You do what you learn!

The story of a Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, having to withdraw her newly published novel from the bookstores due to charges of plagiarism, has been in the news lately. Kaavya was born in India and was brought up in USA by her Indian parents. I find it ironic that Kaavya’s novel is about the an Indian girl like her, Opal Mehta, whose parents were willing to do anything to get her admitted in Harvard University. When an issue about Opal being good only in her studies, and not having much of a social life, came up before the Harvard Admissions, her parents encouraged her to create a false impression of her being a ‘cool’ teenager. This story is not a stretch of imagination. While most parents want their children to attend good schools, Indians in general are obsessed about their children getting admiited to a prestigious college like Harvard or Stanford. Many show no hesitancy in taking short cuts or in creating false credentials to achieve this goal. (For example, a summer holiday in India 'to serve the poor in a hospital' is a ploy used by some high school students to make their credentials more impressive. Nobody knows that they have been enjoying their hoildays in India with some token work in a hospital!) Kaavya was obviously writing from her observations and experiences. (In her case, when she was 17, her wealthy parents hired a ‘special tutor’ to prepare her to qualify for Harvard). Is it any wonder that she did not think twice about copying her favorite passages from someone’s novel?