Kuch meetha ho jaaye?

Dear Namkeen,

I received your email with your apology. Frankly speaking, I had not expected an apology from you, and would have been happy just by having my posts removed from your blog. But the apology came as a pleasant surprise and I accept it with thanks.

However, I am not fully convinced that you pasted my posts from your friend's email and not from my site. Does it then mean that you thought they were your friend's experiences and that you stole your friend's identity? If you honestly thought that the posts came from your friend, it does not make you less guilty. So instead of wronging me, you wronged your friend, you stole her identity. Because you surely were trying to pass off the incidents as yours.

Look at this comment you wrote on the 'Art on sand' post of yours (mine) about the artist I had met and photographed at the Puri beach last year:

"But i was really amazed that he was not frustrated at all. Actually this picture was taken the last day i was there in Bombay i was to leave the next day and that's why that evening i decided to stay back and speak to him.I really wanted to know why he was doing it. And what he was getting out of it. But sad part is he did not speak English or hindi. He spoke a different kind of hindi which i could very hardly understand. So i only understood that he had a family of 4 kids and he had lost his job. He said it was very hard to find a new one and he had been jobless for a month now. Behen mara bacha bhuka pada hai. Khana lana paisa nahi. Ghar jaye to bacha khana mangta. And that's why he would spend most of his evenings at the beach to ease of his frustration. I till you Krsh i felt like hell. And so i gave him some money. He refused to take it initially but i left it there and left.That night i could not even eat i kept on thinking of his family. Today i gave him some money but will that money be enough for him to survive until he finds a job? i told my sister. My sister said there are lots of people like him here in India it's just a pity that the government does not have any system unemployment pensions."

Things like this were too much - You took my posts and my pictures and came up with your fictional stories. And all the little editing jobs you did to your posts... you thought it was enough?? Changing 'Singapore' to 'USA', 'Tapori Sayesha' to 'Tapori Amit' and 'Puri beach' to 'Mumbai beach'? You made me angry, very very angry. So angry that for the first time I realised how much anger I was capable of.

Secondly, you not only violated materials copyrighted to me, but also to my blog commentators. Remember the post about 'Things that will make you laugh'? You even added the comments by Abhinav, Harshi, Aethyr and Macho Girl to make your post. So are you saying that your friend not only copy-pasted my posts in her mail to you, but also the comments?

However, by sending that apology email, you have shown courage and integrity and I respect that. So if what you say is true and your friend was the one who sent my posts (along with the comments AND pictures apparently) to you, maybe you could give your friend a mini-tutorial on how to forward blog posts: If you like someone's blog post, you DO NOT copy-paste the content in a mail and forward it to your friends without naming the source. Instead, you click on the title of the post, copy THE LINK and then send it to your friends.

Some people told me that they pitied you and felt that you were depressed and miserable and having this fake identity and appreciation from people was making you happy. But I don't agree. No matter how manic-depressive or suicidal you are, nothing gives you the right to flick someone else's hard work and life and pass it off as your own just to make yourself feel better. If you have low self-esteem, you've got to fight it yourself.

You renamed one of my posts to 'Mom & Dad, I love you'. Well, if you really loved your Mom and Dad, you would accept them as who they are and not over-write their identities with someone else's Mom and Dad's.

There were also people who thought I should "chill and forget/ignore this". I noticed that they are mostly non-bloggers. Like the anonymous reader on my blog who said the war had no good reason cos my stuff is bakwaas anyway. Yes darling, it is bakwaas, but it is MY bakwaas, and I will defend it. If you have a baby that's not as cute as someone else's, would you not get angry if someone claims it's their baby?? Would you say that it's not a cute baby anyway, so it's okay if someone claims it as theirs?

You will only know how this feels like, when it actually happens to you. Or to someone you're close to. It's easy to take the Anonymous approach and say that this is no big deal. Like the high-horse-guy who thought that slamming my friends in the comments space would take the attention off the real issue here. Dude, I have something to say to you. Everybody has a high horse. Even if you are a complete ass, you have a high horse. I dunno where you got your horse from, but at the place where my friends and I got our horses - plagiarism and identity theft are WRONG WRONG WRONG!

Namkeen, I'm not the one to hold grudges. For me, if a matter is resolved, it is resolved, and there should be no hard feelings remaining. I promise not to have a grudge against you anymore, but I will be honest here and tell you that even though I have forgiven you for the plagiarism, I am just finding it a bit hard to forgive you for making me take down one of my favourite posts - that on baby Aish's expressions. And nope, I will not post it back. But I do hope that this negativity leaves me soon.

I know that your IFF profile got deleted before you could delete the remaining five copied posts. I had contacted your administrators and perhaps they did their duty. I am not sure if the other posts were deleted by you or the IFF administrators. But it doesn't matter now. Maybe it's time to make a new beginning somewhere else with another nick (in case the new slang my friends came up with 'namkeen (v): to copy-paste without permission' kicks off). If you really wanna express yourself, you're welcome to register at blogger.com and join us, the bunch of crazy and happy people who stand by each other and by what we feel is right.

Thanks again for writing in. It has certainly made me feel much better about you. And oh, I will not reproduce your apology email here. Because you own the copyright to it.

Cheers!
Sayesha

Footnote:

I learnt a few lessons from this episode:

1. When you're in trouble, even strangers will extend their help. Jonathan Bailey, the owner of plagiarismtoday.com emailed me with details on how to lodge a formal complaint against such online plagiaristic acts. This dude is amazing. He has been a victim of plagiarism over 400 times in the past four years and has fought them all.

2. It's a good idea to google yourself once in a while.

3. MACs (Mean/Malicious Anonymous Commentators) are not the worst thing that can happen to your blog.

4. But the biggest lesson I learnt from this episode is that when you're in distress, you can never get through it by yourself the way you can get through it if your friends are by your side.

Okay everybody, show's over. Let's put this behind us. So no, I’m not going back to reply to the 163 comments on the last post. :P

Now bring on today's special - the jalebis and kaju ki barfis, cos the bar is back to its (ab)normal self! :)