Fareed Zakaria just screwed over all the guys who’ve quoted Fareed Zakaria. Now they have no idea who they’ve quoted.

This thought came to me out of the blue while I was scrolling down my facebook page with my to-be-used-only-when-a-fellow-journo-goes-down-in-flames emergency thumb. I had settled on a twitter feed from stand-up comedian Papa CJ and the quip just flashed in my head. Like a Keatsian whoosh!

Let’s face it. There’s not one of us who doesn’t get nervous at the prospect of being found filching lines or ideas from someone else. Strong phrases or ideas have a knack of slipping into our heads via some kind of brain-osmosis and slipping out into our writings again. Take the line, “Hindi is your mother; English is your wife”, that I read in one of Chetan Bhagat’s Times of India columns now collected in a fine bundle. It has stuck to my head like a naked piranha to a bum.

But however much I may want to use it without giving away that I’m actually re-using someone else’s line, I’d be a dunderhead to slip it in as if it’s mine. It’s too freakin’ risky.

Which is why Fareed Zakaria, journalism’s answer to Denzel Washington, is such a dunderhead. And frankly, what was he thinking when he stole lines from an essay by a Harvard history professor that had appeared a few months ago in The New Yorker? Didn’t he know that people reading The New Yorker read EVERYTHING?

So now we have pro-choice Fareed groupies, carrying liberal foetuses made from FZ’s frozen liberal sperm, struck dumb by the Conservative media watchdog Newsbusters (any resemblance to Newslaundry is purely coincidental). Sad.

To avoid a repetition of such dimwittedness/sadness, here are five ways in which you can avoid being charged with plagiarism:

1) STEAL FROM OBSCURE SOURCES:

However smitten you may be by lines from The Guardian, The New York Times, Time or Newsweek articles, avoid lifting from them. Even if the print circulations of these publications are plummeting, they are still being read on the internet and bandied about on facebook and twitter. In fact, people who never read The Economist and The Spectator are uploading their apps on their iPads and Kindles these days so as to share articles from them on their facebook wall in between their “The sky is so pretty” update status.

Instead, search for articles to steal from obscure publications. I would recommend nicking paragraphs from the English translation of the late Somali-Polish poet Abdilrashid Snolzbert’s essay, “Gun control and the American libido” which had appeared in the underground Iranian magazine printed in Canberra, Mazel Tov.

2) PEPPER YOUR ARTICLE WITH MANY QUOTES BEFORE SLIPPING IN THE STOLEN BITS:

This is a variation of the shoplifter’s golden rule of paying at the shop counter for ridiculously cheap things while stealing something more valuable. By buying something, the level of anyone suspecting that you’ve got something tucked under your trouser front drops dramatically. So have a trail of quotes by Muhammad Ali, Salim Ali, Salman Rushdie, Josef Stalin, even a cheeky dialogue from Gangs of Wasseypur 2 with sources mentioned running through your piece.

The chances of anyone spotting that lovely chunk you’ve nicked from Tarun Tejpal’s old essay in Tehelka will be minimal. And the beauty of this strategy is that even if someone, including Tejpal himself, spots the stolen slab, he’ll be bound to believe that someone has knocked the quotes off by mistake.

3) WHACK LINES FROM A HINDU ARTICLE:

I’m presuming that your piece will not appear in the venerable Hindu, a paper that not only has an ombudsman but also a separate floor where 12 non-journalistic employees sit for a particular task: of checking whether any material being published in the following day’s edition has any content directly or indirectly lifted from any other already published source, news agencies included. This leaves The Hindu with no time to check whether any other publication has any content directly or indirectly lifted from The Hindu later on.

What is most reassuring is the fact that readers of The Hindu don’t read anything else. While the readers of all other publications leave The Hindu to, well, The Hindu readers.

4) LIFT LINES WHOLESALE FROM ARTICLES WRITTEN IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE:

I can safely say at this juncture that whatever folks make of the English-non-English language divide, it has come extremely handy to me throughout my stainless steel career. In fact, my first breakthrough as a successful plagiarist was in school when I won a creative writing competition by translating the whole of the Beatles’ song “Happiness is a warm gun” into Bengali running prose. While the chances of a Bengali-reading Beatles fan catching my subterfuge were slim, chances of an English-reading Manik Bandopadhyay fan recognising the translated lines of the Bengali writer are far slimmer. In any case, a line such as “Mamata Banerjee can’t flip a fish and eat it” will sound superbly full of whimsy when it’s out in The Caravan. Never mind that in the original, it simply means that the person is incredibly naïve. You’ll be surprised how fresh and “uncatchable” a whole paragraph in Hindustan will be if it’s translated into English in Hindustan Times.

5) STICK TO YOUR OWN STUFF, EVEN IF IT SUCKS:

We’ll never know how an infamous September 1999 instalment of the then-Hindustan Times editor, VN Narayanan’s column ‘Musings” would have read if out of its 1,263 words 1,020 were not identical to those that appeared in an article written by British journalist Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times Magazine in February the same year. It would certainly have been shorter. And bereft of the bit about (Narayanan) seeing a sign he had (not actually) seen while (never) walking through Newark Airport. Some smart aleck in The Pioneer who read The Sunday Times, London, in the office file as well as the Hindustan Times played the snitch.

These days there’s the bloody internet. So if you don’t want to get your “incredible photographic memory” or “commendable talent to influence and be influenced” get you in trouble, don’t rip off other people’s writings.

At least, not until you’ve brainwashed yourself and everyone else to boot that it’s all a very post-modern exercise set up to challenge standard notions of originality, exclusivity and authorship in post-digital mass media that should be published – and published only – in Newslaundry.

Image Source: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/bingmanson/6347196214/]