risk to obtain.

Neither explanation cancels the other out. A functioning community response to teen gangs, more youth programs, more supervised spaces, faster intervention when a teenager starts drifting toward one, addresses the first. But it does not touch the second: why a phone, specifically, has become valuable enough in the social currency of a Bangladeshi teenager's world to be worth this.

Bangladesh is not the only country reckoning with what unsupervised, status-driven online and offline youth culture is doing to teenagers. Australia became the first country in the world to legislate a hard minimum age for social media, barring anyone under 16 from holding an account on platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, with the law taking effect on December 10, 2025. Within days, platforms had removed access for 4.7 million under-16 accounts.

The law has not gone smoothly: a British Medical Journal study this year found that 85 per cent of 12 to 15 year olds who should have lost access were still finding ways onto these platforms, and in June 2026 the government doubled the maximum penalty for platforms that fail to enforce it, from 49.5 million Australian dollars to 99 million. Denmark has reached cross-party agreement on a similar restriction for under-15s, expected to become law by mid-2026. Malaysia is moving on its own under-16 rule.

I am not convinced a hard legal ban is the right tool for Bangladesh, and Australia's own enforcement struggles are a caution against assuming a law alone solves this. But the fact that Australia, Denmark, and Malaysia all independently concluded that unsupervised access to status-driven social platforms is doing measurable harm to teenagers is worth taking seriously, even if Bangladesh's answer looks different from theirs.

First, take the Cumilla police superintendent's advice seriously as a starting point, not dismiss it as an obvious platitude. Knowing where your child is, who they spend time with, and what they are carrying is a real, concrete, achievable thing most parents can act on this week, unlike waiting for a national policy.

Second, schools and community organisations need programs that give teenagers, especially boys drifting toward gang involvement, an alternative source of status and belonging that does not run through what they own or who they can rob. The 250 gang arrests in Cumilla did not happen because 250 teenagers woke up one day and decided to be violent. They happened because something in their environment made a gang feel like the available path to respect.

Third, Bangladesh should have its own honest, public conversation about what a phone, a restaurant, or a brand has come to mean here, before assuming the answer is more of them. That conversation will not stop the next robbery on its own. But a culture that quietly stopped treating visible wealth as the measure of a person would take away the reason a phone is worth what it has become worth.

Apratim went out to take photographs with friends on an ordinary Friday afternoon. He did not choose to make himself a symbol of anything. The rest of us are the ones deciding, every day, in what we praise and what we photograph and what we teach our children to want, whether that ordinary Friday afternoon becomes more or less survivable for the next thirteen-year-old.

* Farjana Yesmin is an independent researcher & machine learning scientist specialising in Trustworthy AI, Federated Learning, and Healthcare Applications