written soon after harvard crimson allegation: America’s penchant for the exotic and how India is considered very hot these days. Amitabh Bachchan knows a few things about business. He recently mentioned in a interview that when a country is doing well economically, everything about it becomes very interesting and marketable. He was replying to a question about the readiness of Indian film industry to collaborate with Hollywood in making slick productions. according to him, the studios have done their homework and are fully prepared.
The Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism episode is part of the publishing industry’s brush with India’s exoticness. If we have chick lit by a second generation Indian turned American, it will click, especially if the kid who is writing it and the heroine chick have Harvard association. If the right combination is there, the plot can be procured. If so much money has exchanged hands, the writer must be good. If so much money has exchanged hands we can use the fact to fool every reader. The only trouble is that not every reader is a fool.
One feels pity for her although she has caused a very small dent in the image India is projecting to the world. Some Indians are known to carry with them their habit of easily compromising on principles when they emigrate. Many Indians will also not accept the worth of fellow Indians if the foreigners do not fete them first. The sale that she would have got here would be partly because of the fact that she has done well in America and has been lionized by them.
She is smart but not smart enough to resist temptation. Very few with her ambition and finding themselves in her place would be able to resist. She may or may not be feeling guilty but she will need all her creativity to challenge the claims of Harvard Crimson and NYT. Taking people for a ride and earning money by doing so may not be a sufficient qualification for Investment Banking, the author’s preferred job sector, but the experience will certainly make her stronger to take on the male dominated field.
The egregious behaviour of the publisher deserves severe condemnation. They make the mistake of launching a faulty product in the market and then start hoping that they would not be caught. When caught, they sing praises of the author. Their commitment to the besieged author would be laudable if someone at a junior level had bungled and a Senior VP was not behind the whole deal. One can understand their brazenness because in many ways it is their book. They wrote some parts of it and they raised the stakes by giving an advance of $500000 for the two book deal whereas an unpublished author usually gets $10000. The marketing machinery usually takes when the product is ready to be launched. Here the marketing people were doing everything from R&D to Advertising. They can get away with it because they are not carmakers and no reader will lose her life by ‘using’ the book.
It also raises again the issue of endorsement. Oprah drew flak for promoting a book which was supposed to be a true story but turned out to be full of stretched truths. At least Kaavya is not guilty of lying in the book.
What else do you expect in a goognabled world? To expect that someone would try to live up at least to the half million advance is asking for too much. The pressure of living up to the smart kids in Harvard probably gets higher priority. If she had not written the book, she would have been a much less recognized but still a bright Harvard lady with a bright future. Now she is infamous and her extremely amateurish plagiarism has undone the brightness of her past and may even cast a shadow on her future. Will you sell your principles for half million?
Written 3-4 days after the controversy broke out: Even if the author had been male, women would have been far less judgemental. They do not have as much a desire for revenge as the men have and more importantly and also unfortunately, men are not ashamed to publicly announce this .
I was harsh on Kaavya(I did feel pity for her despite having reservations about the very small dent the image Indians are trying to project to the world might have suffered) before I read the posts on the net, esp. Sepia Mutiny, although not as harsh as others. I was harsher on her publishers and could not understand the naïve comments made by some about the possibility and extent of involvement of the publisher and even their ignorance. The issue is not about the worth of her writing. It is about the marketability of a product that luckily happens to have a Harvard student with exotic qualities as its author. In some ways her reactions are perfectly natural. The phrasing may be inappropriate but she is only human. My fundamental objection was and remains the propriety of according author status to a kid who has a lot to learn. This again can easily be countered by saying that there is a market for that. But there is also a market for child abuse. Still society does not sanction it. Similarly, no matter how good you are with the racquet or the club, you cannot join the pro tour before a certain age.
Standards of publishing may or may not have fallen but our expectations from young adults as performers have grown a lot. And whether or not a kid is allowed to perform is a decision that must carry the imprimatur of the parents. Even after giving the go-ahead, their duty does not end. They have to guard against the exploitation of their child by others and also by themselves. Jennifer Capriati’s father could not control either the urge to make more money through his daughter and, after some time, could not control his daughter either.
One form of Internalizing leads to conformity(according to Jon Elster, a desire caused by a drive to be like other people as contrasted with confirmism- the desire to be lik other people) and is the indispensable tool for any outsider who yearns to be accepted. She was only doing what she was expected to do to live up to the expectations of her own family and also that of the society she had chosen to make her own. She was expected to cater to the American taste and she and her helpers did nothing wrong in filling her book with references and names that would further bolster her American credentials even as the book was packaged as a product of someone who was not exactly one of them but close to being accepted because of her success.
After having made the successful ascent to the supposed pinnacle of academic achievement in USA and being able to see the promising future if she continued going by the book and internalizing more acceptable norms and conventions, she was trying to the difficult job of digging for her pure unconventional past. She would have even pulled it off but the internalizing impulse could not be resisted and it overshadowed the need to project her original rebellious side. A conventional exotic is what she will be called, despite her valiant efforts to show the readers the other side. Her creativity will be buried under the rancorous allegations.
She was thrust into the big league on the basis of her own claims of creativity(her half written Opal story) and the belief of her supporters in the efficacy of the packaging process. The subsequent additions were the only protection(not just inadequate but, as it turned out, carrying the potential to cause greater harm) against the relentless critical glare of the reading industry. She had not yet outgrown the impulse to conform but was expected to produce something original.
She was not wrong in trying to use any achievement gambit to achieve her admission goal. Every smart kid does that, often with the connivance of parents. After all, one never knows what small factor would impress the enigmatic selection committee members and tilt the decision in one’s favour. In fact, she was being very consistent in touting her potential as a literary person based on the prizes she had won for her poetry. Her mistake was in getting carried away by the hype that is necessary to market a not quite there product. And the money was both part and cause of the hype.
