Past Friday 55: Judging Kaavya and Joya

Via Sepia Mutiny over 2 weeks ago and yes, things work late as usual in my IST influenced brain and lazy siesta-esque mental sensibilities (what can I say, Ive been busy getting mad at arranged marriage men) :

The theme for that week was Kaavya Vishwanathan and the sudden retraction of the bouquets laid at her feet to make way for brickbats to be hurled. Now I havent been thinking about the poor girl because I wondered what she would be feeling throughout the entire fracas and what precisely her role was in all of this (I dont believe everything the newspapers say, because they don't ever probe thoughts and feelings, only something shifty they call evidence, particularly in this case). From the many many articles on Sepia Mutiny, which is where i get most of my desi-related news, and subsequent opinions, I still feel that she was misled and her name is being dragged in the dust over that of her publishing companies. Maybe she just read TOO much chick-lit for her own good.

First of all, why did they have to change her original, darker manuscript? Why did the publishers not do their research? And honestly, these people are asses. If there are only a few words or overall passages flicked from assorted authors, but the overall story is original, what difference does it make? How varied and imaginative can chick-lit be? With a high-school theme where everyone aspires for a Sex and the City lifestyle. Chick lit (from my limited exposure to it), involves shopping, parties, money crises, friends, many guys, sabotages to projects/plans/men and assorted levels of catfights to get aforementioned guys. And giggle-inducing make-out encounters.

Come on people! I am of the opinion all this lawsuit nonsense has made people in America leeches. There should be some limit to this 'intellectual property' stuff. A certain clause structure or tone is not any writer's patented style, or specific to the author alone. Children in any region growing up in a somewhat homogenous environment and think in certain prescribed ways and thus use prescribed structures. We all learned long words or certain phrases from certain authors. Books have immense power to shape sensibilities! Rather than suing, these authors should have simply asked for acknowledgement and had their own books promoted through hers! That would have been a smarter publicity move than disgracing Kaavya and bringing attention to their own rather poor writing style. I would assume that they were simply threatened by her fame! A 17 year old writing about 17 year olds? Of course she was treading on their turf and likely to be seen as more credible! Geeez.

Thus, here is my 55:

The vendor excitedly held up the book at my car window. Opal Mehta’s skinny arms clutched books and sandals, as my Indian sensibility clucked in disapproval at the contact between paper and footwear. I considered buying one just for posterity’s sake, and felt pity for the poor girl. “In India we were encouraged to copy”.

(Heck, I almost feel like buying a copy out of solidarity with the girl. To have a piece of fiction behind which lies an interesting story I can tell my kids, about a publicity stunt gone horrible wrong, and scare them from being lazy over the overachieving attempts at papers they are bound to write!)

Hell yeah! The plagiarism situation in India, is for the most part, nonexistent and pathetic. People steal ideas left right and centre, as is amply demonstrated by the immense creativity of our Bollywood industry in terms of script and music. We were encouraged to copy and regurgitate in school. (I know many of my phoren friends object to this system but I think ICSE ROCKS till then, HSC SUCKS ASS, and I wouldnt know about senior college. We are exposed to good literature here and our math techniques are superlative. Creativity can be only encouraged when their is a norm existent to understand and only then transcend. Otherwise it is chaos). I distinctly remember going to Nehru Centre and other libaries for my ICSE History and Geography projects, and copying directly from the texts available there. No quotations, no in-text citations, just changing the tenses, direct/indirect speech, and order of the words. And a long list of references at the end of the project. I think thats why we Indian students were so careful about plagiarism and citations in colleges abroad... not to mention lawsuits! But I ALWAYS got the bloody systems wrong! Damn annoying, no matter how hard I tried. Plus working with different methods each time! A separate English one, separate Psych one, then the Harvard one at grad school, oof! And once you read a book and shut and returned it, and then you wrote something relevant from there, what a pain to go find it again! Because the paper rarely turns out the exact way one thinks it will! I'm not justifying Kaavya's plagiarism if it was intentional, but I dont believe it was. Then again, who am I to judge?

Speaking of judging, I'm quite curious to know what opinion people must have formed of me after those virginitywala posts. It was heartening to know most people agreed, or believed in the right to maintain personal opinions on the part of both, and that people were for the most part intelligent and as respectful as they could be in the throes of passion hehe. But for instance, one commenter already assumed the kind of person I would be in bed, and honestly, that freaked me out a little bit. That the type of people they are necessarily translates into an impression of the kind of people they'll be sexually. In my experience, its usually translatable (in the case of men - but it takes a good deal of time and skilful observation. It's relatively easy to tell selfishness or self-involvement or overall love-making personality type and to tell penis type, (fat thin long short etc) but skill or the number of previous partners is difficult, unless the person is a smooth talker, and I tend to stay away from those types.) I dont like it when people assume things about me from a stray sentence, and I dont judge people for their lives either.

I stopped judging people in the sophomore year of college in my English class relating to women and literature. One of the very intelligent women in my class (I was seriously a lost puppy with relatively black and white ways of seeing things then) spoke about how our previous opinion of people tend to influence our opinions of their sexual or other 'moral' activities. About how a sexually active friend was 'independent' and 'in control', but a girl one disliked was a slut. And it led me to realise that the sam eperson will be judged differently by different people for no fault of hi/her own, and as merely a consequence of the judger's own situation. The same way, I, for example, was considered modern, liberal, socially aware in college amongst foreigners, but was considered overly modern, independent and a libertine, (yeah, thats a bad thing in a patriarchal, traditional, communitarian society like ours), and therefore fast - by Indians. I became aware of my biases and honestly feel all the better for having become so.

Its an interesting perspective, and a good way to recognise and purge ego in our interactions with people we have ambiguous feelings about - heck, even those we hate. They have something we don't, dont they?!