New Delhi — What should have been a fun trip to a popular beauty spot with some friends ended in a deadly accident for Indian social media content creator Aanvi Kamdar on Tuesday, when she slipped and fell into a 300-foot gorge while shooting Instagram videos.
Kamdar, 27, was shooting Insta reels at the Kumbhe waterfall, about 80 miles south of Mumbai in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, with seven friends when she fell into the crevice, police said.
“She fell on the hard, slippery patch of rocks around 300 feet into the valley and couldn’t be spotted initially,” a rescuer was quoted as saying by The Economic Times. “She was sent up using a stretcher attached to rappelling ropes. Six rescuers climbed down the hill, while another 50 assisted atop the hillock.”
Instagram/Aanvi Kumdar
It took the team about six hours to rescue Kamdar from the deep gorge, due largely to steady rainfall and the difficult terrain hampering their efforts. One rescuer rescue told Indian local media outlet Lokmat that large stones kept falling around the team during the extraction.
She was taken to the Mangaon Taluka Government Hospital on Tuesday afternoon but succumbed to her injuries.
Kamdar was a chartered accountant who found traction on social media with her travel videos. Her Instagram page had more than 278,000 followers watching her adventures .
She described herself as a “detective for travel, luxury finds, cafés, itineraries, tips, and feels.”
Much of Kamdar’s content was focused on “monsoon tourism,” documenting trips made during the rainy season that runs between June and September in South Asia.
It was raining on the day of her visit to the waterfall, and police reminded tourists to be extra cautious during such trips given the conditions.
Dozens of people voiced shock and mourned Kamdar on social media, and some added notes of caution against people risking their lives for the sake of creating viral videos.