Lies...

Tommy Hilfiger appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show busted one of the biggest rumours doing rounds for the past few years. Apparently, he had never appeared on Oprah’s show before and his supposed statement, “If I knew that Blacks and Asians were going to wear my clothes, I would have never designed them.” turned out to be yet another Urban Legend, albeit an expensive one for him, considering the financial implications his made-up statement must have had on the sales of his products. The e-mail forwards (of which I was a recipient too) going around claiming Hilfiger’s racist remarks may not cease for a while and it was appalling to see an ad in the Times of India exploiting the false statement to sell some product without even a disclaimer that the supposed statement was false. This Tommy Hilfiger episode was the latest, I realize, in a long series of lies that we have been systematically fed over the years.

The Great Wall of China was supposed to be the only man-made structure to be visible from the moon. I remember quiz contests which had this question with its ostensible answer and I, myself, probably gave the answer in a quiz or two. It was one of my favourite bits of trivia in school and until a couple of years ago. Then, I discovered that it was a completely fictional bit of information, which owed its source to a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not cartoon. In fact The Great Wall would not be visible even at a height of just ten percent of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It was another unsourceable lie concealed as a fact.

There were nine planets in the solar system when I was in school and in keeping with the tendency of schoolwork increasing with each year, I half-expected the number of planets in the solar system to go up too. Then one fine day, last year, the International Astronomical Union decided to expel Pluto from its status of a planet. The names of the nine planets I had committed to permanent memory, at some point of time when I was in my primary school, became somewhat incomplete now that Pluto was plutoed out. I can never understand how a celestial body which orbits around the sun, has an atmosphere and has its own moon can cease to be a planet. Whether the International Astronomical Union has the right to define what constitutes a planet is debatable but the school texts will, in all probability, soon be amended to show only eight planets orbiting around the sun and it will mean that I have been fed yet another lie.