Consider another example. I decide to build on a famous idea--say Charles Darwin’s idea on natural selection or BP Koirala’s idea of national reconciliation. If the concept of stealing the idea of the idea of putting a picnic table in your backyard doesn’t quite sound like stealing, why can’t I write about Darwin’s or Koirala’s ideas without any attribution to these ‘original’ thinkers?
The problem starts with finding that single original thinker. For, over the years, some of the brightest ideas that have changed the world have come to at least a couple of people simultaneously. Take the idea of the evolution of species that occurred to Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace around the same time, even though Darwin gets more credit for expounding the concept at greater length. Or the idea of telephone that Graham Bell and Elisha Gray stumbled upon, almost in unison--once again with Gray, like Wallace, losing out on fame to Bell because he was apparently late in filing for a patent.
But is there a difference between stealing ideas and stealing words. For words, essentially, constitutes an idea. Say I want to do a piece on the Gorkhali conquest and in my quest borrow heavily from Mahesh Chandra Regmi’s works. Now, the common belief is that I ought to attribute him for his version of the conquest. But Regmi is writing history, which, ideally, should have only one version. Thus if it is true that… “By the early years of the 19th century, the Gorkhali rulers had succeeded in bringing under their control the Himalayan region from the Tista river in the east to the Sutlej river in the west” need I still attribute the statement to Regmi? How can merely restating the facts be considered stealing in this case, any more than when I write “the security forces had reported that as many as 500 Maoist combatants might have been killed during the Maoist assault on the north-western district of Beni on March 21, 2004”? Did I need to ‘quote’ some newspaper on the latter example?
I am well aware that this article might be considered a case of plagiarism too. Yes, I would love to claim the ingenious idea for myself. But what did I do except borrow bits and pieces from others?
One of my recent Facebook updates, which, admittedly, might not be that original either was, “There is no thought/feeling/emotion I have had that somebody else hasn´t, at some point in his/her life, experienced. I know it makes me just one of the billions of ordinary blabbering bipeds roaming about this planet. But the thought makes me more humane too.” I wrote this on the back of my long experience of coming up with ‘brilliant original’ ideas--each of which, save for the specifics, eventually turned out to be someone else’s. Whenever I think I have come up with the most original idea, I only need to do a little research to find that my line of thought has long ago been put into words by a renowned author, scientist or philosopher. Mine his works and you are likely to find that William Shakespeare has said just about everything about love; or Fyodor Dostoevsky about the eternal struggle between faith in god and the wretched human existence.
This raises another important question. In borrowing from other authors, what level of disclosure is needed? The first paragraph of this article was copied almost word for word from Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture. (Forgive me, I don’t know if they sell picnic tables at Bhatbhateni, which I conveniently replaced for Sears).
I haven’t read Lessig’s book. I pulled his words from Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker essay Something Borrowed, which is also, for the lack of a better term, ‘the inspiration’ for this article. But in borrowing his idea, would I have been stealing form Gladwell had I not disclosed the source of my inspiration? Or, to stretch the argument a little further, would I have plagiarized had I failed to attribute the opening lines to Lessig? Of course, many of you might say, without a second thought. But I am sure even Lessig would agree that another law professor in his stead could easily have come up with a similar example. Why should Lessig have exclusive claim over something that just about anyone else from his background could have said?
Let me stretch the argument farther still. Shankar Lamichhane, considered the father of stream of consciousness in Nepali literature, famously ‘lifted’ an article on avant-garde from an international publication. Lamichhane’s excuse? Penniless at the time, he needed some money. But couldn’t Lamichhane have claimed (he was humble enough to accept the charge of plagiarism, by the way) that just by translating the original work into Nepali, he was creating something unique in itself?
The fact is that we human beings are far too similar to one another than we would like to admit--even (or especially) in the realm of dreams. People on psychoactive drugs sometimes report truly surreal dreams, which, they might claim, with some justification in my view, could potentially match the best of Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism.
If so, the genius of Rushdie and Marquez lies in their hard work, of constantly striving to narrate their experiences in the best possible words rather than in their natural flair for the wondrously bizarre. Most of us are just too lazy (or might not have the needed language skills; the two often amounts to the same thing) to be able to put our mental experiences in print as articulately as Rushdie or Marquez do. There are plenty of examples of drug-induced works of genius. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed one of his most famous works, Kubla Khan, immediately after waking up from an opium-induced stupor. The ‘king of horror,’ Stephen King uses cocaine “to create a buzz to write”. Charles Baudelaire believed hashish and opium were “the most efficient” in creating “the artificial ideal”. This is not to imply that all great works of literature, or even the majority of them, are result of drug-induced dreams. Here I intend only to suggest that the effects of some common drugs on common people are, unsurprisingly, common.
All said and done, I am well aware that this article might be considered a case of plagiarism too. Yes, I would love to claim the ingenious idea for myself. But what did I do except borrow bits and pieces from others?
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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