A case of plagiarism.. an apology to Trisha Gupta..

It was brought to my attention today that Saurabh’s piece on Masaan was plagiarized from Trisha Gupta’s original Mumbai Mirror piece. Naturally she is rather upset about this. I hadn’t read either piece but then I quickly did a comparison and her complaint is entirely justified. I am rather disappointed I must say. I still did not wish to go public with this because I did not wish to shame anyone this way. Therefore as soon as I learnt about this I deleted the post and tweeted Trisha Gupta about this (she’d registered her complaint on twitter as well) but then someone left a comment on Saurabh’s post highlighting the similarities and I felt it only fair to give the other side a chance. I certainly owed it to Trisha Gupta. Obviously Qalandar wasn’t aware of Trisha Gupta’s piece either when he posted Saurabh’s article. Anyway I am now referencing the comment that was left today by someone below. I have of course deleted Saurabh’s post but I can testify to the fact that the claims below are entirely accurate. To this end I am appending a paragraph (as example) from Saurabh’s piece at the end here and one can compare it to the opening one in Trisha Gupta’s piece. This is completely unacceptable. My apologies to Trisha Gupta..

[This “review” is a rearranged word-for-word copy of a review in the Mumbai Mirror, written by Trisha Gupta, that was posted online on July 26, 2015 at 2:00 AM IST, or about a day and change before this was posted. (http://www.mumbaimirror.com/columns/columnists/trisha-gupta/A-river-runs-through-it/articleshow/48220795.cms).

For instance, paragraphs 1-3 of this “review” are paragraphs 6-8 of Ms Gupta’s review.

The remaining paragraphs of this piece, beginning with “Masaan ticks many of the boxes…” are paragraphs 1-5 of the Mumbai Mirror piece.

It is astonishing to me that the “author” has the audacity to simply copy-paste an entire other article, switch the order of paras a bit (not even that much) and pass it off as his own article. This is indeed a beatifully written piece, but it was not written by Saurabh and was first published on the Mumbai Mirror’s site. A removal and an acknowledgement of this travesty would be in order.]

from Saurabh’s piece:

[Masaan ticks many of the boxes people might think of when they think of Benaras. There is a retired Sanskrit teacher, and a drunken “dom” raja. There is the pulsating excitement of Durga Puja, and the quiet tableau of life along the ghats. But this Banaras is neither the sweetened Yash Raj variety that leavened the teariness of Pradip Sarkar’s “Laaga Chunari Mein Daag”, nor the relentlessly dialoguebaaz version that enlivened the first half of“Aanand L Rai’s “Raanjhana”. Rai and his scriptwriter Himanshu Sharma might be said to have specialised in a self-referential, sardonic, streetsmart Banaras – opening their film with Kundan (Dhanush) remembering his first sight of Zoya (Sonam) in childhood as “Benaras’s first gift to me”, or having Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub wistfully declare, “Mohalle ke laundon ka pyaar aksar doctor aur engineer utha ke le jaate hain” only to have our hero Kundan retort with “Murari, yeh Benaras hai. Agar launda sala yahan bhi haar gaya, toh jeetega kahan?” The masculine energy of the city that the film channelled was perhaps best summed up in the song “Banarasiya”, in which Irshad Kamil punned on the word for a denizen of Banaras and the fact of becoming a pleasure-seeker, a lover: “bana rasiya”.]