The online world is one of such hoaxes that it gets my goat quite too often. My mailboxes (I have loads of them, and they collectively get me hundreds of mails every day) collect email hoxes far too many for my sanity. Either I am too steeped in work or simply too lethargic to respond to the senders. The average sender, usually, is a friend who is blissfully naive or unaware of email hoaxes or both. He or she would have, in turn, got the mail from some friend of his/hers and would have forwarded it to me in good faith.
There have been two which have been doing the rounds for close to a year, both involving UNESCO. One claims that the Indian national anthem has been declared by UNESCO as the best in the world, and the second is about the UN organisation naming Bengali as the sweetest language. I am at the receivieng end of both hoaxes since I happen to be an Indian and also a Bengali by birth.
The first time I heard either, I immediately checked the UNESCO website. It didn't have anything on either of the two "declarations". I wasn't surprised. If either was true, I would have probably first seen it in the news media rather than come to know of this "proud moment" for Indians and Bengalis through silly chain mails.
I finally made myself write something about this after a journalist got in touch with me the other day asking for my "corroboration" and reactions to the two so-called declarations. I did what any good journalist ought to have have done: I got in touch with UNESCO (last evening). I also carried out Internet searches for "UNESCO India national anthem" and "Bengali sweetest language" and was horrified with the results. There were some sites which debunked the first. Almost all sites that showed up in the results on the first two or three pages perpetuated these hoaxes.
The clincher was on the Times of India website. It apparently was a reworded version of the text of the Bengali hoax email. The Kolkata-datelined story started off, "The Bengali New Year couldn’t have started on a sweeter note. If a message circulating on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is to be believed, Bengali has been voted the sweetest language in the world."
When we started off as journalists we were taught about the importance of sourcing stories. These days, probably, the practice has fallen out of fashion. The TOI story did not mention a source and, worse, instead of scotching the Twitter/Facecbook rumours, it went on to perpetuate them. When the most-visited news website in India does that you can imagine how far and wide myths and lies are spread. Talk of responsibilities of journalists. Huh.
Meanwhile, this afternoon I received my confirmation from Sue Williams, the chief of UNESCO's Bureau of Public Information, asserting that the two are indeed hoaxes. Sigh.
All these days I had insisted that the Internet is the domain of the elite. Now I must insist that it also full of idiots.
[The Times of India article is still there. Check it out before they remove it. The TOI website is notorious for doing such things.]
