Kaavya Viswanathan

So Ms. Viswanathan has been in the news for the past couple of weeks. Came across her story quite accidentally… was checking how much butt Venus is kicking, and the next picture was hers, with her name below it and no additional information. You can read the story here. Briefly, she’s 19 and a sophomore at Harvard, signed a book deal at age 17, got a 500,000 dollar advance: "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got In". Really impressive story, and I was about to forward it to a friend (to get her working on her daughter who’s showing promise as a budding movie critic, to illustrate that with support and direction, she too could be signing a book deal in no time) when I open the next link and discovered all was not well.

She is accused of plagiarizing passages from two books by the same author… now that the book is under an electron microscope it’s 3 plagiarized authors so far. Na isitoshe! “they” are now looking into articles she wrote while interning at a newspaper… but wait… why stop there, go all the way to the cradle why don’t you!

Lots of blogs about it, tones of schadenfreude (my new favorite word) and most importantly, a young life has taken a hard knock. Allowed myself to sink into “take that wunderkind” for a quick second, then just really sympathized with her 'cause she's just a kid, and i'm sure we all remember how indian kids at school just HAD TO BE the brightest, fastest,...-est. Hope she emerges stronger.

Being a fan of 'chick lit', it tickled enormously to read that a 'great mind' thought "plagiarizing from chick lit has to be some kind of double whammy against artistic integrity".