I. Introduction
— Kaavya Viswanathan, April 26, 2006 [Link]
II. Conflict
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[via Harvard Independent; thanks, Rekha] |
Opal Mehta |
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All day the house had smelled of spices, and now before our eyes lay the resulting combustion of all that kitchen chemistry. The feast my mother had conjured up was extravagant, and I realized how hungry I was; I wasn’t a big fan of Indian food, at least not on a daily basis, but today the sight of it was pure poetry. Brown sugar roti and cloud-puff puris just itching to be popped. Coconut rice fluffed up over the silver pot like a sweet-smelling pillow. Samosas transparent, peas bundling just below the surface. Spinach with nymph-finger cloves of garlic that sank like butter on the tongue. A vat of cucumber raita, the two-percent yogurt thickened with sour cream (which my mom added when we had guests, though she denied it when asked; I’d seen the empty carton, not a kitten lick left). And the centerpiece: a deep serving dish of lamb curry, the pieces melting tenderly off the bone. |
… the house had smelled of spices all day, and when we sat down at the dining room table, I nearly combusted at the sight of the extravagant feast my mom had conjured up. Usually I wasn’t a big fan of Indian food, but today I was suddenly starving. The table creaked with the weight of crisp, brown rotis and feather-light, puffy puris. A basket of my favorite kheema naan sat beside the clouds of cashew and sultana-studded coconut rice in an enormous pot. There was plump okra fried in oil and garlic till it melted like butter on the tongue, aloo curry studded with peppercorns and glistening chopped chilis, and a crock of raita, a cool, delicious mixture of yogurt and sour cream, bursting with finely chopped onions and cucumbers. The centerpiece was a deep dish of mutton curry, the meat (my mom only used halal bought from an Arab butcher in Edison) already falling off the bone. |
Born Confused
III. Climax
‘I really thought the words were my own. I guess it’s just been in my head… I feel as confused as anyone about it, because it happened so many times.’ [Link]
On national TV last week (thanks, BEAH):
‘All I can tell is the truth.’
IV. Resolution
A Harvard University student’s “chick lit” novel has been permanently withdrawn and her two-book deal canceled, publisher Little, Brown and Company announced Tuesday… “Little, Brown and Company will not be publishing a revised edition of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan, nor will we publish the second book under contract…” [Link]
Come on now. Leave the girl alone.
Good grief… is her whole book a patchwork of passages from various sources stitched together ? The effort of doing that seems higher to me that just writing it from scratch…
and the point of this article is??
seriously, this is getting out of hand. she admitted to it already. just leave it alone. these new similarities are a stretch…
Dead horse but who makes naan at home? Are Jersey McMansions coming equipped with tandoor ovens these days?
I vote for the hodgepodge theory. I don’t know if there was a conscious plagiarism, but the way this girl’s mind soaks up and squeezes out what she’s read in the past (near verbatim) is astounding. She’d make a fantastic lawyer.
I view this as decoding the influences of one of our most talented mashup artists.
Actually, she’s never admitted to intentional plagiarism.
“seriously, this is getting out of hand. she admitted to it already. just leave it alone. these new similarities are a stretch…”
what did she admit to? these passages side by side do not seem like a stretch, but point to more “unintentional internalizing”
In your theory, she remembers the text verbatim, including italics and the exact order of specific clauses, but not the sources, orthat she’s ever read an Indian-American novel before.
girl is well-read what can you say….she’s got all the YA’s books covered
Yes, her research is impressively thorough.
Raytheon’s CEO, Swanson, was caught with his hand in the plagiarism cookie-jar. Here’s how he got away with a slap on his wrist: many years ago, he says, he gave a marketing/PR hack a box of his notes on management and leadership along with some other books that influenced his thinking. The expectation was material that he can use in presentations and stuff. He forgot to recheck what came back and finally wrote a book with it and that’s how stuff from other books ended up in his book without attribution.
Also read Suzy Welch’s article in the WSJ today where she thinks the publishing industry could be the one responsible here (not that Kaavya is any less responsible.)
So…as the number of books Kaavya plagiarised from increase by the day I wonder if this was a inner job from Mr Allow Packager.
Would do good for a whole lot of people if Kaavya comes clean and either takes responsibility or points out how this came about.
as the wheel turns
<
blockquote>a tug and a tweak…
Holy Mother of Plagiarism. Can we MOVE ON TO ANOTHER TOPIC? There are tons more issues that we can discuss on SM…you can add links to the other postings on this topic… it’s like beating a dead dog….get over it.
Ohhh SNAP! RED HANDED.
All the material she had admitted to ‘borrowing’ was based upon internalizing works she had read. So, either she hasn’t written the book at all and she is honest about not having read a novel with an Indian-American protagonist, but lying about having written the book, or she did write every word of the book and copied a whole lot. Including material from a type of novel she had never read about.
For Lords sake, just come clean.
You are wasting your time. I want what my contract entitles me to.
A Greek tragedy is meant as a cautionary tale which inspires empathy in the audience 🙂
When Detroit hosted the superbowl, windsor got a windfall – simple reason – the strip clubs this side of the border go the full monty on lap dances -drove a lot of traffic over- the bareass lap dance on SM seem to be equally good for media attention – but surely not the traffic you want to have now, would you?
yeh larki stole three passages out of mera personal diary too! gundabhai is swearing revenge!
I mean, to a certain degree, everything we have say or write has been written to or said to a certain degree before. I am sure some one has said that as well. Does that mean I plagiarize it? … To meticulously piece together and paraphrase several books into one book would probably be more time consuming than actually just writing something. I bet you could probably take any book recently published, and run a statically algo against every book ever published showing that certain passages in the book in question are common to passages that have been previously been written.
Whenever there is a raising star people want part of the action, or some how sully their good name. I havenÂ’t really followed this story, nor did I follow that Da Vinci law suit, but seems like a popular theme these days? DidnÂ’t some one try to suit that harry potter lady?
The point is, this is totally gotten out of hand…
how in the world is that the first analogy you came up with
What the hell!!! Was she writing a book or making last minute assignment submissions??? I’ve kept quiet based on the observation that she’s being bashed left, right and center for the copying methods. Then we find a second author stands up pointing that “Opal” has passages exactly as in her book. And now this… the third book.
Seriously, its time someone looked at the pinheads running the publishing company too. Didn’t they read the book which seems to now have the dubious record of being copied from not one, two but three books!!!!
Pasting is actually much easier. That’s why blogs quote liberally (though they cite). Note that the phrases come in exactly the same order.
As a published writer, my experience says otherwise. It takes me a year to eighteen months to write a book that I consider publication-worthy. In contrast, I can stitch together a credible novel using other people’s work in about two months. The difference in time and effort is significant. [Link]
yes i empathized but this is becoming voyeuristic – it’s like tormenting an animal for fun before killing it – just sordid. well – my 2cts – if people want to pitch in and talk about it, their call.
Usually empathy is inspired because we learn the moral of the story, not because our favorite blog dissects it ad nauseum. 😉 And yet, having said that…I might have one more thing to say about K-gate, in a few hours. Perhaps I will spare our readers and just put it on my own blog.
Screw the plagiarism… I am going out to eat keema nan and mutton curry.
Isn’t Opal Mehta‘s family hindu? Why are they eating meat from only halal butchers only?
Non vegetrarian punjabi hindus & more so sikhs find halal repugnant… if mehta is punjabi(can be gujju also and elsewhere) then its unlikely…
Did you guys hear that bang?
That was the South Asian author bubble bursting.
too bad…I’ll miss all the covers with saris and henna wiht titles like “The 7th Wife of Banglapore” and “Am I white or brown anyways I’m soooo…confused!?!” good times
I now have a good feel for why she did it. god damn it i love food. I have been cooking since i was 10 or so. I can give up sex, money, reading make magazine, my somewhat prized dualcitizenship but not cook books and i dont mean ttl cookbook. next to e, food is my passion… But if i was to write an indian american story, i would describe food that way… She was fluffing it up w/ details to sell it to a non indian audience. It probably was the required fluff, the same kind that makes amy tan unbearable…
any ways lets talk about another desai discussing identity and it finaly in a superficial way pays attention to NE india.
sorry it should have been i wouldnt describe food that way.g
again just whats a south asian author…
I think these multiple posts are necessary. And the fact that each and every one of them is getting lots of comments would suggest that other people think so too. Shoot, the New York Times has written seven articles on Kaavya already, and several of them were on the front page. Enough with the moralising. People want to talk about this stuff, and this is the story that keeps on giving (what is it, four or five books now?). Those who don’t want the painful details don’t have to read. But they can’t help it. Before you know it, this one will have a hundred comments as well, half of them from people who think there are too many comments on the subject.
Well done Sepia Mutiny! You presented the facts, you were fair minded about it, without defending or condemning her. You guys deserve an award.
Seriously.
I guess her family must be gujarati muslims from Chennai.
The bigger food related inconsistancy here, is saying that an Indian-American family (or anyone in their right mind) would make rotis, puris and kheema naan for a single meal.
The level of denial in some of these comments is astounding.
very true beta,
do figure out where did you get your bata.
I. Swear. To. God.
We’ll get to comment #75, and someone will say, “I’m new here, but I just have to say I think she might have just used similar phrases like we all do all the time. Let’s not judge her before we have all the facts.”
What, I wonder, would people consider sufficient evidence?
time travel क्यों करते हो |
Maybe they had guests over for dinner or were celebrating something – my mother always goes over the top in such cases..
Except me. 🙂
You bring out a good point though. People who don’t want to hear about this anymore (even myself to some extent) don’t seem to realize that they are in the minority. For example, my non-Evil persona wrote two posts today about positive role models in the Indian American community, neither of which generated much discussion. The number of comments a post receives is definitely not always an indication of the level ofinterest in a story (it sometimes indicates that what needed to be said was all said in the post 🙂 but it does tell you something. We also don’t write about a topic soley to drive site traffic since we don’t get paid or benefit in any way whether one person or 20,000 people visit our site in a given day. My point is that most people are NOT in fact sick of hearing about KV.
realy ask her to make som khyali pulav too then
De Nile doesn’t only flow through Egypt. 🙂 [end corny joke]
or it could be most people are sick of another indian who did well in the techie field
I agree. But, having established that she is a plagiarist, there is this:
Perhaps the fifth post on this topic could help us understand why?
whoops…sorry for the misquote. the last line is obviously mine, not the Times’s 🙂
Even you, my brother in the dark arts, even you. You may be evil (you didn’t go to evil medical school for nothing), but you’re fair-minded evil.
Corny Abhi (“De Nile”), on the other hand, that’s one desi we can do without…
please add being mentioned by another desi-libbie-demleaning who reminds of goyal ji.(for some reason vinod also does they seem to pick same topics)
OK I thought it was me but I was seriously irritated by some of her attention to detail when I read the book. It made some of the worst kind of mistakes which makes ABCD’s I know look like they’ve been living in India their whole life! She could have done a little bit more research about the foods and habits and names and regional and cultural particularities about the people she was writing about. I mean for petes sake if she’s south Indian why the F did she write about about a “gujju” family with no clue about them and no attention given to some obvious details that grate perhaps only to us because we are desi. A white person could care less and not really know.
Let me clarify my point: this entire affair is sordid. Every bit of it, from the possibilities around the creation of this novel, to the behavior of the adults around this young woman. She has not been well served. I am, marginally anyway, an educator. Sometimes I do a good job, sometimes I do a poor one. But those of us in positions of authority must act with a certain standard. Standards matter. I suppose I’m just pissing in the wind moaning about ethics when large contracts are handed out and publishers want to make big bucks with a best-seller. This woman, whatever she has done, is paying plenty. I am ambivalent – I have sympathy and am disappointed at the same time. It’s not the most important story in the world, but it is a perfect storm of class, luck, color, priviledge, and innocence (or innocence lost).
I don’t want this young woman crucified and if books are parcelled together for easy reading and profit and pleasure, so be it. So bet it. I see nothing wrong with that. But transparency is a wonderful thing.
I suspect the same thing…will know for sure when my book arrives.