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 Badmaash of Bambino or President 10%

Back when I was at one of pakistan’s premier business schools, I fancied myself to be quite the whiz kid. As in a smart, intelligent, capable, outstanding student. But by the end of my first semester, I was on the verge of dropping out

WTF, I asked myself.

Then, one of my esteemed seniors intimated how he was soon to graduate with a 3.6 GPA. The game was that he and his friends would take out their professors and their families for meals prior to the exams. They would buy their bratty kids ice creams. They even had reams of cloth from their family’s textile mills delivered to the professor’s house. And et voila!

I was depressed – not because I was morally offended, but rather because it was a system I couldn’t compete in.

So I transferred to pakistan’s premier university. It’s USAID endowed buildings surely would be a hallmark of integrity. And were they ever.


Unless of course you knew how the plagiarism detection software worked. If you were friends with, or as an attractive woman, able to flirt with the teaching assistant. If you signed up for the communist party/Jihadist outfit the professor was fronting in the university. Or, as the most popular option, you were willing to metaphorically fellate the absent minded professors who could be convinced to adjust the grading curve in your favor.

And what struck me was that at both places, these means were not at all without hard work. In fact, it involved more effort than simply studying. But since these methods allowed one to cram six months of efforts into one week of bribing, cajoling, threatening, fellating, it seemed to be far more popular with the students at both institutions.

And at one point it dawned upon me, that this was the Pakistani way. In fact, Pakistanis are world class at figuring out a system’s flaws, and then bleeding it for all its worth. Literally. And it seems to breed a perverse joie de verve (or whatever that term is) within us all.

Points to ponder upon – US funded Jihad, reverse swing, Army financed heroin trade, the group match against Bangladesh in ’99, 58-2 (b), insinuating that rape is a good way to get a Canadian visa, jumping traffic lights, bhatta system, kunda system...




BCCI, running Bedford trucks across the country even though the company that made them shut down 30 years ago, withdrawing money before ramzan to ensure that no zakat is paid etc etc

To further expound upon my point, lets take reverse swing as an example. Scratching the ball etc was not cheating per se, so doing it made sense. The fact that the game was grossly in favor of the batsmen necessitated its rise. And the suspicion that the practice would be cheating as long as the white man didn’t know how to do it was eventually confirmed by 2005.


of course, not all of these arguments are morally correct or ethically sound, but they achieved the purpose.

Its called realpolitik.

In realpolitik, morals and means don’t matter. They’re not supposed to. The end result matters. How you got there is not part of the equation. So sometimes it leads to a just end, and sometimes it leads to a fucked up end. Sometimes it uses just means, and sometimes it uses fucked up means.

But it gets the job done.

And that’s what Pakistan is all about. You can of course admire the sheer audacity of our realpolitik. And like expertly breaking red lights for example, such actions usually get a good laugh as well as being a short term source of happiness.

But what does it do for the long run? No one knows.

But what is known is that the success of realpolitik probably implies that Pakistanis, whether they realize it or not, follow Machiavelli rather than Mohammad.


And so to the point of my blog.

On Saturday, Pakistan’s craziest president yet formally took over the reigns of power. Craziest is not a pejorative term here, he really is certifiably crazy.

All of Pakistan is up in arms. Well, other than those who voted for his party. By all of Pakistan I mean that part which can be heard, either on tv, or in the papers, or in the fledgling blog world, and which usually doesn’t have the time to bother itself with the inconvenience of ‘voting’.

Amongst the most popular rants, we have Mr.10% becoming President 100%. We also have fears that he will sell our nuclear weapons. We are also very afraid that Pakistan will be split up into US serving mini-states, the infamous “Pakistan Khapay” not withstanding. No one doubts that this is a US conspiracy, which itself is funded by a Jewish conspiracy. It is clear to most that Pakistan is being targeted because it is a muslim state. No one doubts that AAZ is a tool of the Americans.

So far so good.

But here’s a little googly.

Didn’t someone involved intimately with the foundation of Islam once say that our leaders are the personification of our own ‘amaal.’ In other words, we get the leaders we deserve? I’m sure someone said that.

And take a look at the Badmaash of Bambino’s story. In less than a year, he has traveled all the way from from A-class jail induced dementia to the top takht in the land.



Very quickly, he used the assassination of his wife to grab the reigns of a party he never was prominent in, used the grief over that assassination to steer his party to power...


...used the slight mandate of those elections to get his own man elected as PM, used the promise of redemption to hoodwink his populist partners into confronting and eventually removing the country’s boss...

...and then broke all his promises to get rid of the coalition, and issued new promises to ensure that he came sailing into the post which is supposed to be ceremonial and yet holds all the power.

You have to admire him.



He took the system and bled that bitch dry. Come on – you have to admire him. And this was just 2008. He has also stuffed swiss magistrates, eluded English judges, duped Dubai sheiks and got each one of his best friends in positions of power. I mean –Advisor to the PM on Interior. Who comes up with this shit? Its brilliant.

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.



So are we going to wait for him to change?