Taking photographs reduces life ?

In many interior parts of India there is a belief that taking a photograph of oneself reduces his lifespan. I was wondering why this belief may have come into existance, coming to think of it i started my photography very early in my life. In the mid 90s i bought my first SLR, since then there has been no looking back.

Early on in 2000 - 2001 i started feeling that photographs are taking away my experience of the event, more time is being spent on making the photograph than actually taking in the experience. This made me leave photography temporarily and now i am back in the full form pulling all resources together for making my photographs work.

In the olden days i believe there were large format cameras, which needed to be placed on a tripod, a black cloth thrown over it and the group shot needed to be taken. This process is time consuming and costly. There are also other points that i have in my mind

• In the absense of proper infrastructure for transport it might have been difficult to get the photographer from far away
• The time actually spent on taking a photograph might have been percived to be a waste of time

People would have started saying that taking a photograph means lot of time in my life, more the photographs more time wasted so on and so forth.... This has led to the belief that taking a photograph reduces one's life span. It is not actually the process of taking the photograph but the time consumed that they are reffering here.