A footnote: plagiarism versus originality

Just to clarify my stand, overt influences need to be rightfully acknowledged wherever referenced, which makes perfect sense. Now Kaavya's case itself is rather inconsequential, not just in the larger scheme of things, but also because she has pilfered both style and construction, and not just expanded on the themes that impressed themselves upon her.

However, the ambiguity I was seeking to plumb, and which remains intriguing, is whether the spirit of a book can inspire another, equally worthwhile one. Whether a heavily influenced work(citing the influences faithfully, even) can escape the mantle, or even brand, of "Copy", "uninspired" and the like.

To be absolutely objective, almost everything 'new' or 'original' is necessarily informed by past experience. It is an inevitable axiom of life, and one that is truly irrevocable. Man is, more or less, the sum of his experiences, his life-events, his relationships, the sights, the people, the places, the thoughts, the prejudices that constitute his past. We strive to make sense of that absurd farrago that crowds our perceptions, that vast and impenetrable fog that has moulded us, breathed life into our endeavours, and in some sense, anchors us onto what is familiar and conforms to experience . So, experience merely adds a newer dimension to that canvas, that fashioned by someone or something else, mind you... In essence, man is derivative of everything he has seen and felt.

Now this is a complex and indefinable concept. So everything is in some way or the other, 'borrowed'. What then, may be condemned as a crime, under the circumstances? Maybe Kaavya was genuinely influenced as deeply as she owned she was, by Megan McCafferty's body of work, so much so that in following her example, she unconsciously duplicated her exemplar's traits in her own writing. Who can say?

But the bottomline still is that Kaavya should have known what she was doing and made a note of it. So, budding writers, beware! It doesn't help, either, that in these times, people are better qualified to detect such singularities in art(or whatever passes for it) than display a corresponding degree of virtu in the same.