Kaavya refuses to duck for cover

NEW YORK : Indian-born novelist Kaavya Viswanathan suffered an Icarus-like fall after the Harvard Crimson screamed plagiarism but the Harvard sophomore is still not ducking for cover.

She hung in there on seasoned journalist Katie Couric’s widely watched “Today” show, snubbed the Harvard Crimson which broke the literary scandal; and even displayed a surprising willingness to go on a tour to promote her controversial new book in Britain.

“Students at Harvard, like students everywhere, are not especially well-known for their charity to one another. When 19-year-old Viswanathan flies into London next weekend, she will arrive with the shrill bells of criticism and retribution ringing in her ears,” said The First Post.

“America’s latest chick-lit sensation is coming to promote her precocious first novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Viswanathan is pretty and accomplished,” it added while dovetailing the controversy with mock amusement.

But Harvard is less than amused and it was unclear whether it would take any action against Viswanathan who wants to become a Wall Street investment banker.

“Our policies apply to work submitted to courses. Nevertheless, we expect Harvard students to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty at all times,” Robert Mitchell, the director of communications for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, told reporters.

“We would need to gather much more information on this situation before we could make any kind of judgment,” Mitchell added, while dismissing reports that the university would “investigate” the sophomore.

The Harvard Crimson was quick to point out that in the summer of 2003, Harvard reversed its decision to admit applicant Blair Hornstine to the Class of 2007 after Hornstine was found to have plagiarized material in articles that she wrote for her local New Jersey newspaper. 

But William C Marra, president of the Harvard Crimson, told DNA that “it was too early” to speculate on whether Viswanathan who is a joint Literature and Economics major would suffer the same fate as Hornstine.

Viswanathan who probably feels the Harvard Crimson gunned for her has ignored frantic media requests from her campus paper.

“We have been trying to speak to her every day but she hasn’t returned our calls,” Marra told DNA. “We broke the story. We don’t take pride in having exposed her. This is what we are supposed to do – it is our job. David Zhow broke the story. We received a tip from an anonymous caller. Then David read the books and found striking similarities.”

Viswanathan who is currently taking a few days off from Harvard acknowledged borrowing material from novelist Megan McCafferty but maintained the similarities were “completely unintentional.” She told NBC’s Katie Couric on the “Today Show” that she read McCafferty’s books three or four times while in high school but didn’t bring them to Harvard with her and didn’t consult them while writing the book.

Born in Chennai, Viswanathan is the only child of her parents — Viswanathan Rajaraman, a neurosurgeon and Mary Sundaram, a gynecologist. “Everybody in my family, including my parents, won science prizes. I was the one with the writing gene — and I’ve no idea where that came from,” the young author earlier quipped to Indolink.
Viswanathan who wants life to go back to normal is confident Harvard will not short-circuit her career; “I don’t see why they would. It’s a genuine, genuine mistake.”