Kaavya Viswanathan is a teenager of ethnic Indian origin. She's also a student at Harvard. And she's currently in the news for various reasons. After receiving a half a million for her book titled
How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, she was in line for confirming a movie deal for her book; when came the news that Kaavya seemed to have
plagiarized passages from another writer (Megan McCafferty) and her literary works (if you could really call
chick lit literary works of any sort). She later released a
statement to the press explaining that:
"I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words. I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious."A few columnists since then have pointed out the irony of her finally coming up with something original, even if it was just an apology, by use of the word
internalize.
That irony apart, I haven't read her book, nor do I wish to comment on it's substance. I'd probably never read it, or any of McCafferty's work either. But I guess it's a sobering turn in the story of a young girl of ethnic (read
non-white ) background. Whether it's her fault or her publishers' or her book packager's, she screwed up! You're really depraved if you're ripping off someone else's work from a bad genre anyway to write your book. Kinda like copying/plagiarizing answers from the last placed student's solutions to the class final final exam.
I saw
this piece on ABC news late nite that alterted me to this new phenom , a variation to conventional Yoga - broadly termed as
Christian Yoga. The motivation for this seems to be that some people are not comfortable with the
Hindu chanting that accompanies Yoga sessions, and want to make it Christian. Notice the absence of any guilt at the bastardisation of the form of worship of another religion.
Great - so now the Christians are out there
internalizing aspects of Hinduism and Hindu worship (not for the first time too!). Whatever. These ignorant idiots are deliberately ignoring the implications of this plagiarizing of another religion's form of worship. And this is hardly the first or the last instance of all things Asian that have been bastardized by the West.
But what about the influence of music and movies from the west (or other parts of the world) in Indian pop culture? There are so many instances of obvious direct rip-offs in songs, scenes and complete movies in Bollywood (commercial Hindi cinema). Obviously plagiarization of all sorts is absolutely rampant in today's society. You could call it inspiration, imitation, internalization. Or whatever else you can come up with. Everybody's doing it.
The bottomline is that to get to success & fame fast, it's easy to rip off someone else's work to cash in on their success or what worked right for them. There's almost guaranteed success in that direction. Only thing of consequence, when you haven't bothered to acknowledge your original source for the inspiration and pay due respects to them, is the 11th commandment (internalized from Jeffrey Archer who internalized it from the 10 commandments) -
Thou shalt not get caught!
