Plagiarism: Severe than Plague

"Nice status message, dude! Where did u get it?

Aah, nothing special, just thought of it one day.

Com'on man, I know u. It isn't your type of thinking. You can't think it up ever :P

Yeah, yeah, I know u r damn smart. Ok, I accept its not mine. I read it on some one's blog, liked it and hence here it is. But seriously yaar, isn't it a brilliant piece. Now, everyone will think I am so deep and intellectual. hahahahahahaha !

Its awesome dude, I am going to look up something for mine as well. :D"

This conversation shouldn't seem alien. We all have heard, seen, or done it before. We all have come across some kind of rip off, lift up, inspired or plain copy of someone else's work. For something like a status message it doesn't seem so big of an issue. But, when it is spread across the wide canvas of public display, some hearts do break. Indian Film Industry or Bollywood as we lovingly call is an epitome of perfection when it comes to plagiarism. Right from Sholay to 3 Idiots, half of the movies/music are lift offs from some international movie, music album or bestseller novel. And most of the time, its left for the viewers to guess the source. Sometime during last year, I had compiled a list of all time chart buster hindi songs along with their originals on my Orkut profile. It seems like somebody got pissed and all the originals were withdrawn from YouTube (it was my primary source). A recent shocking surprise came from 3 Idiots. Anyone who has read the book knows that the movie is copied extensively. Just because Hari doesn't romance the dean's daughter but Ryan gets her doesn't make it a new story. And it was more shocking because Aamir Khan "The Perfectionist", Vidhu Vinod Chopra "The Classic Film-maker" and Raj Kumar Hirani "The A-lister" overlooked this and then rebuffed all the claims from Chetan Bhagat. After all, Dev-D was way different than Devdas but it cited itself as modern day Devdas story with a twist. That's honesty and integrity towards your profession.

We Indian don't take this pretty seriously because it is not a big deal if someone uses someone else's work to earn. I agree we have bigger issues to deal with but plagiarism is a moral hazard. It skews the mind of youngsters who don't realise it to be a mistake. When I was in business school, there were tons of assignments with very little time. Since Internet was handy, all we had to do was to open google and get all the data required. We hardly bothered about citing sources correctly and neither did our teachers think about it as long as we had a slide with 'Bibliography/References' at the end of the presentation. After coming to the States for my Masters, I followed the suit and did nothing more than citing the websites at the end of the presentation. That was when I learned about the gravity of this issue when my faculty asked me if I had lost all my mind coz my presentation was all set to sink my academic career. I was shocked and surprised to know that I could be thrown out of the school forever. But a learned man he was, he knew that Indians are ignorant about most of the moral laws. After all, we have one of the most corrupt systems in the world. But not all are this lucky. It hasn't been long when Kaavya Vishwanathan's writing career was destroyed because of the having numerous lift-offs from various sources.

I could go on and on about the issue but the point is not explaining it. The point here is to understand that plagiarism is a crime, and that too a serious one. We need to educate our teachers to incorporate proper citations as a mandatory requirements as well as punish all those who defy and deny proper respect to their sources. Its high time we get our morals right !