The recent Fareed Zakaria episode
has sent warning signals to the people who have mastered the art of plagiarism. I do not wish to judge what he has done as a genuine mistake
or as a pure and deliberate intellectual dishonesty. I also do not wish to argue that it is a result of any professional envy. But, it has sent a message
to many who hesitate to acknowledge the source from which they have lifted the
content literally. May be it was a sheer
coincidence that on the same day one of the vibrant blogging communities in
India detected a few blog posts where patterns of systematic and merciless
copying were done.
Recently I was editing a few
articles submitted by some high ranking officials for a souvenir. It was very
unpleasant to see some glaring plagiarism by two of them (who lifted portions
from Wikipedia) without even acknowledging the source. Drawing ideas from
others to substantiate one’s point is fine. But one can’t lift several
sentences from another person’s work and express as his own and fail to acknowledge
the original contributor or source even in the references. This has happened to
some of my blog articles as well. In spite of a warning that they are
copyrighted, I found that extracts from my blog have been lifted by others.
Fortunately for us, through Google we can track such clever practices.
Now I am on a different but akin
topic now. That is about the ghost writers and their unaccountability. I
somehow feel that some of the highly paid writers and high profile dignitaries
who face terrible deadlines and time constraints are in the habit of
outsourcing their writings, reports and speeches. This can land them in serious
trouble if those people who write on behalf of them have compromised on the
originality of the text they wrote.
Ghost writers (or Outsourced writing) and Plagiarism
The profession of ghost writing
is not a recent phenomenon. In this era of outsourcing, along with the
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO), we now
have outsourcing of writings of any kind: Speeches, theses, dissertations,
editorials and messages. Outsourcing of theses and dissertations are very
popular among students of some of the universities where neither the student
nor the guide is capable of proving or disproving any hypothesis or has any
inclination either to make an experimental or exploratory or descriptive study
independently. The entire work is
given as a comprehensive contract to a ‘professional thesis writer’ who has
mastered the art of ‘content analysis’ of works done on similar themes and
can liberally lift the extracts
meticulously. One could only sympathize
with their utterly worst performance during the public viva-voce examination.
As theses and dissertations are increasingly being uploaded over internet, one
could possibly detect the plagiarized content without much difficulty.
Speeches and Messages
Our busy leaders need to be worried now. Most of our senior leaders from
all fields, viz. corporate, politics, bureaucracy, agree to give speeches and
lectures to several audiences. Many are invited to speak every day to different
audiences and sometimes more than one speech on the same day. Most of these
speeches are delivered through reading from a prepared written text and lasts for
20 minutes to nearly an hour. Can we believe
that these busy leaders prepare these speeches themselves?
I used to believe during my
college days that
