Plagiarism
Published by quizman January 22nd, 2005 in GeneralAmit writes about plagiarism in the Indian blogosphere. I saw a couple of interesting blog posts, circa Nov 2004, that caught a famous film critic from one of India’s biggest newspapers plagiarizing blatantly from the reviews of a world famous US critic. Read about it in Kitabkhana and DesiMediaBitch.
Around 1997-98, CricInfo published an article on April 1st about an Oxbridge professor called “Loof Lirpa” discovering the spin secrets of Shane Warne. There were comments on aerodynamics, friction, seam movement and the like. It was beautifully written and one couldn’t help laughing out loud at the creative genius who had made it all up. Next day, lo and behold, Asian Age - Bangalore edition, reproduced the same article verbatim on the front page. The journalist, who had put his own name on the article, quoted CricInfo and went on about how the intricate details of Warne’s deliveries were dissected. I couldn’t believe my eyes. For some reason, I could not keep quiet about it. I called up the Asian Age office, got this person on the line and the conversation went something like this:
Me: “The article that you quoted on the front page. Did you notice that it was an April Fool spoof?”
Him: “How do you know?”
Me: “ummm..Loof Lirpa is April Fool written backwards”
Him: Pause…”How do you know it is a spoof?”
It went on for about two more minutes and I hung up. Next day, I sent an e-mail to the Editor (M. J. Akbar) and cc-ed the editor of CricInfo. The latter guffawed at the joke. The former did not reply.
True story.
The Nikhat Kazmi story was broken by Delhi blogger Jai Arjun a.k.a. “Jabberwock” in his post Whorism in film writing
Thank you for your kind words about the Loof Lirpa article- mostly written by myself but with help from CricInfo colleagues. I did not realise the Asian Age had picked it up, but I think I wrote 4 or 5 Loof Lirpa articles in all, every one of which made it to mainstream media elsewhere. The plagiarism really made the joke worthwhile
A couple of the others are still on-line do a search on loof Lirpa and cricket and you’ll find them..