Letters to the Editor
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glorified wankery
so who was this article really about, roy?? it must have gotten tiring typing with just one hand.
and if you read this roy, please laugh at yourself, or you have no life!
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Saving lives
A young man stepped out in front of the Caltrain last year. The East Indian parents in my daughters class knew the boy, shaking their heads in dismay. Opal Mehta, her borrowed words, did not save him. Salmon Rushdie, risking his life to speak freely, but not free of Opal Mehta stealing his words. Will she save him? And Sandip Roy, who we came to enjoy hearing, but now wonder at his lack of humility, a golden boy bragging while so many in India barely get one meal a day. Will Opal Mehta save him?
Whatever money Opal does make, will that be used to help the uneducated? Please ask Kaavya. Maybe then she will also be saved.
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How did this happen?
I've heard all about the plagiarism, top and bottom but does anyone know how a 17 year-old got a $500,000 two book deal without a book? It's my understanding Ms. Viswanathan was taken under contract before she even wrote anything. It's really not that surprising that a story with such a beginning would end badly. And of course, Ms. Viswanathan needs to take full blame and responsibility for her actions but at the very least when she signed up for fame and fortune she was a minor/adolescent. The people who signed her up were adults ready to pimp a sweet young thing so as better to exploit a niche market. We've all had Y.A. chicklit, now some East Indian Y.A. chicklit--on some level the publishers got exactly what they wanted; the same old young adult literature for girls but with curry and Saris instead of burgers and blue jeans.
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Oh pity the pretty Harvard girl with 500G's
I just wonder, did she plagiarize in high school to get into Harvard?
That is one thing I noted the Indian mafia in my school were always good at: helping each other out.
Legal, moral, whatever, all they cared about was getting into Harvard and making $$$
This is the outcome.
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Smack me upside the head.
As someone who has always countered high expectations with flagrant failure, I got a kick out of the article.
And while I take great choleric umbrage at the myriad literary felonies of Kaavya Viswanathan, I can't despise her like I so lustily despise James Frey. James Frey abused the trust of junkies, addicts, and wannabe junkies and addicts; Kaavya abused the trust of the YA market. Plus Ms. Viswanathan is cute, while Mr. Frey is the Anticute.
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How did this happen?
I've heard all about the plagiarism, top and bottom but does anyone know how a 17 year-old got a $500,000 two book deal without a book? It's my understanding Ms. Viswanathan was taken under contract before she even wrote anything. It's really not that surprising that a story with such a beginning would end badly. And of course, Ms. Viswanathan needs to take full blame and responsibility for her actions but at the very least when she signed up for fame and fortune she was a minor/adolescent. The people who signed her up were adults ready to pimp a sweet young thing so as better to exploit a niche market. We've all had Y.A. chicklit, now some East Indian Y.A. chicklit--on some level the publishers got exactly what they wanted; the same old young adult literature for girls but with curry and Saris instead of burgers and blue jeans.
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jeez
As opposed to white people, who are non-competitive and above that sort of thing.
By the way, I suspect she did not get into Harvard on her own merits (hiring a $20,000 applicant packaging--as opposed to book packaging--firm like IvyWise looks pretty fishy in retrospect), but this talk of an Indian mafia is getting silly, if not downright racist. Just call her a plagiarist--her background, regardless of what Sandip Roy said, is really not the issue here.
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What in the World?
It is almost as offensive as the news of Ms. Viswanathan's dishonesty to read so many Viswanathan Apologists chalk up her crime the fault of her youth and inexperience. When I was 17 I was a college-bound high schooler who knew very well that copying other people's work was an incredibly serious, wrong thing to do--and I was only planning on going to Georgia State, not Harvard. Why are so many posters here willing to give her a pass? "She was too young to know she committed a serious error" explains Mary E. "Its partly her fault," raves theannalog. PARTLY her fault?!?! Sure, publishers encourage plagiarism--they don't care that it discredits the publishing house and errodes public confidence in the industry. "Just don't get caught," they whisper as they hand over the envelop full of money, laughing to themselves because they've exploited another empty-headed teenager. What's wrong accountability? We'd probably suffer fewer episodes of this nonsense if the perps didn't think they could make a soft landing on misguided homilies that explain away antisocial behavior: "Don't blame him, you know his parents drank." Jimminy Christmas!
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Who's smug?
Sandip Roy's strange narrative of the superhuman abilities of Indians is probably meant to be ironic, but it doesn't quite work. Instead, he comes across as smugly self-congratulatory. He claims, essentially, that while there are a few ordinary Indians who should be accepted in their ordinariness, the rest of us in the diaspora - Roy included, of course - are superhuman doctors, programmers and spelling-bee robots.
While there are all sorts of things that are wrong with this vision, I will restrict myself to pointing out two. One is that Roy, like much of the upper-class diaspora, seems to live in a world of willed blindness. He does not see the rest of the South Asian diaspora: the cab drivers, convenience store clerks, motel owners, and waiters in Indian restaurants. Are they also supermen with photographic memories and IIT degrees, to be fondly admonished for pushing their children a little too hard?
The other problem is that the smugness of the doctors, computer geeks and spelling-bee parents is essentially fascist: a nasty mixture of self-satisfaction, cultural anxiety, disdain for others, and contempt for a liberal education. It is not coincidental that this elite segment of the Indian diaspora in North America and Britain is viscerally anti-Muslim, and a major contributor of money and political support to the Hindu right in India. Sandip Roy may not subscribe to that ideology, but he does seem to share their vision of what it means to be South Asian in the contemporary world.