Urban Legends

You will pass all papers in a semester automatically if your roommate commits suicide.

Surprised?

Good evening toastmasters and evaluators

Let me tell you one more story.  One day a baby sitter was waiting at her master’s home with kid.  Suddenly she heard the phone ringing on down stairs.  She went down and picked up the phone.  But there was only a heavy breathing sound.  She asked

“Who is this?”

There was no answer, again she asked “Who is this?” again breathing sound.  She hangs up the phone.  The process continued for 3 to 4 times and she got irritated, she called the police and informed about the incident.  When the next call arrived police informed that the call is originating from upstairs, she ran back to baby and found a man was holding the baby on one hand and phone on another hand, police arrived at the scene and arrested the person.

Do you believe this story; don’t these are called Urban Legends.

You all are familiar with superstitious phrases.   So what is the difference between superstitious and urban legends?

Superstitious are small folklore quotes without any reasons or knowledge there won’t be any supporting stories or events.  Something like

“Number 13 brings you bad luck”,

“If a black cat cross the road you will met with accident or miss fortune”

On the other hand urban legends are small stories telling something very likely to happen, with very likely situations.  And also people use to say this happen to friend of friend of friend of mine.

Now let’s see how we can cook or start an Urban Legend.  The main ingredients are a superstitious phrase or folklore story, a plot, some characters, little suspense and a brilliant climax.  That’s it.  Now you can email it to all friends in your friends list and they will do the rest.  You can see the magic after few days; the same story will revert back to you informing this happen to one of your friend.

The term Urban Legend was used by folklorists, but it came to print media in 1968.  When Dr. Jan Harold Brunvand published his book on Urban Legends in 1981 called “The vanishing Hitchhicker” he consolidated all the information available regarding Urban Legend.  And this book is considered as the one of the excellent study on Urban Legends.

I remember a story about a little girl died during operation when all the machines in Operation Theater suddenly stopped working, because someone outside the operation theater used mobile phone.  I think almost all of you received this email.  Even there was photo and names of hospital in this email; the one I received contains a banglore hospital name.  Later I received an email with New York hospital address.

When I read the mail only one thing came to my mind.

“Oh god there is so many people sitting on bench in IT companies, please give them some work, or remove internet connection from their machines”.

Many interesting studies were conducted after 1990 on Urban Legends.  A study was conducted to check how the urban legends are spreading. Here are the results.

Congrats my IT friends, along with superstitious and spam mails we have helped the world to spread urban legends also.

Another survey was conducted to know how many people believe in urban legends, here is the result.

The urban legends are virus which effects believe and knowledge, and we the educated people are carriers of such virus.  So please take a pledge that you won’t be part of carriers any more.

Over to you toastmasters.