Now people talk, that's one of the biggest way to communicate ideas among each other. People tell their experiences, their problems and their own stories to each other. But what happens when they don't have any more experiences to share? They shut up and do their work?
No, they start to talk about people they know, this is called Gossiping. This is particularly more interesting than when one tells his own experience, because this time the second person (who is listening to the story) can pass his judgment about the subject (whose story is being told) without taking the risk of hurting feelings of the first person (who is telling the story). This is fine, everyone gossips. Problem starts when the second person becomes the first person and tells the story about the subject to another person. What's the problem you'd ask, see when people start to talk about people they don't know, they tend to add, skip, or change a few details of the story, either by misunderstanding, bad memory, or plane idiocity. This is where things get even more interesting, because here both first and second person don't know the subject. This is called a Afwah. Then there are times people even don't have stories about people they don't know. And that is when they shut up and do their work.
Just kidding :P. This is when people make up fake stories about themselves, or sometimes about people they know, or sometimes they even make up fake people to tell stories about. See? Fake stories about fake people, does it get anymore interesting.
So there, that sums up to roughly 5 types of stories that float around by the word of mouth. Mostly you can tell the real ones from the fakes. Sometimes you hear 2 different stories with same basic structure and a few details changed from two complete unrelated sources. There's a very famous evergreen fake story about different girl's hostels. I've heard it from 3 sources that I can recall, in a local train from Faridabad to Okhla, they said that cleaners found carrots in washrooms of Nehru Girl's College. Then in my college about college's girl's hostel, that they found bananas in the washroom. And the latest was in my office in Jaipur, this time it was a working women's hostel, and they found carrots and radishes in washrooms. A more common type of fake story find its source in messaging services like SMS, email, status messages. Everyone must have seen these. They most probably start with images of cute sick baby that makes you go Aawwww, and ends with a line like forward this message to help this poor baby. Then there are badluck/goodluck for next 5-10 years messages, that if you don't forward you will have or don't have. They can also have some added detail like today is birthday of some God, because u know we have so many of them in India that everyday in a year has one or other God or Guru's birthday. I once tried to start my own original fake story message. It was like that these chain messages are actually made up and encoded by terrorists to pass their secret message, because this way no one can identify the source or destination of the message, so plz forward this to all your contacts and spread the awareness :P. I sent it to 5 or 6 people who used to send these type of messages a lot, and figured out that if I receive this message from anyone other than those 6 people I've successfully generated a fake chain message. But that never happened.
So when do we people shut up? When we die!? Hah! No silly :P, 'cause when we die our relatives/friends/wellwishers cry at the top of their voices. We don't shut up. This is the bottom line. We breath to talk. And let's say there comes a time when our jaws just get tired up of all the exercise, what do we do then? We BLOG! :P
