Doing borrowed time

This blog may be still very new, but a lot of people have asked me why I have not yet written about Kaavya Vishwanathan and her rather unfortunate saga. I did mention her the first time I wrote in this space, but merely in passing, perhaps because she was already centre-focus in too many other places. But now there are so many directions to explore out of that core that is Kaavya’s controversy that it could just use a little more talking about. A recent story in a news magazine points out that everyone ‘borrows’, some more liberally and literally than others, from someone else. And the sources may be known, familiar to anyone who reads, listens to music or watches movies, or unknown, as in so deeply buried in esotericism that it is cited and accepted more often than not as ‘original’ work.

Filmmaker and scriptwriter Anurag Kashyap has said in an interview that he has, on occasion, been asked to copy a Hollywood release, frame by frame, shot by shot. Thus Kaante was a good copy of Reservoir Dogs, for instance. However, most of Bollywood, as the Hindi film industry is better known, believes not in copying, but in ‘inspiration’. Munnabhai MBBS, for example, is very like Patch Adams, while Ek Ajnabi reminds the viewer of Man on Fire. Anu Malik is known for picking up his tunes from almost anywhere – Raja ko Rani se pyar ho gaya from Akele Hum Akele Tum is a barely rejiggered version of the Love Theme from Godfather. And all this is not even starting to scrape the mould off that sort of creativity in that world!

In literary works, be they academic or not, fictional or not, the more serious and mean-sounding tag of ‘plagiarism’ is often used. This actually refers to what goes beyond ‘inspiration’ and ‘borrowing’, into the realm of ‘stealing’. When given its detailed provenance, a piece of writing that is taken from something previously published or waiting to be done so is allowed – which is the way much science and scientific papers do the trick. Put it into context, give it its due credit and all will be well with the world. But there are ways out of that, too. If two writers have manuscripts published that seem uncannily alike, it could be simultaneous coincidence or accidental duplication, perhaps because of a pre-publication exchange of ideas or divine providence that put words and sentences together in the same or similar way in two different instances.

Too weird? Too complex? Too true! So why jump on poor young Kaavya, when she is just following the examples set by luminaries such as Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, George Harrison, James Cameron, Alex Haley et al? Or even me, who has taken much of this information off the Internet! At least Kaavya put her name to a book that, while it was hardly classifiable as ‘literature’ was very readable and even fun in parts? It was, to me, a lot like a bride’s wardrobe – something borrowed, something new, etc, etc. And since when did dressing up in someone else’s clothes become an unpardonable sin?