Wining and dining at S.D.’s was the fun stuff that it always is—a lot of good food with alchohol and conversation, both of which just ceased to flow. Darby and I met A.di for the first time and I have to say this. I have never seen anyone wear such a crisp white shirt before. I would even a few days ago take pride in mine but I abdicate the throne. Moving away from such frivolous sartorial details, let me type my impression of A.di, someone I’d love to be in touch with. She is one vocal, feisty and fun woman. She is an ex-colleague of S.D.’s and we had already heard so many good things about her. S.D. had told us in detail the effort and vigour that A.di would put in everything she did at the hell-hole of a university they both taught in. But she just ‘had to’ leave the place the moment she had the opportunity for it seems she couldn’t have survived there. And I don’t blame her. One might ask “why not stay there and fight the system?” but the survivors there who make any sense confess that with the ‘crab mentality’ abounding there, no decent or honest work gets done. And that has been the case for over 15 years. A.di now stays in New Zealand with her husband and son. She has successfully completed a creative writing course, one of the best in that country and plans to devote herself to full-time writing. She seems to be indebted to her former workplace for two reasons—1)one because it has taught her that good people are the same all over the world and bad people are the same all over the world, too, and 2) had it not been for her terrifying work experience there, she wouldn’t have discovered the writer in her. Incidentally, it has left such an indelible impression on her creative mind that her dissertation is an impish campus novel. She is currently working on getting her work published in India and I hope she tastes success.
Our free flowing discussion that day covered as diverse topics as the current absurd questioning by Heathrow Airport officials of Indians they presumably think might tell them something about the Mumbai terror attacks(guffaw!), the increasingly democratic tendency seen in the selection of Rhodes Scholars in the recent years, a Jewish friend of A.D.’s who is a devout believer and a homosexual simultaneously, how he tries reconciling these contraries in his life, and plagiarism. I learned a couple of things. Supposedly, Indians and Koreans are the most notorious when it comes to plagiarising. I am not surprised that Indians make it somewhere to the top of that list because poor us! We do not even understand the concept of plagisrising and how serious its implications can be, precisely because a majority of us go through the entire grind of education in our country (even higher education) through the tried and tested method of ‘rote and mug’. Koreans, I was informed, apparently take the cake. Whereas tutorials in India often ensure that the same material is produced by all their beneficiaries in examinations, where even university professors are guilty of writing lectures where they ‘harmlessly’ lift from other sources, in Korea, the best essay adjudged by a teacher in a language class is copied by all the students as per the instructions of the teacher!!! This, my friends, is the norm there. I don’t know which is worse. And then we talk about brain drain and how the best are leaving India for greener pastures. Have we ever pondered over the fact that may be not all, but so many leave their own homeland because their efforts are wasted in the by lanes of redtapism and because their best work goes unappreciated in their own land? People are too busy celebrating mediocrity and accepting lack of originality time and again in almost all spheres of life to bother about the ones we lose to foreign shores.Brain drain is happening every day all around us in our country—in our homes, in seats of learning, at workplaces, in election booths. And I call it brain drain because I find all around me a culture that ingrains in its followers a tendency not to question, a perverse desire to nip doubts in their buds without letting them grow, without quashing them with reason and convincing logic. I feel responsible as a teacher to ask my students to think, to analyse, to question and not accept anything or anyone at face value. And if I have failed in fulfilling this moral duty, I have failed to do my job.
P.S. I must make one point clear about this post. I do not think at all that Kaavya Vishwanathan was oblivious to the fact that hers was a case of blatant plagiarism. What I was referring to is academic plagiarism in classroom notes and answers found in tests. Students in India find framing answers by lifting passages from critics a completely innocuous exercise.
