Kishore Singh: Plagiarise this!

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Jabberwocky, my colleague in office and precocious blogger on the Net, was being obtuse. "Do we have a policy on plagiarism?" he wanted to know.

"We don't," I said by way of hasty explanation, "plagiarise." "Not us here," he said, "but other journalists, are they free to lift copy from journalists elsewhere in the hope they'll never be found out?" "Why do you want to know?" I asked suspiciously, "Are you planning on switching jobs?"

But Jabberwocky, it seemed, was the one who wanted to ask the questions. "Do you know Nikhat Kazmi?" he queried. "She's a film critic with a very sound understanding of cinema," I hedged, recalling a conversation with friends who seemed to think rather highly of her knowledge of cinema.

"You do know Roger Ebert?" my colleague continued his cross-questioning. "I haven't had the pleasure," I responded acidly. "Roger Ebert," Jabberwocky said by way of explanation, "reviews films for Chicago Sun Times." "And I'm sure enjoys it too," I countered, "but I'm not looking to hire a film critic, whether Indian or American."

"Of course not," said my colleague sniffily, "it's just that Ebert reviewed a film called Shark Tale in Chicago Sun Times, and Nikhat Kazmi reviewed the same film last week in The Times of India, and the sum and substance of both seems to be extraordinarily similar."

"Coincidence," I said, "besides, how many different ways could there be of writing that a film is good, bad or indifferent?"

"What if," he continued, "entire sentences of one review also appeared in the other review? Would that be a case of plagiarism?" "I suppose so," I said, "that's provided they actually are lifted in the manner you mention and not, like most Bollywood cinema today, merely inspired by the general theme."

At which point, being the kind of Jabberwocky who tends to store evidence of wrong-doings in a bloggy manner, he placed before me the two reviews, one of which was clearly signposted from Chicago Sun Times, and the other from The Times of India.

Passages, several of them, had been helpfully underlined, establishing a clear link between one review being identical in parts to the other. If Ebert wrote "Time slips into the future" then so does Nikhat, and if Nikhat wrote "The movie merely recycles the plot of The Godfather, and the Jaws inspiration gets the thumbs up when the famous theme music, scary for people, is an inspiring national anthem for the sharks", Ebert's variant reads: "The movie doesn't follow the plot of The Godfather so much as recylce its characters, and the Jaws inspiration gets an early smile when the famous theme music, scary for people, is as inspiring to sharks as the national anthem."

Checking both, I could see there were sentences where not a word had been changed; others where a couple of words had, in fact, been omitted, or added. But on the whole, it did appear that either Roger Ebert and Nikhat Kazmi were the same, or here was a case that screamed plagiarism.

"Wait," I said, for I was finding it hard to believe that a critic with a national newspaper could stoop to borrow entire passages from someone else's work, "maybe you are just presuming that it was Nikhat who plagiarised Ebert.

Perhaps," I volunteered, "it was the other way round." Jabberwocky smirked, "That might have been true if Ebert's review hadn't appeared in the first week of October and Nikhat's in the last week of November."

"Then," I surmised, "it appears that you may be right, therefore to answer your first query, I was always a little saddened I didn't know Nikhat Kazmi, but I don't think I mind it so much any more."