Suspicions Raised That Many Passages From Opal Mehta Were Written By Kaavya Viswanathan
In a startling turn of events, the Heck Of A Guy Blog investigative reporting team has discovered significant portions (in some cases, entire pages) of Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life appear to have been written by Ms Viswanathan herself.
The New York Times, Harvard Crimson,1 Boston Globe, and other publications have listed at least five books from which passages were copied and pasted, with little or no change, into Ms Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life:
1. Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty
2. Second Helpings by Megan McCafferty
3. The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
4. Can You Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella
5 Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
On reviewing this list some time after my initial posting on Ms Viswanathan and her literary exploits, Kaavya, Kaavya, Kaavya, I realized it was unlikely that these five books could account for all 320 pages of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Even if these researchers from the periodicals, the representatives of every author now living or dead, and the Harvard student body missed as many as half the total sources, Ms Viswanathan would have had to copy much more extensively to complete her novel solely from the works of others.
Given this calculation and the well-documented contractual pressures to complete the book by deadline, it seemed altogether too probable that Ms Viswanathan might have succumbed –- in desperation –- to a temptation that the other publications and blogs have been loath to even mention: writing portions of her novel herself.
The first problem I faced after formulating this hypothesis was the lack of a mechanism by which to ferret out segments that might have originated with Ms Viswanathan. After considering elaborate schemes to eliminate plagiarized materials until only pure Viswanathanian content remained, I finally realized the obvious answer was to reverse that notion. And, indeed, by looking for passages that appeared to be written by a relatively bright 19 year old rather than by published novelists, I easily and repeatedly found lines, paragraphs, and even complete pages for which no source other than Ms Viswanathan herself seems to be responsible.
Although a final count is not yet available, it appears that she alone may be responsible for half or even more of the content of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.
While Ms Viswanathan could not be reached for comment, the Heck Of A Guy law consultant speculates that this unanticipated finding could serve as a basis for legal actions on her behalf against her publisher and book packaging group who implicitly contracted with her on the dubious premise that a 19 year old college undergraduate would write like Salman Rushdie. And, since, as many writers have noted, Ms Viswanathan is both a perpetrator and a victim, she has grounds to pursue legal remedies against herself.
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Footnotes
- From reviewing the blogs, it appears that searching for Ms Viswanathan’s plagiarisms has replaced Sodoku as the latest wacky undergraduate craze at Harvard ~back~
