Plagiarism rules the roost

This has been a season in which plagiarism and controversies related to it have hodged the limelight. First came the case against celebrated author Dan Brown, alleged of copying parts of ''Da Vinci code'' from ''The Holy blood and the holy grail'', written by two unknown guys. This case can be seen as no more than a publicity stunt by these 2 authors. And it has to be said that they somewhat succeeded in that since their book sold a large number of copies after this. But, ultimately, and rightly so, Dan Brown won the case.

Last week, a young Indian writer, Kaavya Viswanathan, was caught in the eye of a storm in USA. Her national bestseller ''How Opal Mehta got kissed, got wild and got a life'' was found to have striking similarities with teen fiction writer Megan McCafferty's books '' sloppy firsts'' and ''second helpings''. Kavya, reacting to this allegations, said that the similarities were 'unintentional and unconscious'. According to her, she had grown up on these books and they had influenced her so much that the language and situations accidently came to her pen. But the publishers of McCafferty's books have refused to buy this explanation.They said that there are more than 40 passages in kavya's book, which use similar language or situations. Infact the stories are almost similar. According to latest reports, the publisher's have withdrawn her book from the stores. The literary world is waiting with bated breath to know what happens in this case.

And now comes plagiarism of a different kind. The affected party this time is none other than the crusader, the author of this blog. Two days back, my good friend Akhil send me a blog link and told me, ''Hey buddy, Checkout this link''. The blog name was mexxian. I started reading and found out that the topic was similar to my last post in this blog, the one about my 1st vote. As I read on, to my astonishment, I realised that these were the same things that I wrote in my blog. Yes, the post was completely copied. I can't explain the kind of feelings that came to my mind. I was hurt deeply because this was a post which I valued most because it dealt with one of the most important moments in my life. And this guy unashamedly copied this and made it his own. The most astonishing thing is that he posted this in his blog, barely 4 hours after I published this.

Then I wrote a pretty long comment in his blog explaining how this whole thing is against the spirit of blogging and how it hurt me deeply. My friends Swapna, Meenu and Akhil gave me a lot of support during that time. The next day he removed his post and send me a message in orkut - ''I wrote only what I felt. Hope u got my mail''. But until this moment, I haven't got any mails. Also what puzzles me is that he could still say that he wrote what he felt, when all he did was to blatantly a post from my blog and add 2 sentences of his own. I hope he clears the doubt soon. If u watch closely, u could see some paralells between the reaction of kavya and this guy. And this made me think about a theory that ''when caught, all copycats act alike.i.e. Copycats copy other copycats.''

Last but not the least, a special thanks to Akhil for bringing this to my notice. Otherwise, atleast somebody would have thought that am a copycat[which according to me isone of the worst possible ways to describe an individual]. Be original...That is the mantraa...Lets all fight plagiarism together......well, this is only a tip of the iceberg that is plagiarism. If we move on to films and music, I would get topics to write on forever. So am stopping here....waiting for ur valuable comments

with love, your crusader Praveen