Letters to the Editor
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I can't believe what I just read
Failure would be getting a book deal and writing crappy books that nobody wants to read. Ms. Viswanathan didn't fail. Plagarism is far more serious, grotesque and, for me, unforgivable. She stole the work of others to pass off as her own. That it may seem unbelievable to those of us who don't steal from others doesn't mean it was so remarkable to her. Amorality does that. "What was she thinking?!" Unless we are thieves too, it is hard to understand how a thief thinks. I don't remember Salon publishing empathetic tributes to Ben Domenech that chalked up his theft as only a misguided desire to please the tireless demands of his ethnicity. Ms. Viswanathan submitted stolen work as her own. If you buy her "internalizing" excuse, shame on you. To credit her Indian background as an accomplice in her vile act is insulting to Indians. That kind of weak-minded crap begs the response that the reason Indian-Americans do so well in spelling bees is because, obviously, they cheat.
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Are you kidding?
Take your sense of racial superiority back to India, Sandip. That's not what America's about.
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Only at Salon: It's a woman AND a minority, so we will CELEBRATE her plagarism.
This article cracked me up for several reasons:
1. If this "writer" was male and white, he would not have even been mentioned in Salon, which is what this wordthief desearved.
2. She didn't copy ALMOST WORD FOR WORD VAST TRACKS OF THE BOOK on purpose. She did it because she was so brilliant, she had no idea that she was plagarizing! She couldn't help the fact that her memory was so good. She
3. The assertion that Indians are better at everything then everyone else. The author doesn't know if it's genetic, but there's just got to be SOME reason why they are just so damn awesome at everything. Yes, no wonder they always win spelling bees. It has nothing to do with hard work and practice. It's just a part of being Indian! I wonder how quickly a white intellectual would be crusified by Salon if he speculated aloud why Caucasians seem to be so good at something, and then concludes with thinly-veiled language that it must have something to do with there whiteness. After all, don't most white kids have to memorize the Declaration of Independence and scores of Walt Whitman.
If it walks like racism and talks like racism, it's racism. I don't care how much melanin it has.
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Duck
Maybe they won all the spelling bees because they were up against you as an opponent?
Whether you agree with the author or not, the whole point is that he's writing as an 'insider', talking specifically about pressures--at least in his mind--placed on him by people within his ethnic group. I don't see him justifying what Kaavya has done so much as give us examples of this traditional "pressure" and how it's affected his life. I also don't think Kaavya's downfall will change anything within that community; she'll just be looked on as an anomaly, conveniently overlooked, IMHO.
White males and females have been adding their take on this story too; it's just not from the same angle.
Duh.
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Even more plagiarism on her part
It wasn't just the two McCafferty books. From the Washington Post:
"Tuesday the (New York) Times reported that it had discovered similarities between Viswanathan's book and Sophie Kinsella's 'Can You Keep a Secret?' Also Tuesday, the Crimson reported it had found other sections where 'Opal Mehta' echoed Rushdie's 'Haroun and the Sea of Stories' and Meg Cabot's book 'The Princess Diaries'."
I get that she was under enormous pressure, but how could a young woman as brilliant as she must be not know this was all going to come crashing down on her? Obviously, the only thing that mattered at the time was doing whatever it took to make the pressure go away.
I have a great deal of sympathy for her and it all has to do with her age. It's not like she spent a decade plotting and planning how she could get away with publishing a book that she stole from others in order to make some quick bucks, she was a teenager trying to secure her future. She was 17 and she made a terrible mistake. What 17 year old hasn't? Only most 17 year olds never live to see their mistakes revealed on a global scale.
However, I disagree entirely that being 17 lets her off the hook. She was a brilliant 17 year old who fully knew the difference between right and wrong. And she knows that difference now. I imagine she's in no shape to admit to what she did just now, but I hope that she will. Acknowledging her deliberate plagiarism is really the only decent thing she can do.
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Unbelievably snotty and racist
While I respect high achievement, I suspect the outstanding results of Indian immigrants stems from the fact that they are almost entirely respresentatives of the super-wealthiest and most privileged segment of their Indian homeland.
This stands in stark contrast to generations of American immigrants from other countries, who have traditionally been the persecuted, downtrodden, those seeking a decent life and so on. It usually takes such under-privileged types a generation or two to climb the American ladder of success.
However, this is strikingly not true of Indian immigrants. My hometown has a very substantial Indian community. It appears that they ARRIVE in the US already complete with advanced degrees, or with the ability to get into competitive US colleges (tutition entirely paid for by wealthy parents back in India). Then after taking advantage of a fancy education, or easily finding jobs in the computer or engineering or medical fields, they decide to stay on and enjoy a lavish US lifestyle rather than taking their skills back to their needy country of origin.
I have often wondered about the long term harm done to India (and China and Pakistan and others) when we cheerfully drain off their best and brightest engineers, computer specialists and doctors, high level professionals who are desperately needed back home.
However, given this, why is it ANY surprise that these pampered overachievers from overseas turn out to be stellar performers here in the US? I mean, we've pretty much put out the red carpet for them and made it very, very easy. If we sent our finest native born US engineers/doctors/computer geeks to another tolerant, open country, wouldn't THEY turn out to be the smartest and highest achievers in THAT society?
This is the flip side of the painful ongoing debate about immigration. How much of the store are we going to give away before we realize there is nothing left for those who were born and grew up here?