Plagiarism in educational journals

Sometime ago, an Indian professor alleged that one of his works had been shamelessly plagiarized by an American professor; the allegation was published in two parts in a leading English newspaper.  A few months later, a similar charge was  brought against some Indian academics.  Just a few days later, newspapers reported plagiarism of an outrageous kind on the part of the vice-chancellor of an Indian university and his associates.  In four of their papers published in three years, the VC and his associates had plagiarized the works of some foreign physicists.  These plagiarisms were uncovered by one of the professors of the same university.  The original author of one of the works, who was a professor of physics at Stanford University, alleged that the VC and his collaborators had "practically copied" a paper published by him six years ago.  Predictably, the VC denied knowledge of the inclusion of his name in the papers in question.  Not surprisingly, the professor who uncovered these plagiarisms was suspended. 

There is an endless stream of plagiarisms in Indian universities, and even the tabloid press is not interested in reporting them unless they are outrageously shocking. Our universities are no longer proud preserves of intellectuality.  A typical modern professor is no longer a person of cerebral superiority who has retreated into the wilderness of the mind: you can't expect to find him hunched over dusty volumes in a musty library or puzzled over a chemical reaction in a laboratory.  The modern counterpart of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan is a nouveau intellectual who has mastered the techniques of achieving "success" with hare-brained intellectuality.  Plagiarism is one of the means; he has got it down to a fine art.

It is not very difficult to get a plagiarized or a substandard article published in an Indian journal.  In the year 2000, I edited two issues of a supposedly scholarly journal to which a professor submitted an article with recommendations from the president of the association which publishes the journal.  Both times I rejected the article as being unworthy of publication.  But it got published in the very next issue.  I was not surprised.  In this day and age of philistinism, it is natural for one person of "Maggi-noodle" intellectuality to empathize with another.

Given this situation, it is, indeed, surprising that the VC and his friends who had plagiarized the works of the Stanford University professor could not get off scot-free.  Perhaps, they had gone too far in pushing their luck.

The twin traditions in emceeing

A master of ceremonies cannot afford to be cynical; he has to have a handsome and ingratiating presence, a charming and cunningly modulated voice, and, more importantly, a seemingly optimistic outlook.  If you are intelligent, you can affect all the three.  But, intelligence of which, I believe, sensitivity is a part and hypocrisy don't go together.  Given that, at most gatherings, the emcee is expected to lavish praise on people who are unworthy of any praise, and to describe fatuous speeches as illuminating, a sensitive emcee -- an unusual collocation because sensitivity and emceeing can hardly go together -- is apt to get depressed and cynical and ends up putting on a lacklustre performance.

What set me reflecting on emceeing was a function I had attended recently.  The emcee not only lavished high-flown compliments on the chief guest, who proved equal to the situation by extravagantly affecting modesty of the exemplary kind, but adopted a declamatory style, liberally interlarded with quotations from classical Telugu poetry and outrageous hyperboles which sounded hilariously old-fashioned. 

This baloney is, however, flattery so thick that it doesn't do much harm.  In straightforward flattery of this kind, the emcee compares the rich man's generosity to, say, Karna's, his aesthetic talent to Viswanatha Satyanarayana's, and his patronage to Sri Krishnadevaraya's, and everyone concerned knows that the man being praised is far from being all those things, and that the emfy (master of flattery) is only following a tradition.  The virtue of this tradition is its apparent artificiality.

Blarney, however, is flattery so thin that it deceives people.  G K Chesterton describes it as the "most poisonous kind of eulogy" and explains how it operates.  The flatterer takes a rich man's superficial life, clothes, hobbies or love of dogs and then enormously exaggerates the value and importance of these natural qualities, so much so the rich man emerges as a prophet and a saviour.  While the eloquent emcee takes for granted that the guest of honour is an ordinary man and sets out to make him out extraordinary, the devious emcee takes for granted that the guest of honour is extraordinary and that, therefore, even the ordinary things about him are great!

Emceeing of these two kinds will thrive as long as people love the lies that save their pride.  The plain-spoken emcee has to wait until people start tolerating unflattering truths.

In praise of blunders – and blunderers

It was a hot and sultry morning.  For the captive audience of about 1000 men and women inside the over-crowded auditorium, it was stifling.  And the emcee, a perfect match for the weather, was making it much more oppressive for the audience who were groaning at his sloppy, long-winded introduction to each and every guest of honour.  Then he did something enlivening: he forgot to invite the chief guest on to the dais and announced the prayer.  There was a ripple of laughter among the audience, and the heat seemed beaten out of the auditorium for a few brief moments.

A half hour passed, and it was foul weather again inside the auditorium.  When the audience were twisting about in agony, there was a break in the "weather" again, as the blundering emcee announced, "The chief guest will now have the privilege of lighting the lamp…"

The world would be an extremely miserable place if people did not make mistakes.  If there were no mistakes, there would be nothing for us to laugh at.  If laughter is a blessing, then error, which never fails to raise a laugh, ought to be welcomed.  And the blunderer who helps you laugh your head off should sufficiently be rewarded.  The most incorrigible blunderer should even go into the Guinness Book.

Errors don't just entertain us; as Robert Lynd points out in his essay, 'In Praise of Mistakes', the discovery of an error in a serious work gives us a temporary feeling of superiority over the great person who has produced the work.  A dry-as-dust reader who comes across a blunder in chronology in Shakespeare feels an inch taller than the immortal Bard of Avon.  So does a pedantically accurate reader on discovering that Sir Walter Scott has made the sun rise on the wrong side of the world.  A lady felt excited when she noticed a mistake in Dr Johnson's dictionary: the word pastern (the part of a horse's foot between the fetlock and the hoof) had been wrongly defined as "the knee of a horse".  It was a heady experience, and she couldn't contain her excitement.  She went up to the great Johnson and asked him how he could commit such an error.  When Dr Johnson replied, "Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance", she must have been in seventh heaven.

If you don't consider me a ghoul, I'll share with you the feeling of amusement a misprint in the Vijayawada edition of an English language newspaper gave me a few years ago.  "Siddhartha Academy found dead", read the headline of a news item.  What the headline writer had intended was this: "Siddhartha Academy founder dead".

Some noise on the subject of silence

One evening, I was led to think seriously about silence when I had to put up with some dreadful music that was blaring out the entire evening in my neighbourhood.

Not that I hate music: I can't, of course, sing, but I can tolerate other people's singing.  Neither am I intolerant of noise.  I work in an environment which is rather noisy, and my own contribution to it is quite substantial.  It's just that the music in the neighbourhood was deafening and unbearable.  I guess most people are like me in this respect.

Paradoxically, though most of us are annoyed when the noise levels are high, we are not comfortable with the total absence of sound either.  If noise can be deafening, so indeed can silence: silence becomes "loud" when it is total.  If noise can be annoying, absolute silence can be frightening.  Not many people are votaries of graveyard silence; even those who observe mouna vratam may not be its adherents.

Silence reminds me of the three legendary Cartesian monks who climbed to the top of a hill to live in splendid isolation, observing rigorous silence.  After a year, one of them broke his silence and said, "It's nice, isn't it?" and relapsed into silence.  Two years later, another monk replied, "Yes", and became silent again.  Three years later, the third monk scribbled on the sand in front of him: "You both are talking endlessly, and the hill echoes with your garrulous chatter.  I am going away from this place."

We, in India, have our own Cartesian monk in the late P V Narasimha Rao, who, in his heyday as the prime minister of India, was the cartoonist's delight.  A typical cartoon representing PV's taciturnity had both his lips tightly held together by a fastener zip. It is said – it used to be said, rather – that PV opened his mouth (1) to brush, (2) to eat and drink, (3) to yawn, and (4) to cough, and for nothing else!  PV was not only silent but the cause of silence in others: his scowling face with its celebrated pout rarely failed to intimidate one into silence.

There is something more to PV's silence.  PV was not just a practitioner of silence; he was an aficionado.  I'll tell you how.  PV was a polyglot: he knew 17 languages.  So indeed do several others.  But PV was unique: he knew how to be silent in 17 languages!  Avvaiyar, a second century Tamil poet, said that silence is a mark of gnana.  If it is so, PV was a gnani, indeed!

But, for us, agnanis, silent moments are awkward moments, especially during a conversation.  If your listener maintains long silences, confining his responses to monosyllables, you become uncomfortable.  You begin to wonder whether he finds you uninteresting, boring, stupid… There is another side to it, too: if you want a conversation to end, you have an effective tool in silence – sullen, studied silence.

To end this piece on a serious note, some people know the art of graceful silence.  Shout at them or speak to them rudely, but they won't react impulsively.  They do say what they want to say, but they let silence play a vital part in their reaction.  That earns them the respect even of their adversaries.

Where linguistic apostasy has led us

Sometime ago, I gave a pep talk to a group of students from an English medium school.  In the course of the talk, I mentioned the names of some well-known writers in Telugu and English and asked the students if they had read their books or at least heard about them.  The question only drew blank looks all around.  There was, however, one student who said that he had heard the names of some of the writers but not read anything written by them.  "Why is it", I asked them, "that you don't read any fiction in Telugu, your own mother tongue?"  A large number of students said – with considerable pride, I thought – they were not literate in Telugu, their mother tongue, because their second language was Hindi.  And they made no bones about the fact that their competence in Hindi was next to nothing.  I gathered that, in English, the medium through which they study, they don't have a reading habit as such, as the only books they read are their coursebooks.  As far as their oral communication is concerned, the fluency in English they have acquired can only help them communicate in a few limited contexts.

When I began my career as a teacher of English, I had to contend with something slightly different: linguistic apostasy on the part of my English literature students most of whom were from affluent families.  They had read nothing in their own literature which, in fact, they looked down upon, and read quite a lot in English which they considered a superior language.  What mattered to them, however, was English, not literature, and so they read plenty of light, frothy concoctions such as Mills and Boon, Barbara Cartland, and Harold Robins.  If, instead, they had read some literary works in their own mother tongue, it would have given an added dimension to their approach to literature.  By losing their own mother tongue on account of their linguistic snobbery, they had lost a dimension of their sensitivity.

If the linguistic apostasy of those years were bad, the linguistic impoverishment of the present in which an average student knows no language well enough is worse.  It is a problem that ought to engage the attention of parents, teachers and educational authorities.  Children should be encouraged to develop a healthy interest in their own mother tongue and read the literature in their own language.  It will urge them to take interest in other languages, including English; interest in one language, it has been proved, has a transfer effect.

Where phoniness is never questioned

Once I consulted a dental surgeon about bone graft and tooth implantation.  The doctor, a new entrant to the profession, gave me a lot of information about both, and when I asked him whether there should be a long interval of time between the two, he said, "I don't quite know.  I'll find out and tell you."

If I had earlier been impressed by the doctor's wealth of knowledge, I was now struck by his honesty and sincerity.  How many professionals can bring themselves to say, "I don't know", when they don't know something?  They may be careful not to misinform people, but they may still use jargon and sound knowledgeable, or say something vague to avoid admitting ignorance.  It is really great on the part of a professional to say, "I don't know" when that is actually the case.

Great people have often spoken these three words.  "I don't know", said the celebrated Duval, librarian of Francis I, when someone asked him a question.  "Why, Sir, you ought to know", the man snapped.  "The Emperor pays you for your knowledge."  Duval replied, "The Emperor pays me for what I know.  If he were to pay me for what I don't, all the treasures of his empire wouldn't be sufficient."  Someone asked Edison, "How did you learn so much?"  Edison replied, "By telling that I didn't know and that I wanted to know." 

Eugene Kennedy in his book, The Pain of Being Human, points out that there is something refreshing about the person who can say, 'I don't know'.  In friendship, psychotherapy or marriage, not to mention the courtroom, the truth is much better than the urge to con the other person into thinking we know something when we do not."

I would add the classroom to Kennedy's list.  It is because this simple truth ("I don't know") hardly ever gets spoken in my profession where phoniness seems to be the rule rather than the exception.  But there is no need to speak this truth, considering that the entire instructional system rests upon the hoary lie that teachers know and pupils don't.  The person who doesn't know how to perform a surgical operation cannot operate on a patient.  But people who cannot write two decent sentences can teach how to write – and enjoy being glorified on Teacher's Day!

Lies, damned lies and statistics

A story I read in the "Lifestyle" magazine fascinated me.  A woman was told that she would be granted three wishes but that her husband would get ten times more or better than whatever she wished for.  For the first two wishes, she wanted to become the richest and the most beautiful woman in the world, and both were granted.  Her third wish was malicious: "I'd like a mild heart attack."

Of course, the woman had a mild heart attack, but what would the husband have got for the third wish?  He would certainly have had a heart attack.  But would it have been ten times severer or ten times milder than the wife's? 

That depends on how we interpret the condition in relation to the wish.  And if we are required to generalize the "sample" (one woman) to the "population" (all women), what conclusion can we come to about women in general?  That also depends on our interpretation.  If our interpretation is that the husband's heart attack was ten times severer, then women are clever indeed.  If, on the contrary, our interpretation is that it was ten times milder, women are dumb, though they think they are smart.  Most women might argue that the first interpretation is the correct one, and most men, the second.  Truth, it is said, "will out".  But it looks as though there are no truths; there are only interpretations.

If you think I am splitting hairs, you are right.  And I am splitting hairs because I have just finished reading two books about statistics in which there is plenty of hair-splitting: How to Lie with Statistics, written more than forty years ago, and Damned Lies and Statistics, published in 2001.

Joel Best, the author of the second book, talks about the following statistic he once came across in an article in a prestigious journal: "Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled."  What does it mean?  Well, let's assume that the number of American children gunned down in 1950 was one.  If the number doubled each year, there must have been two children gunned down in 1951, four in 1952, eight in 1953, and so on.  By 1980, the number would have been one billion (more than four times the total US population that year).  By 1995, when the article was published in the journal, the annual number of children gunned down in America would have been over 35 trillion.  Absurd!  Actually, the author of the journal article had borrowed the statistic from a 1994 yearbook in which the information had been given as follows: "The number of American children killed each year by guns has doubled since 1950."  In other words, the deaths in 1994 were twice as many as in 1950.  But the statistic had got garbled in the journal article. And considering the reputation of the journal, the statistic must have been uncritically accepted and quoted by several researchers.

Let me go back to the point I made with reference to that funny story with a clever punchline: you can prove anything with statistics if only you know the "art" of interpretation.  Benjamin Disraeli was not wide of the mark when he said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."