Read the following two paragraphs:
# “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart….”
% “Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty….”
Do you find any similarity between the two? The first one is from McCafferty’s novel called “Sloppy Firsts” a novel she wrote in 2001. The second one is from Kaavya Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life”. A pure coincidence? May be!
Check the following two sentences, the first one is from McCafferty and the second one from Kaavya.
# “Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done.”
% “Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later, I was sick of listening to her hum along to Alicia Keys....”
The plots of the stories are similar and so are the sentences and phrases. Such similarities run into 40 or more. They are available at this site.
Now, for most Indians these similarities seem very normal. It anyway happens all the time in Indian mainstream media, entertainment and literary sections. Movies are copied- scene to scene, dialog to dialog, without giving any acknowledgement and the Indian audience laps it up cheeringly without an iota of concern that it was “plagiarized”. Songs are blatantly copied- music notes are ‘borrowed’ without any change and most of the articles and books written by many authors ‘reuse’ pages of text verbatim without even changing a comma.
Actually, ‘plagiarism’ is an alien word to most Indians. They do not seem to be affected by it at all. This runs in corporate world as well. A former team member working in my company once wrote a brochure on our company’s offerings and to my astonishment I found out that it was ‘cut and paste’ from a close competitor. It was the same font, same words and same structure. And when I told him we cannot do that, he adamantly retorted- “Why not?” and though I tried to convince him otherwise, he maintained his stand that it was quite OK to do it. He even reasoned that ‘we shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel’.
Most of the students in
The words ‘plagiarism’ or ‘intellectual property’ do not seem relevant to most Indians. It is very natural to copy a text, copy a lyric or a tune without acknowledging the originator. And the roots for this are laid during our primary education enfo
By the time students get into engineering and degree colleges, they become experts at ‘mugging’ and reprinting the text. My favorite word to describe this phenomenon is ‘creating excellent Xerox machines’. So, when the whole of
I for one strongly support for a strong action against her ‘borrowed’ works. Because we need some good examples- which can be viewed and watched by many parents and teachers across this country- so that they realize that this ‘copying’ business will have negative consequences. If Kaavya is let go free, it will be unfortunate because India will now go back to its usual business with renewed energy and confidence to continue its plagiarism activities and will continue breeding another generation of ‘copy making’ students.