Enough has been said about Fareed Zakaria and his plagiaristic ways, but he’s not the first to indulge in a little borrowing and inspiration. In fact, Zakaria has a long list of illustrious predecessors in India who showed him the way when it comes to dipping into others’ talents.

In 1999, the then-editor of Hindustan Times VN Narayanan had to resign after 38 years in journalism when 1,020 words of his 1,293 word column called ‘Forever in Transit’ were found to be identical to those in an article written by Bryan Appleyard in London’s Sunday Times. Interestingly enough, in that pre-Twitter age the copying was revealed by none other than rival newspaper Pioneer’s BN Uniyal. However, this was not the first time Narayanan had been accused of such word-theft. In 1992, when his column had been referred to the Press Council for plagiarism he had blamed his “photographic memory” due to which he unconsciously repeated the words of others! That case was dismissed as “pure harassment”. And despite having to resign, it’s not like Narayanan was shunned by the world of journalism. Instead, according to an article which appeared in Outlook in 2006, Narayanan went on to head Bangalore’s Harilal Bhagwati College of Communication and Management – teaching journalism students.

After a suitable gap of a decade, cries of plagiarism were heard again in 2010. That too in regard to a piece on Rajnikanth. In 2010, India Today carried a cover story on him for their southern editions. The Letter from the Editor for that issue had lifted 12 sentences from a Slate article on Rajnikanth, including gems such as, “If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth”.

Once the original source was discovered, editor-in-chief Aroon Purie whose signature the letter bore, did apologise to the writer of the piece, Grady Hendrix. The magazine’s next Letter from the Editor also apologised to its readers, while blaming the mistake on “jet lag”. A separate letter to Slate’s editor, David Plotz assured Plotz that “serious action has been taken against those concerned”. It was believed that then-Managing Editor Dileep Bobb who had allegedly written the piece was sacked.

This is not the only time that plagiarising by bade log has been found to have taken place in India Today. In 2007, Niranjana Iyer, an Indian book critic based in Canada wrote a blog about reading Mills & Boons in India. In 2008, India Today’s Deputy Editor Damayanti Datta wrote a blog post on the same topic which was suspiciously similar to Ms Iyer’s blog. In an extremely and understandably angry piece in 2009, Iyer compared the two posts and said she was yet to receive an apology from the magazine, even though she had written to Prabhu Chawla, who was editor at the time.

It’s not just journalists who are given to journalism. The jo tera hai wo mera hai (what’s yours is mine) spirit pervades the literary world too with writers happily stealing the works of their brethren. Even well-known writers such as Mulk Raj Anand have been accused of lifting articles. His inspiration was an article by RC Zaehner, a professor at Oxford. Either these journalists and writers couldn’t give a damn whether they’re caught, or they really believe they’re infallible. Their choice of victim and inspiration is difficult to understand otherwise.

Another Indian writer, Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen was also found to have plagiarised her 1994 novel Cranes’ Morning from Rosemary Tree – a 1956 novel by Elizabeth Goudge. Hers was one of the few cases in India when the book was recalled by the publisher.

Other Indian authors who have been embroiled in plagiarism include Indian-origin American teenager, Kaavya Vishwanathan who admitted that passages in her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life were plagiarised from two books by Megan McCafferty. The major shocker is of course Shiv Khera, self-help book author. In 2004, a retired railway official Amrit Lal alleged that there were 34 instances in the former’s book Freedom is not Free in which Khera had helped himself to words from Lal’s book India – Enough is Enough. The two were said to have reached an undisclosed settlement but not before Lal was quoted in Outlook as saying, “It was like seeing a priest coming out of a whorehouse”. With sentences like that, you can’t be surprised that Khera felt tempted to lift a few words here and there.

Big Bang Theory fans be warned, the following instance of plagiarism occurs in Dr Sheldon Cooper’s esteemed field of Theoretical Physics. We are talking about Dr B S Rajput who had to resign as Vice-Chancellor of Kumaon University in 2003 after it was established that a published paper co-authored by him had been ripped off from that by a Stanford professor. The investigation was carried out after President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam intervened.

Since Bollywood films have regularly been “inspired” by the West, our film reviewers too have adopted this ethos. In 2004, The Times of India’s film critic, Nikhat Kazmi was found to have copied huge chunks from a film review of Shark Tales by the Chicago Sun Times reviewer Roger Ebert. The following year it was found that Gautaman Bhaskaran had copied a New York Times review of the movie Alexander by reviewer, Manohla Dargis.

Going by our long tradition of plagiarism, across writing genres, while Zakaria might be the latest to get caught copying, it doesn’t look like he’s going to be the last. And following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Zakaria has also been welcomed back with open arms by CNN and TIME. As they wrote – all’s well that ends well.

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