I am a folklorist by profession and inclination. My interest lies on some narratives which communicated mouth to mouth or digitally these days. So, for last twenty years my chief interest has been in “urban”, “modern” or “belief” or “contemporary” legends. For a traditional folklorist, legends connote long lived old stories about the past or recent times living in rural places told and believed to be true but based on some fictional characters.
In recent times, the conventional stories about saints or giants, fairies or monsters have been altered by stories of automobiles, trafficking, super naturals, drug violations, scams, education, and financial organizations and so on. Current folklorists want these stories recognised as genuine folk narratives, often told as “news”, “real events” or “rumours”, beginning in a small way and then spreading rapidly due to interest and importance. A contemporary legend mainly highlights the current fears, anxieties or concerns of a particular culture or community alongside a glimpse of a wider range of attitudes and assumptions within or outside the space. However, the popularity of the Internet is altering this once purely oral tradition, as more and more contemporary legends become the subject of Internet sites and have become textually documented in the cyber world.

This narrative genre namely “contemporary legend” was coined by Jan Harold Brunvand during 1980s in America with his collection of legends, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings (Brunvand, 1981: 3)He has made two points clear: first, that legends and folklore do not occur exclusively in so called primitive or traditional societies but can be from contemporary society; second, that one could learn much about urban, modern or contemporary culture, and society by studying such narratives. In India, plenty of contemporary legends are found which deal with supernatural elements, markets, financial organisations, frauds, scams, murders, kidnapping, and drug violations and so on. The factors of discrimination, natural calamity, poverty, unemployment, armed conflict, and oppressive social structures are among some of the most important social issues in India. Alertness of all these crisis have literally introduce contemporary legends which are whimsical, 99 percent- apocryphal, yet believable stories that are “too good to be true” and always attributed to a friend -of-a-friend (Brunvand, 2013: xxviii). By studying contemporary legends one can see how these narratives evaluate, reflect the reality of the societies. It shows how these social realities produce some concepts which can be drawn from the discipline of oral narratives that try to understand the social strain and the response to that strain