| While Khera was writing Freedom is Not Free, he met Amrit Lal and asked whether they could "work together" on the book. He even presented Lal with a copy of Freedom is Not Free. That's when Lal discovered 34 instances of cut-and-paste "borrowings" from his own book India: Enough is Enough, and decided that enough was, indeed, enough. |
| Confronted, Khera sent Lal a cautiously worded letter denying an intent to plagiarise, but appreciated Lal's "having brought to our attention some sentences from your book for which giving a credit escaped our attention". (Speaking of giving credit where credit's due, this paragraph was compiled from news reports""there are few things more embarrassing than a column about plagiarism being sued for the moral lapse in question!) |
| Lal is furious; Khera is being careful (his website, www.shivkhera.com, has an under-construction notice up these days) but has also said that borrowing sentences from various sources and creating a new work out of it is not plagiarism. |
| This is not an entirely new thought: the person who originally said "Steal from one, it's plagiarism; steal from two, it's research" is thought to be John Milton. (Wilson Mizner, Steven Wright and John Burke were among the authors who stole this reflection. And I think I stole the idea of using this example from Anne Fadiman's essay on plagiarism, though I can't be sure because a friend has stolen my copy of her book.) |
| There are very few instances of plagiarism as clear-cut as the one where the late Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen stole an entire book from Elizabeth Goudge, where even the faintest shadow of doubt was laid to rest by a comparison of the opening lines of the two novels. (Chapter One, The Rosemary Tree by Goudge, opening sentences: "Harriet at her window watched the gulls with delight. It meant bad weather at sea when they came up-river, and she had known when she woke this morning in the waiting stillness, and had seen the misted sky, that the long spell of fine weather was going to break in a gale" and etc. |
| Chapter One, Crane's Morning, Aikath-Gyaltsen, opening sentences: "Old Vidya sat at her window and watched the cranes with delight. It meant bad weather on this plateau when they came from the east and she had known, when she woke this morning and had seen the misted sky, that the long spell of fine weather was going to break in a rainstorm" and etc.) |
| Most cases are far more murky, as with Nancy Stouffer's conviction that J K Rowling had stolen the Harry Potter idea: Stouffer claimed to have invented the term "muggle" and she had written a book that featured a character called Larry Potter. The similarities began""and ended""here; the case went to court but the judges ruled in Rowling's favour with no ambiguity whatsoever. |
| Lewis Perdue, author of several books that share the same obsession with Christian mysticism, gold keys and the "divine feminine principle" as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, genuinely believes that Brown stole his idea. But genuine, fervent conviction isn't the same thing as proof, and Perdue's claims run afoul of the legal concept of scene a faire. (Scene a faire is the idea that you can't copyright information that flows naturally from the setting of a book; that is, the shackling of slaves on plantations and their miserable living conditions will appear in most books on slavery, so you can't claim that another book that features chained and beaten slaves has stolen your idea. I stole this definition from a dictionary of literary terms.) |
| If you've browsed Lal's list of similarities and outright sentence borrowings, there's no question that he has cause for grievance. His sentences, his thoughts and his phrasing pop up in too many instances in Freedom; he and Khera worked together, and how! But to paraphrase Khera's catchphrase, "Bestselling authors don't do different things. They do things differently." |
| The original is "Winners don't do different things. They do things differently." I think that this is trademarked. Incidentally, the cached copyright page on Khera's website states clearly, or did until the site went offline: "This Site or any portion of this Site may not be reproduced, duplicated, copied, sold, resold, or used for any commercial purpose not expressly permitted by Mr. Shiv Khera or an authorized signatory (specifically permitted in writing) on his behalf. The Shiv Khera Group retains an exclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce any third party document, on the Site, or permit in writing any third party to do so." Khera may be ambiguous about the extent to which the rights of other authors apply to their work, but he is very clear about his own rights. |
| But Lal unwittingly gets to the heart of the matter when he says that Khera's books depend heavily on borrowed material. ("Even in his bestselling You Can Win, it's 73 per cent anecdotes and jokes""82 anecdotes, almost all of them unacknowledged, in 290 pages," he told Outlook.) Like many authors, Amrit Lal takes the idea of a printed book very seriously. To him, a book is the original product of a writer's reflections, imagination and intellect. |
| Khera is doing unto Lal what self-help authors the world over have done to everything""from the Bible to personal anecdotes. What he's selling is not a book but a brand: the Shiv Khera brand, suitably trademarked. He's not offering or promising originality any more than The Chicken Soup series is. The Chicken Soup books are composed entirely and unapologetically of borrowed anecdotes. Likewise, when Paulo Coelho uses hoary old stories, the stuff of email forwards, in his column, the value he brings to those stories is not that they're original, but that they're endorsed by him. |
| Like Coelho, Khera must have seen nothing wrong in what he does; it's not what he put together that was important but how he added "value". Khera is a repackager, a brand manager who sells a specific product that he's willing to endorse as effective as opposed to the original. Lal should be acknowledged, even compensated; but his case comes down to how you perceive a book. |
| If you think every book is a truly original creation, that all insights should receive at least the grace of acknowledgement if they're rewarmed by someone else, then you see books as creative works of the mind. |
| If you feel that some books are just packages, their contents put together on the sanitised assembly line and guaranteed to be useful in a certain way, then you see books as products, just like running shoes, or branded clothes or watches. You're buying the signature, not the T-shirt. |
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