{"id":812,"date":"2012-08-29T19:19:09","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T19:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=812"},"modified":"2012-08-29T19:19:09","modified_gmt":"2012-08-29T19:19:09","slug":"where-does-inspiration-end-and-plagiarism-begin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2012\/08\/29\/where-does-inspiration-end-and-plagiarism-begin\/","title":{"rendered":"Where does inspiration end and plagiarism begin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vivek Kaul
\n<\/strong>
\nSo all\u2019s well that ends well. Fareed Zakaria is back in business. But the question that remains is what is plagiarism and what is not? Where does inspiration end and plagiarism start? Let\u2019s explore these questions in the context of music and films, both international as well as Indian, and journalism.
\nAs I write this I am listening to the song \u201cPapa Kehte Hain Bada Naam Karega<\/em>,\u201d from the movie Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. The song starts of sounding very similar to an old Roy Orbison song \u201cO Beautiful Lana<\/em>\u201d but changes track after that and acquires an identity of its own.
\nThe composers Anand-Milind may have clearly been inspired by Roy Orbison in the way they composed the song, but they hadn\u2019t plagiarized.
\nThe bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell in an essay titled Something Borrowed \u2013 Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life?<\/em> tries to examine the questions I raised at the beginning of this piece. He describes an experience that he had with a musically inclined friend of this.
\nAs Gladwell writes \u201cHe played Led Zeppelin\u2019s \u201cWhotta Lotta Love<\/em>\u201d and then Muddy Water\u2019s \u201cYou Need Love<\/em>,\u201d to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration\u2026He played \u201cLast Christmas<\/em>\u201d by Wham! followed by Barry Manilow\u2019s \u201cCan\u2019t Smile Without You<\/em>\u201d to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard the song.\u201d (You can listen to Can\u2019t Smile Without You here<\/a> and Last Christmas here<\/a>)
\nGladwell talks about the famous heavy metal band Nirvana and their inspiration. \u201c\u201cThat sound you hear in Nirvana,\u201d my friend said at one point, \u201cthat soft and then loud kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies. Yet Kurt Cobain\u201d \u2013Nirvana\u2019s lead singer and songwriter \u2013 \u201cwas such a genius that he managed to make its own. And \u201cSmells Like Teen Spirit\u2019<\/em>?\u201d \u2013 here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. \u201cThat\u2019s Boston\u2019s \u2018More Than a Feeling<\/em>.\u2019\u201d He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, \u201cThe first time I heard \u2018Teen Spirit<\/em>,\u2019 I said, \u2018That guitar lick is from \u201cMore Than a Feeling<\/em>.\u201d\u2019 But it was different \u2013 it was urgent and brilliant and new.\u201d
\nSo what this tells us is that a lot of good old music formed the base of a lot of good new music. But does that imply plagiarism? Clearly not!
\nLet us look at some examples from closer to home. Talat Mehmood once sang a song \u201cHain sab se madhur geet wohi jo hum dard ke suron main gaate hain<\/em>.\u201d This song from the movie Patita was written by Shailendra and set to tune by Shankar Jaikishan. Those who know their English poetry well, will know, that this song is clearly inspired from P B Shelley\u2019s poem To a Skylark, in which he wrote \u201cOur sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought<\/em>.\u201d
\nOr take the case of the song \u201cJab hum honge 60 saal ke aur tum hoge 55 ke,bolo preet nibhaogee na phir bhi apne bachpan ki<\/em>\u201d from Randhir Kapoor’s directorial debut Kal, Aaj aur Kal<\/em>. Any guesses on what is the inspiration for this song? It is the Beatles number \u201cWill you still need me, will you still feed me, when I am 64?<\/em>”
\nIn both these cases something new was created from something that was already in existence. Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal explore the difference between inspiration and plagiarism in their brilliant book R.D.Burman \u2013 The Man, The Music<\/em>. As they write \u201cThe pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance of Shaan<\/em> was the title song, \u2018Pyar karne waale pyar karte hain shaan se<\/em>,\u2019\u2026The recurring beat in the song could have been inspired, in part, from \u2018I feel love<\/em>\u2019 by Donna Summers, but the song in itself was multidimensional, a grand mix of Asha\u2019s voice and a host of instruments, and bore no resemblance to the Donna Summer hit.\u201d (You can listen to I feel love here<\/a>).
\nRD Burman was accused of plagiarising right through his career. \u201cRight through his career, this was probably one question that Pancham had to defend himself against, in most of his interviews, and he often clarified that inspiration was part of the game in any field of art and that his rule was to use one line and recreate an entire song out of the same, something that most composers did,\u201d write Bhattacharjee and Vittal. \u201cPancham\u2019s stand against charges of plagiarism was matter-of-fact; he did not go out to copy tunes if given the chance to operate on his own terms. He might have needed a start, only to help him trudge along,\u201d the authors add.
\nThere was a lot of inspiration that went into the composition of 1942-A Love Story, RD Burman\u2019s swansong. \u201cWith \u2018Ek ladki ko dekha<\/em>\u2019, he got on to the full-on mukhra-antara style that his father once pioneered in \u2018Borne gondhe chhonde geetitey<\/em>\u2019 (the original tune for \u2018Phoolon ke rang se<\/em>\u2019 in Dev Anand\u2019s Prem Pujari<\/em>), where the mukhra and the antara are merged as one\u2026 \u2018Kuch na kaho<\/em>\u2019 found Pancham fleetingly referencing the tune of SD\u2019s \u2018Rongila rongila<\/em>\u2019 (SD as in SD Burman, RD\u2019s father) and giving it a totally different colour and contour, with an orchestration bordering on the symphonic\u2026RD went back to Indian classical music and Rabindranath Tagore for \u2018Dil ne kaha chupke se<\/em>\u2019, basing it on the dual inspiration of Raga Desh and Tagore\u2019s \u2018Esho shyama sundaro<\/em>\u2019, and using strains from ‘Panna ki tamanna<\/em>‘ (Heera Panna<\/em>) and \u2018Aisa kyon hota hai<\/em>\u2019 (Ameer Aadmi Garib Aadmi<\/em>,1985),\u201d the authors point out.
\nSo clearly even the best musicians are inspired when they do their best work. The same stands true for cinema as well. Take the case of \u201cManorama Six Feet Under<\/em>.\u201d I saw the movie when it was released and was impressed. The screenplay, dialogues, music, performances…everything about the movie was brilliant. Then I read in a review that the movie was copied from Roman Polanski\u2019s 1974 Jack Nicholson starrer Chinatown<\/em>.
\nI managed to locate a VCD of the movie sometime later and happened to see it. Broadly speaking, yes Manorama<\/em> is a copy of Chinatown<\/em>. The story is more or less the same. But Navdeep Singh the director of the movie has managed to Indianise it very well. And Manorma<\/em>‘s end is brilliant, much better than Chinatown<\/em>‘s vague arty ending. Of course, Manorma <\/em>does not have the incest angle to the story that Chinatown<\/em> had.
\nNow this was a clear case of a director who was inspired. Yes he copied, but I don’t think he plagiarised.
\nSo the distinction between plagiarism and inspiration is not always easy to draw. Malcolm Gladwell makes the point when he writes about something that most journalists have to do at some point of time. As he writes \u201cWhen I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to \u201cmatch\u201d a story from the Times (I presume Gladwell means the New York Times here): to do a new version of someone else\u2019s idea. But had we \u201cmatched\u201d any of the Times\u2019 words \u2013 even the most banal of phrases \u2013 it could have been a firing offence. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality only on the level of sentence.\u201d
\nThis is a very important point that Gladwell makes furthering the point that in many cases it is difficult to distinguish what is plagiarism and what is not.
\nBut that is not always the case. Musicians like Bappi Lahiri and Annu Mallik made a career out of plagiarising western tunes. So did Anand-Milind by copying Ilaiyaraaja. The same is true about Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante<\/em>. It is a shameless copy of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. In fact Anurag Kashyap, the dialogue writer for the film even admitted in an interview that he was given the DVD of Reservoir Dogs<\/em> and asked to translate the dialogues. So much for being creative. Sanjay Gupta’s Zinda<\/em> is also a scene by scene lift of the Korean Movie Old Boy<\/em> even though Gupta claimed that \u201cinternational films\u201d inspired him.
\nSo that brings me back to the question that I have been trying to answer \u201cWhere does inspiration end and plagiarism start?\u201d The answer to this most likely is: It is a very individual thing. Every creative individual knows where inspiration ends and plagiarism starts. As Justice Potter Stewart, a US judge, wrote in Jacobellis versus Ohio (1964), \u201cI cannot define pornography, but I know it when I see it.\u201d
\nIt\u2019s the same with plagiarism.
\nThe article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 29,2012. http:\/\/www.firstpost.com\/living\/where-does-inspiration-end-and-plagiarism-begin-435291.html<\/a>
\nVivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at vivek.kaul@gmail.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivek Kaul So all\u2019s well that ends well. Fareed Zakaria is back in business. But the question that remains is what is plagiarism and what is not? Where does inspiration end and plagiarism start? Let\u2019s explore these questions in the context of music and films, both international as well as Indian, and journalism. As I … <\/p>\n

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