Many of you have already picked up on the story broken by the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. It appears VERY likely that young author Kaavya Viswanathan is a cheat. Her newly released novel, part of a lucrative two-book deal, has several passages that are almost identical to a 2001 novel that examined similar adolescent themes:
A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty–the 2001 novel “Sloppy Firsts” and the 2003 novel “Second Helpings.”
At one point, “Opal Mehta” contains a 14-word passage that appears verbatim in McCafferty’s book “Sloppy Firsts.”
Reached on her cell phone Saturday night, Viswanathan said, “No comment. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
McCafferty, the author of three novels and a former editor at the magazine Cosmopolitan, wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson Saturday night: “I’m already aware of this situation, and so is my publisher…” [Link]
Normally I would be skeptical until I heard more about this, but the Crimson has just broken it down to the point where you know how this is all going to end. Her literary career is over. If I were her I would think about falling back on medical school or something real quick. I was thrilled to see a teenage girl that could still write and didn’t use “u” instead of “you,” or “r” instead of “are.” My hopes for the next generation are now completely dashed. Here are just two of the numerous examples of apparent plagiarism cited by the Crimson:
From page 217 of McCafferty’s first novel: “But then he tapped me on the shoulder, and said something so random that I was afraid he was back on the junk.”
From page 142 of Viswanathan’s novel: “…he tapped me on the shoulder and said something so random I worried that he needed more expert counseling than I could provide…”From page 237 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done.”
From page 51 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later, I was sick of listening to her hum along to Alicia Keys……” [Link]
<
p>
Reading the Crimson article inspired me to do some investigative blogging of my own and has led me to a fantastic discovery which I would like to reveal first to SM readers (an then later to the world press). Aided by SM staff I have found striking similarities between the novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” and the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. For example, if you take the name of the main character, “Opal Mehta,” and you rearrange the letters, it gives you the following phrase:
<
p>I think somewhere in Holy Blood, Holy Grail they mention that “a pale moth” is one of the symbols associated with the female divinity, a symbol that was suppressed in the 6th century by the papacy. On a previous post we all wondered why the title character would be named “Opal Mehta” of all things. It makes sense to me now.
Furthermore, I have reason to believe that Kaavya Viswanathan may not even be her real name. Rearranging the letters in her name gives you:
Roughly translated this seems to mean that Satan stays away from wherever the Ankh is displayed (the ankh being an ancient symbol that some believe is the precursor to the Christian cross). This again is a theme that Baigent and Leigh discuss in their non-fiction book. Before the Harvard Crimson article I would have just thought that “maybe this is all a coincidence,” and this really is just a book about a teenage girl that she created from her imagination. I am sure that you all agree in light of the evidence that I have just laid out that this is highly unlikely. This girl simply has no conscience.
See related posts: How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and…, The narcissist principle
Is there a picture of this girl??
Ahamkara indeed. She wrote about her ahamkara. Had ahamkara to tell the world about it. Had the ahamkara to think that she could steal someone’s work. And had the ahamkara to deny it. WIth so much ahamkara she might think that she should stay at Harvard. She should gracefully leave Harvard and return the money before she does any more damage to herself, to Harvard, and to Indian-Americans in general.
Satyam E. Jayate
Update from the New York Times.
Ms. Viswanathan said she wrote them about not having a boyfriend, about the pressure her friends were feeling to get into good colleges and about being an Indian-American girl.
“I’ve never read a novel with an Indian-American protagonist,” she said.
That reminds me. Did you all watch the Katie Couric interview this morning?? She pronounced Metha as “Metta.” How the hell can and Indian American author not know how to properly pronounce the name of her title character?
Thanx for the link Pooja. This is certainly an interesting turn of events. Personally to me there is nothing “original” about the plot or the story writing. It seems extremely average. I mean don’t most teenagers have the same angst at almost the same time. I certainly fell into that stereotype when I was a teenager. I do believe that she was influenced some way or the other in her writing by McCafferty which she does admit. As for how deliberate it was is something that is still up in a toss for me. She was 17 and it seems like she made a “lame” attempt at writing something and the packager developed it and she seemed surprised that she got anywhere. There is definitely some freaky politics behind all this.
And you spelled Mehta as Metha…
Doh!!! You know what I meant though 🙂
Did I mention that I never learned to type? I’m a hunt and pecker.
I think you meant to write Mehta. And I hear desis pronouncing their own names differently every single day to accommodate the listener. I’m not surprised she’d say Metta on Couric.
Fair enough, that’s true. It just seems like such a good opportunity to change that behavior though.
Jane Yes, we are way too friendly and host-like and accomodating about the pronounciation of our names. You never see Italians or Latino’s accomodating anglo-speakers. It demonstrates pride 🙂 Now I wish my name wasn’t so damn easy to figure out.
My colleagues think I am as a$$ when I insist that they learn to pronounce my name right….If they dont make the effort, I proceed to screw up theirs. Funny , when a Cathy gets called Khati and Zachary gets called jhakaaree, suddenly they can pronounce Shantanu so well!
Oh, Abhi, now you’re just piling on with a cheap shot. I’m certainly no linguist, but I don’t know that the way in which any of us pronounces things should somehow become some sort of test of cultural authenticity. If English is functionally her first or primary language — and I fully realize she immigrated here, but so what — why would we be holding her to the standard of someone for whom the relevant Indian language is their first lanugage? And how and why should any of us become the legitimate final arbiters on proper pronunciation? There are plenty of South Asian Americans who don’t speak a word of any South Asian language, and never have — if their pronunciation isn’t quite at the level of someone who is fluent, are they somehow less authentically South Asian as a result? What about someone who grew up in the South, and speaks Hindi with a bit of a southern drawl? You gonna deem them less authentically Indian American as well?
I’m Indian American, and my Hindi sucks. Pronunciation probably does too — that’s certainly what my cousins in Delhi always told me. Thankfully, I’m never going to appear on the Today Show to have you evaluate it. 🙂
yeah, I’m with AK on that. I speak one south asian language fluently, used to speak another that has faded from memory somewhat, and I’m learning a third. Yet my friend Anil keeps giving me shit about pronouncing his name Aneeel.
Anyway, from Pooja’s NYTimes link:
errr..riiiight.
I do feel sort of bad for her at this point. In a baby-cow-raised-for-veal sort of way.
See comment 259.
didn’t one of the newer articles ALSO mention how the ORIGINAL version of “Opal” had four frends, but they told her to get rid of one? then they told her to add the “stirring graduation speech”? maybe we can pick on her for THAT, since elle woods did one in “legally blonde”. more internalizing!
ANNA, I applaud your empathy, but once you accept big bucks, it’s time to be a big girl.
Abhi — strategically accommodating the listener, which is what I assumed cmt 259 was about, seems a different phenomenon than actually, well, “internalizing” (sorry) different accents and forms of pronunciation. But as I said, I’m definitely no linguist, and I guess we don’t know which one it was here.
Cicatrix — Poor Cica! your friend sounds tres unreasonable, and perhaps clear-headedly cynical to boot. Although I’m a bit confused — how hard can it be to learn how to pronounce his name if he’s told you (in your words, “giving you shit”) how to do so a few times? Only two syllables, after all — it’s not like those long, multisyllabic Sri Lankan last names which can take 10 minutes to say no matter how you pronounce them.
i don’t know, cicatrix. 🙂 i don’t think earning big bucks necessarily inspires maturity, though it would be ideal if it did. rich people don’t necessarily act like “big girls”…the ones i knew in school acted quite the opposite.
oh, and maybe the bucks aren’t so big?
Hey now, no piling on Sri Lankans! We don’t expect anyone to know where the country is on a map, let alone pronounce our names!
anyway, ahem. back to topic: Kaavya, Kaavya, KAAVYA!!
I’m not saying it should inspire maturity at all, I’m saying it demands it. Once you accept something like that (and I think a grand is a lot of money, never mind half a mil, so I don’t really care how much it eventually came down to) you must know what is expected of you. If you can’t deliver, don’t accept the cash. Accountability has to play a role here.
(though I do judge her parents, just as I do those Sweet 16 parents. Foisting your own dreams and aspirations on your kids, even in the name of their betterment, is never pretty.)
I’m going to name my first kid “NeuroscientistAstronaut NobelLaureate [lastname].”
What?!Pilot Inspektor not good enough for you?
😛
Pilot Inspektor, I mean.
C’mon, she cheated, cheated, cheated. So these are the types that Harvard is letting in these days? I don’t think I would ever want to go there to be quite honest. I’m assuming this young “author” thought that her audience would be primarily Indian and would not be familiar with McCaffertyÂ’s works?
Cica, I don’t want my kid to be a pilot or an inspektor. Dirty jobs.
First off, I’d like to ask why it matters so much that Kaavya is Indian. My take on this affair has never been “oh no we can’t trust the Indians” or “She gives the Indians a bad name”… Yes, she had an Indian-American protagonist, but other than that, Kaavya isn’t particularly Indian. She’s completely Indian-American, or British, if anything.
I’d also say that despite the number of passages that seem to be lifted, I believe Kaavya when she says that she did not intentionally plaigarize. First off, she’s smart – it seems like a really stupid idea to lift sentences out of a book in the same genre, when it’s really easy to get caught. Secondly, she really does have an amazing recall for words, and it is very likely she pulled out some phrases without realizing that it was the exact same wording she’d read half a year earlier. I’m not saying that it was right for her to allow her book to go published this way, but unlike some others on this thread, I cannot picture her with a book in her hands trying to figure out which sentences to lift.
About the “nothing I read gave me inspiration” thing – Kaavya’s read an awful lot, as have I. Now, while I’ve never published a book, were I to be asked a question like that, I’d probably go for the same answer just because I wouldn’t be able to recall one or two authors that really stuck out in my mind – I’d point to the whole genre.
And the teacher who made that comment? Well within his right, but entirely inappropriate. Who here is in college or has graduated college recently? What percentage of your classmates were asleep? In my classes, quite a lot. Even at Harvard there are boring teachers and sleep-deprived students, because that’s college. That teacher may not like her writing style, but that’s completely up to the individual; I’ve always admired her writing, and the many awards Kaavya has won backs me up on this one.
Lastly, please, at least make an attempt to get the facts right. Her parents did send her to an outside counsellor priced around $10,000 (not $30,000, as some people have said), which I’m sure she’s taken a lot of heat for. On the other hand, her parents wanted the best for their only daughter – is that such a crime? And Kaavya is 19 years old right now. Not 17, not 18. There are also some other things, like the fact that Kaavya has not wanted to do IB since she was five – it was a more recent development in college… I can’t remember all the inaccuracies to rebute them, and I’m not registered on the sites that are linked in this blog, so I won’t even try. While these are minor details, I’d like to remind most of you that you don’t know kaavya and making assumptions about her is a bad way to go, especially when you’re making assumptions off “facts” that aren’t even true.
I didn’t start this comment meaning for it to be an entire defense of Kaavya, because I admit that we all have our faults, Kaavya included. It’s just that sometimes you have to step back and think – think about the worst embarassment you’ve faced in your life, publicized in every major newspaper, with people who don’t know you judging your character based on scant facts that could well be wrong. We voyeurs are only making it worse.
Guys,
On Sunday and Monday, I was pretty upset on her behavior but still wanted to go slow and show restraint.
On Tuseday, I felt bad for her and thought it is possible that in a subconsious mind, she was using McCrafferty’s work as a template. I found Language Log’s and Ashvin’s reasoning plausible.
On Wednesday, I think it is more than “unintentional” – as Abhi in many incarnations has said and Cicatrix too, the plots are very similar between her and McCrafferty, the dialogues in 40 odds instance are more than similar. If you are truely tapping to your internalized literature experiences, she should be drawing from a larger body of literature too – the one she openly admires – like Jane Austen, PG Woodehouse in addition to McCrafferty [whom she claimed to have read many times]. We should see a bigger hotch-potch rather than confined to two novels in a very surgical manner. Something like we saw in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2. Memory recall alone will not be confined to McCafferty’s.
There is something strange – We are now seeing the tip of the iceberg: Alloy-17th Street’s role.
I did saw her interview – She is scared and not in a happy position – I feel bad for her but but am not able to give a compltete clean chit. I still want to go slow but am having hard time declaring innocence in traditional scene. May be, almost all chick lits are Boy-band like creations, this one got caught.
12 Angry Men
Kush, I feel like you should make a song about this 🙂
Nah, he’d be sued by Craig David for plagiarism.
sigh – First we were accused of being haters. Then we were accused of being lovers. Now back to haters again.
Actually, a female TA (only a few years older than Kaavya), whose use of the evocatively racist tag “mowglisambo” is no help to her credibility.
I was thinking of The Cure!
Whodidit – Possibly, Claudia Gabel From NYT:
Thanks, Kush!
I really want to believe that KV is not guilty…but I can’t in my mind imagine how someone can “internalize” over a dozen passages verbatim – even including the formatting. A report I read said that some of the similar passages copied not only the words but formatting (bold, italics, etc).
However, I also can’t in my mind believe that KV would be so stupid to sit down and so blatantly and stupidly plagarize.
so what happened?
I am beginning to think that the “set-up” theory is possible.
Possibly there was substantial input from Alloy/17th street in this book..far more than KV or Little, Brown wishes to acknowledge….and possibly someone at Alloy decided to insert those passages as a way of “punishing” KV.
Perhaps then KV in reviewng her “own” manuscript never noticed this and no one else did until the reports came out.
I don;t know…but it is just so hard to belive that this was unintentional plagirism and it is also hard to believe that KV could be stupid enough to plagiarize in such an obvious way.
One more thing, none of those passages seemed to even necessarily make the book better…so again what was the point?
So many questions,
Your thoughts.
WonderingMan
WonderingMan (284#)
Never underestimate stupidity.
As an aside I wonder if it was a plain jane instead of a cute & smart girl with an attitude, how long exactly this discussion would have gone.
Regards
hey, your highness, didn’t you say in the other thread that she wasn’t smart? 😉
Bengali (286#)
Actually I also said she might be too smart for her own good 😉 (I have a way of weasel wording)
Regards
About Indians distorting their own names while speaking to Americans, I have seen it happen often enough. Once, this guy Ashok, introduced himself on the phone as “Hi, this is ‘ash-hock’.” I asked why on earth did he mispronounce his name; if he mispronounces his name, how on earth will the other guy learn the right pronunciation of Ashok. The fellow replied that it is easier for them to remember and pronounce “ash-hock” than “ashok”. My reply was, “Then the next time tell them your name is “ash hole” and they will remember it even better.”
Speaking of South Asians distorting their own names when speaking to non-desis, something I think is significantly worse is when desis are talking to other desis and they insist on (mis)pronouncing the other party’s name the “white” way, even if the other person objects to it and everyone concerned is relatively fluent in at least one South Asian language. There’s no excuse for this.
K is a liar. I’ve seen lots of students plagiarize and one can tell when a student is shifting about, having been caught in a lie. The student who takes responsibility gets off much easier than the one that deines it. K is denying everything and slowly, but surely, she is damning herself in the process. And, if she did have a photographic memory then she would have remembered to cite in the first place! Does K have any connection with Bush? Both seem to think that they can get away with lying and, when caught, both plead complete ignorance. You’ve been caught K and it is time to fess up. If you had done the same in my class I would have failed you by now.
Satyam Eva Jayate
agreed, but if and ONLY if the other person objects. everyone should always have absolute sovereignty over the pronunciation of their own name — even if someone else might think that it’s a mispronunciation by their standard. if said other person pronounces their name the so-called “white” way (whatever that means), then no one else should really have much basis to object.
Laughing It was just an off-the-cuff phrase. I was referring to the way which many non-desis (which here in the UK usually means English people) sometimes mangle South Asian names, and have trouble with what they regard as more difficult pronunciations.
Got it, understand now. I suppose you could have said the “AK way,” since I have trouble pronouncing names every now and again. Take, for example, the name Psycho Tricks. Always stumble over that one.
The Guardian puts in the knife, and gives it a good twist: “ Kaavya Viswanathan’s plagiarism isn’t too much of a concern, but the junk swimming around in her brain is.“
Abhi wrote :
Atanu Dey wrote :
I wrote in a comment long time back how I felt it somewhat annoying that the News person on NPR pronounced her own name Lay..ksmi Singh like no Indian really does. If you dont pronounce your own name the way you want it, why not call your self Bob or Sally?
In the same lines I argued in favor of changing a name of city in India.
Umm, I may be misunderstanding what you are trying to say, but why and how is it your concern how she pronounces her name — why does it make any difference to you? And on what authority are you the final arbiter to decide whether someone is pronouncing their name “the way they are supposed to” in the first place? There could be any number of reasons why she pronounces it the way that she does, and it’s her name, so she’s the only legitimate judge of whether it’s being pronounced the way it should be.
HOLD THE DAM* PHONE!!!! ABHI QUOTES FOX NEWS!!!
I never thought I’d see the day….
Seriously, you’re series of comments have really left an impression. I’m a bit ashamed of my cynicism. What is integrity and how would you define it? Bravo, abhi, for hungering for truth.
Aw crap, I mispelled you’re. Well, I did go to a state school….
Fair and balanced, baby. Abhi reports, we decide.
I dont care. It doesnt make any difference to me. He/she can pronounce his/her name as “Ass-Hole” like Atanu mentioned, for all I care. The fact is that they are doing it to accomodate others. Living on someone else’s terms. I dont do it.