I like to have pictures of interesting and beautiful places I have been, but it seems unnecessary for me to appear in these pictures, and I have never quite understood why other people want that so much.

via Tikal | RMS
Frankly, I could not agree more. It is more like people want to tell you that I have been there. But in case of nutcases they will make sure that every photo that they take, of the monuments and the cityscapes that they went to, will have themselves as part of the photo. This is narcissism at its best. You want to tell the world that “I was there.” How many social-networking pages/posts are flooded with images of monuments with the poster / people as soon as they visit them? Better still live posting! In an earlier era of non-social networking, people used more cruder methods to tell you this. The solution was simple, just put your name on the monument, to tell all others you were there, or that you own the monument. Not that it is a bad thing, but at times it takes away all the beauty of the place under question to limits of what can be considered to be decent.  But this just seems to be just one more human tendencies, which I am not able to relate to, which would be because may be I am becoming de-humanized.

On another note, even kings and emperors could not give up this temptation. Apparently after conquering the Adilshahi kingdom of Bijapur, the last Great Mughal Aurangazeb, made an inscirption on the Malik-e-Maidan cannon (This cannon second largest, single cast canon). Though more artfully made, it is of the same kind.