Rumours have a life of their own. It’s amazing how they have the tendency to be passed on so rapidly and linger on immortally. Every school and college has its own set of fables dutifully handed down by seniors and passed on year after year, nobody having witnessed them first-hand. Then, there are some snippets almost everyone in the right state of mind knows to be false but that are, nevertheless, passed on further to catch that prized look of amazement on the listeners’ face. While these comprise mostly innocuous tales, much needed to add a little spice to the otherwise bland academic life, today we have urban myths widely circulating through specious e-mail forwards.
Recently, I came across this interesting site ( http://www.snopes.com/ ) that attempts to find the origins of the most widespread urban legends and verify whether there is any truth in them. The section on College is especially amusing, considering how schools and colleges are a breeding ground for the most unbelievable legends-some true, some not. There are other equally absorbing pieces, like the one about a man battling a $0.00 charge that won’t go away ( http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/zero.asp )and another about NASA developing a million-dollar astronaut pen which could work in outer space( http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp ), the latter subject being quite popular now, thanks to ‘3 idiots’.
This reminds me of one of my favourite passages from Malgudi Schooldays where Swami gives a lurid account of his teacher’s violence: “When he started caning he would not stop till he saw blood on the boy’s hand, which he made the boy press to his forehead like a vermillion marking…..His cane skinned people’s hands. Swaminathan cast his mind about for an instance of this. There was none within his knowledge. Years and years ago he was reputed to have skinned the knuckles of a boy and made him smear the blood on his face. No one had actually seen it. But year after year the story persisted among the boys…”
As a Chinese proverb goes -“What is told in the ear of a man is often heard 100 miles away”!
