Copy Pasting Copy Paste

"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research."

I read this quote today on a friend's facebook status. when i started to write this blog, i googled the phrase, and found this:

The quote "If you copy from one author, it's plagiarism. If you copy from two, it's research." has been attributed to playwright, raconteur  and entrepreneur Wilson Mizner. The exact wording to which you allude has been widely attributed to comedian Steven Wright. Did he plagiarize Mizner?

it was an interesting example of fate stepping forward and stealing my punch line.

you see, when i saw the quote, it managed to provide a pithy summary of why i had decided to name my blog "copy paste material." the decision had come a year of being a journalist, and three years before that of being a student at LUMS.

what i had come to see was that in both cases, one needed to essentially plagiarise in order to be credible.

as a student, i often felt that i had read and seen enough to hold certain views. but in order to be taken seriously, i had to present it in light of what others had said or done.

as a journalist, i was starting out as a copywriter on the international desk. so yeah, i covered three wars - i'm a regular robert fisk. anyhows, being on the international desk meant sitting around, reading the wires, and - wait for it - copy pasting them into your story.

in both cases, the mark of quality was demonstrated by, amongst other things, a variety and depth of sources. in fact, an out right copy-paste was inacceptable. but reframing et al the stuff constituted quality.

hence the title - copy paste material.

why do i bring up this now?

i read a blog recently, which ended thus:

"undeniably, and unfortunately, there is a little bit of Zardari in all of us."

which reminded me of this:

"Asif Ali Zardari did what every Pakistani does – he looked at how the game was being played, sought out its soft spots, and then cut it to pieces. Its why he’s here. He does what all of us do. It maybe at a different scale, but it’s the same scene.

You have to admit - we all have a little Zardari within us."

yesterday, i came across this:

Every time I bribed a policeman, ignored the traffic signals, sent gifts to judges, made phone-calls to those in power to seek favors, I kept this in mind. Every time I willfully weakened the justice system for my benefit, I knew what I was doing. I knew exactly what kind of crop I was sowing. Some other people did too, but I don’t want to name any names.

a sort of like this, i wondered:

"Every day, as we break red lights and jostle with vehicular madness, as we consume tainted water and questionable food, as we bribe and barter, we live in existence where the possibility of the consequences of our actions can not hope to be considered, because perhaps we know of no other way."

now if you are getting my flow, i suppose there are two ways i can go with this. i can get all egoistical, and claim that people are copy-pasting my ideas. or i can face up to what i believe myself - that these are signs of people waking up to the massive contradictions that lie within us.

moreover, i could make sense of the 'copy-pasting' being employed in academia and journalism - because in a society overflowing with ideas, their repetitions and their regurgitations, the only way of making sense, the only skill is one of bringing together references that your audience can relate to in order to create a narrative, or an opinion that makes sense.

a part of me wanted to believe that i was being plagiarized, but it would be egoistical folly. surely i was not the first person to realise that pakistanis can often be in denial about themselves, that change lies within us all. moreover, a lot of my own blogs have been basically copy-pastes of my wife's ideas and thoughts. so it would be hypocritical.

but what provides irrefutable evidence of the fact that all these are original works is when you step back and read all of them in their context. the second link for example, works the same motifs i used to examine afridi into a haunting account of the sialkot lynching. i doubt if he/she had ever even come across what i had written. the reason both ideas work is that they allow their readers to make sense of their society using examples of their own experiences - the bribing, the bartering, the wheeling and dealing.

to get a much better example than all of this, take a look at this magnificent video. umar sharif, in about a few minutes, weaves together references from silent-era Hollywood to post-Cold War geopolitics, from one style of qawwali to the next, from one generation of sub-continental romancing styles to an eerily prescient version of another (i am referring to the line about giving out phone numbers.)

(thanks to tazeen for the link)

and it gets even more interesting. there is for example an indian version of this song currently out:



according to twitter user @Mehmal, both songs are versions of an older song, known as "Launda Badnam Hua, Nasiban Tere Liye." an indian website meanwhile says that the song was a "famous Bhojpuri song "Launda badnam hua naseeban tere liye", which was sung by Rani Bala"

Soon enough you come to realise that there might not be anything original in the world. so what?

each idea flows from somewhere, and flows on to somewhere else. attributing your sources is always great, but you can't very well put footonotes in a song or a movie.

the whole point is to make what ever you do your own. you're going to be copy-pasting whether you like it or not, whether you realise it or not. but you do have the choice of making it in your own style, in your own image.

The Omniblogus - Tangent 3: There was Once a Wasim

[Part One]
[Previous Part: Tangent One - The Man Utd Fan]
[Previous Part: Tangent Two - The Lagaan Discourse]

This blog was written on the 22nd of June. A variety of reasons, most notably my wedding, prevented this from being done earlier. yet i am convinced it retains a timeless quality, undiminished by the fading memory of that glorious day at Lord's, and the subsequent semi-final defeat.

Can you name any movie that James Dean was in? Probably not. Yet most people could recognize this picture of the short-lived superstar.

There are people who come to define not only a profession, but an era. Their essence seems to capture the world around them, the glories and vagaries of their time, the sense of how life was meant to be lived within their context. the word "zeitgeist" was invented for them.
One such person was Wasim Akram.

The Left Arm of God was a man who was plucked from obscurity at 17 and went on to redefine what it meant to be a bowler. Like one of his contemporaries, Shane Warne, his mastery of his art was so great that he left his greatest victims (the English, the Indians) with massive Stockholm syndrome. And yet he was also a playboy, a poster child for diabetics patients, a prodigal son for bookmakers, a partygoer and a scapegoat.
But for my generation, he was, is and always will be – Wasim bhai.

For the longest time, I had not questioned why we called him wasim bhai, Then I saw this again, and immediately i recognized the awe that fills up in the future Ufone salesman you see below.

In fact, this public service message may well have been my first real encounter with Wasim bhai the person, and as the ad makes evidently clear, Wasim Bhai was already a legend.

Remember, this is before the 400 test wickets and the 500 odi wickets, before the tri-series in Australia, before the repeated brutalization of India in Sharjah – heck, it’s even before the bloody reverse swing sodomization of England, both in the test tour and the world cup.
Our cricketing consciousness woke up to an age where Wasim bhai was already divine.
And so while I, and people my age, got to see Wasim Bhai’s greatest years, as well as his latter days, we never saw the awkward young boy who was just learning to make his mark, learning where to bowl the inswinger, when to use the bouncer, how to disguise the slower one.
In a sense, we never really grew up with Wasim Bhai.
Yes he was always there, the ever-protective guardian of our dreams and hopes. Time and again, when the Pakistani team’s collective brain farts would leave our spirits flagging, wasim bhai would resuscitate them faster than Pamela Anderson on Baywatch. Bowl after bowl he would beat the bat, flirt with the edges, and when the slips inevitably dropped the resulting catch, he would glare, call their mothers whores, and return to bowl the batsman out. In a previous era, fast bowlers bowled short, broke bones rather than stumps, and had long, long run ups. Wasim bhai almost ambled in, and bowled them full, but man, did he bowl them well.

But still, he was after all, wasim bhai.
For us, our generation’s hero, our era’s James Dean, came to be in 1996, in a forgotten ground in Nairobi.
It began perhaps the most insane and counter-intuitive love story since Rumi gave up his scholarly trappings after one gaze in Shams’s eyes. Other countries venerated men like Tendulkar, who gave them century after century, or Waugh, who gave them illusions of immortality, or even Hick, because really, they had no one else to support. So what was it about this man then that turned all Pakistanis delirious?

It was not like we were blinded either. Every inevitable failure, every ugly swipe resulting in tame dismissals, every golden duck, every moment of indecipherable stupidity was roundly criticized, chastised, moralized and analyzed to death. Fathers and uncles would make exasperated grunts and evoke memories of Zaheer and Mushtaq, young girls would find their cricket fever suddenly cured, foreign commentators would sound bemused and smug. There would be snide remarks about the stereotypical idiocy of the pathans, and vows that he would never be supported again. Logic, common sense, pragmatism, his lowly average, his sheer uselessness all screamed for him to be banished to the wilderness.
And perhaps that was why we loved him – because he encapsulated best the spirit of what it meant to be Pakistani in our times. He was something no one else could quite understand, he used an approach that no one would dare mimic.

Consider this – the only thing that matches the volume of opinions regarding the failure of Pakistan as a viable entity is the plethora of expert conclusions that his career was finished. And yet, both of them are still around. Because just like Pakistan, he is forever resilient, forever capable of reinvention. When even he could see that the batting was just not happening anymore, he did not slip away into the darkness. He came back as the baddest mothfucker leggy since a fat boy from Victoria.

Once, while I was somewhere up north, a friend and I saw young children jumping across a yawning ravine with death defying leaps. At first we wondered how they could do something so stupidly dangerous. Then it occurred to me that the reason they could pull off such insanity was because the possibility of failure never came to their heads. They had pure faith in their madness.
Mohsin Hamid had written of 1998 that no one believed in consequences anymore.

Every day, as we break red lights and jostle with vehicular madness, as we consume tainted water and questionable food, as we bribe and barter, we live in existence where the possibility of the consequences of our actions can not hope to be considered, because perhaps we know of no other way.

It would be foolish then to expect our Lala to be any different.
We will never be what this game, or this world is supposed to be about. We may never fully democratize, or industrialize, or de-feudalize. He will never learn a method, or perfect a formula, or become predictable.

But when it all seems over, when there is no hope left, when everyone will write us off, we will have our moment of undying glory.
We are “The Boom Boom” generation.