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.