Dinos are the New Santa



My 3 year old loves dinos. So do most kids and many adults. That’s why so many movies have them from the Jurassic Park trilogy (with part four in the offing) to Godzilla. Hell, the remake of King Kong had a scene where the eponymous gorilla/ape/whatever fights, who else, dinos on the island! And all this interest then translates into shows on Discovery and National Geographic that are watched by kids and adults alike.

The animation is so real that the younger kids actually believe that dinos still exist. My 3 year old is one of them. Ask where we can find dinos and she’ll say, “Jurassic Park”. I’m guessing that in her head that’s like a zoo for dinos!

Way back in 1897, an 8 year old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon was crushed to learn from her friends that Santa was imaginary. So she wrote to the New York Sun asking “Is there a Santa Claus?” The Sun’s editorial writer Francis Pharcellus Church penned the response that went on to make history! Huh? That’s because Church used it as “an opportunity to rise above the simple question and address the philosophical issues behind it” (that’s Wikipedia’s description)! You’ll understand why when you read the following phrases from Church’s response:
“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”
And adds:
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.”
Obviously this is not a response meant for an 8 year old! The “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” line has become a template (in America and hence the Net) to be used thus: “Yes, Virginia, there is (a) (subject – person, object, activity, and/or concept)”. It is an extremely popular way of making statements of fact, satire or parody.

I hope someone will write a similar letter when my daughter eventually asks the question, “Do dinos still exist?”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn
Read more

Handling of the Satyam Scam

The Satyam scam. How does that fit into Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s book on reforms in India, Backstage ? The reason is that, as both NASSCOM and the government of India felt: “(Satyam’s) collapse would create a great deal of disruption for clients worldwide and seriously damage India’s reputation as a reliable source of software services.”   Therefore, the government decided to work with the private sector to “organize a quick takeover by a reputable new buyer, who would quickly restart the company”. But that could not be done overnight. In the meantime, the new board would have to reach out to Satyam’s clients and “reassure them that the company would survive”.   For the new board to have credibility when it made that statement, it had to be staffed with people who understood the private sector, the IT sector in particular, and commanded respect and trust. Deepak Parikh from HDFC was made chairman, and other members of the board included a former NASSCOM chairman, CII member,
Read more