Caught in the heist

Sometimes, you look up to someone as your role model and then they goof up. That's what happened with Fareed Zakaria. As of now, the celebrated columnist has been given a clean chit on plagiarism charges and reinstated too. But he's not the first to steal something from someone and pass it off as his own. Nearly everybody does that. Like we show off an iPad as if we invented it. And if my memory serves me right, Prometheus stole the fire and put it up on eBay for sale—thus angering both Olympus and that hapless Stone Age guy who rubbed flintstones. Talking of anger, Rajat Gupta must be feeling deeply sorry for himself as he didn't even rob a dollar. The lecturer in him was just sharing knowledge. Oops, bad luck. The greater trouble, however, is that overachieving folks like him had already reached the pinnacle of their field. And what they don't realize is that they are harming those they once inspired. I don't know much about insider trading but i see how plagiarism works. After all, I'm pretty active on Twitter (not as much as I'd like to but still). On the timeline, the day someone starts plagiarizing your lousy tweets is the day you actually arrive. On the contrary, nobody needs to arrive on Facebook. The reason being very simple: Famous-quotes beget one-liners beget copy-paste. Personally, i don't give a damn about credit as long as I'm getting paid for my lame tweets and blogs (which I'm not). At the end of the day, we'll be forgotten like the rest of them. Only our work will be remembered and if we are lucky enough, shall get plagiarized too.

"You plagiarist, you stole my f—ing quote!" - what one Anonymous said to another