Sweet Tooth For Barfi

Barfi is the new flavour of this festival season with film critics and YouTube enthusiasts having developed a sweet tooth for the movie by same name. They seem to be chomping on it with the same gusto as anchors of foodie shows on TV.

The movie whetted their appetites after it got selected to represent the country at Oscars. The movie makers in their pursuit for 'inspiration' have not even spared Korean and Japanese movies and quite unknowingly ended up providing a 'globalised' spot-the-original-scene contest for critics.

Plagiarism in Hindi and for those matter movies of any Indian language is as old as hills. Movie makers had no qualms in lifting themes, songs and their chances of getting caught was always as remote as noose around Ajmal Kasab.

Within India also this link is incestuous. A Tamil filmmaker may lift a story from Hindi movie, or a Malayalam film maker may lift it from Tamil.

However film makers over the years have become craftier about plagiarism. Gone are the days of lifting themes from just one film. Thus we had a movie like 1970s hit Love Story, based on Eric Segal's novel having 'inspired' many in India. The result was Ankhiyon ke jarokhon se in Hindi and Madanolsavam in Malayalam, which was also dubbed in Tamil as Paruva Mazhai. Now thanks to internet and satellite television, they copy scenes from dozens of films and that too not just from Hollywood.

But little do these filmmakers know that internet can be a double edged sword, as it has also made the viewers more savvy and hence their chances of not getting caught has come down drastically. During licence-permit raj days, very few could manage to travel abroad and even Hollywood films were hardly screened beyond metro cities. Hence they could get away with this daylight robbery on gullible film goers and those foreign filmmakers, whose themes were lifted, somehow were either unaware or thought it was not worth the trouble fighting legal battles amid India's heat and dust.

Lastly, the country's choice for Oscar entry for the Best Foreign Language category always ranged from intriguing to downright silly. So far, barring Tamil movie Jeans, only Hindi films have been chosen for that honour. Most often the chosen films have more to do with star appeal and marketing potential than quality of acting or theme.

Copysutra Unlimited

The fact that noted Indian-American political commentator Fareed Zakaria was caught for plagiarism and suspended from Time and CNN may have caused ripples in US, and Zakaria was oozing with apology, he said he made “a terrible mistake. . . . It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault.”

But at his home country it caused hardly any such stir. Gauging the reaction of people from all walks of the society, it seems that at best it evoked only a casual what’s-the-big-deal shrug. 

An editor who not too long ago was caught for lifting paras from some foreign publication, but still managed to keep his job, said, “Being editor-at-large (Fareed Zakaria is editor at large at CNN) is a tough call. You travel so many places, attend cocktail sessions and read so many things that after a point you don’t remember what is yours and what it somebody else’s.” As an afterthought he said, "I feel he should not have taken paras from a well known journal like New Yorker, but maybe from some provincial publication, whose website frequently gets inaccessible due to lack of bandwidth."

The members of the academic community were more amused than shocked about developments concerning Zakaria. A research scholar, who considers ‘control C+control V’ the greatest invention since wheel, said, "God for copying one para he is doing all this. I know of guys who have lifted whole thesis and are now well placed in life." He then reeled out some names which were indeed very respectable ones.

However, he added that sometimes accidents do happen, as in the case of one of his seniors. He had plagiarized one thesis and unfortunately the invigilator happened to be the guy, whose thesis he had lifted! “Such incidents do happen, but are as rare getting hit by lightning,” he philosophized.

A film director of seventies, who had improvised many Hollywood spaghetti westerns of the 70s into daaku films (also called faluda western) and rode into sunset with good fortune and some popular awards said, “This internet age is proving to be a boon as well as bane. These days it is easy to get film footage and other materials to copy, but it is becoming almost impossible to not get caught by the audience.” 

He recalled nostalgically that during the licence-permit raj days of the 70s, few Indians used to go abroad and English movies were hardly screened in small towns and television was unheard of beyond metros. In such an environment it was easy to get away with lifting almost a whole film and pepper them with song and dance numbers.

For most Bollywood music directors plagiarism is as inherent in their songs, as say words like pyaar or ishq. A Bollywood remix lyricist amid his tight schedule took time off to share few thoughts on the issue. “There is nothing like originality. Everything happens due to inspiration. Even Shakespeare was not original.” Just then he broke into the latest ad jingle for a telecom company ‘jo tera hai, woh mera hai’ to drive home his point.

Disclaimer: A work of pure imagination

Also read: Bangalore Beat