Kaavya- A Cinderella story with an anti-climax

How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life

Ludicrous, pathetic and confounding, all at the same time… ludicrous because, it all sounds too dramatic, the whole ‘rags to riches and back to rags within an incredible span of time’ Rajinikanthish story; pathetic considering the tender age of the author compared to the hype created around the issue; confounding as I am not quite able to come to terms with the fact that a "sensible" Harvard-stud should go around lifting apparently 40 paragraphs from two different books of the same author, which though not quite easy to identify, would still be a cause of severe panic.

I was probably late in catching up with the new Cinderella novelist Kaavya Vishwanathan around the corner, with only the article in The Hindu last week enlightening me. Lo and behold, the very next day, comes the news that there might be a few paragraphs in the book which are not original. And the issue has only been seemingly growing in proportions since then. As I have been following the issue quite decently, I only have developed a feeling that something is very fishy, and I have hence put forth a set of my arguments. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong anywhere.

1. Would an author of a 400 page book really put in those 40 paragraphs, hardly constituting 20 pages in the whole book, to just make it more "interesting"?
2. Isn’t the real life story of Kaavya [a geek trying to desparately get into Harvard, while losing out in personal life] too much in similarity with the book to claim that the whole idea has been lifted from elsewhere?
3. If there are really those many passages copied, why has no “complete” proof [ as in, all the passages in question have not been released] been shown by McCafferty’s lawyers when asked by Kaavya’s publishers?
4. If those few strikingly comparable passages are enough proofs against Kaavya, why is her publishing house, Little Brown standing by her side instead of suing her for all the trouble?
5. C’mon guys, a 10th standard kid who submits a copied assignment, feeds it in MS Word, changes all the words into their respective synonyms using the thesaurus option, and gets away with it easily in a class of 30. Kaavya is a girl on whom half a million dollars have been placed, half a dozen camera lights have been directed, and half a billion people are focused. Has she really imagined she could get away with practically anything?

Believe it or not, as I was writing this blog, and was searching for more articles to throw light on Kaavya’s stand, I came across this editorial, which carried by the Yahoo banner can easily make my article sound plagiarized!! Anyway, if Kaavya is really found guilty in this case, and if it appears that she has, in fact, neatly copy-pasted most of her work from other books, I would just believe that she is the dumbest any real-life Cinderella could get… a climax in which the fairy-tale princess not only drops her slipper but also smashes it into pieces in the hope of not leaving behind any proof of crime!!!