Update on My Secret Sharer

As previously reported, Meta Cranky has been robbed. Specifically, an Indian academic in Orissa put his name on an essay MC published very long ago. Since then, MC has been gratified to watch red-faced, apoplectic professor-types hold forth on the topic of on plagiarism. Her favorite, thus far, is a professor who, when presented with plagiarism, has re-instated students who dropped her class in order to fail them. Insert Clint Eastwood in "To Sir With Love" and you get the picture. Buy an essay from Questia and make her day, sucker.

MC contacted the journal that published her long-ago essay. Its lawyers asked how much of MC's essay was republished under Secret Sharer's name. Percentage-wise. Well, SS left off the epigram and inserted some British-isms. That should knock off a percent or two. In fairness, Secret Sharer appears to have read MC's entire essay before he truncated it. Still, she was there first.

Now that she knows her Secret Sharer's name, MC's curiosity has gotten the best of her. SS's vita is online, as is the website of his current university. She wants to know why a person from a 3,000 year-old culture, who speaks Hindi and Oriya, bothers with the topic of her essay. MC's plagiarist is from the ancient Kalinga nation, readers; the author of the Mahabarata was born in the city where Secret Sharer teaches. Its residents are rightly proud of their 72-foot statue of Lord Hanuman. They would be within their rights to sniff at a potboiler by 19th-century British girl who kind of complicated Percy Shelley's first marriage.

MC thinks the principal of Secret Sharer's school offers a clue. The principal's message on the school website notes that: "The rationate of education can only be realised when the drive to a mindless competition for jobs is stopped. In its place we will try for holistic assemblage of mind and body. Our goals is to reorient education in this direction." A climate of "mindless competition for jobs" could move a faculty member of a small college to think he needed to steal my essay. Let's remember, though, Lord Hanuman's curse. Hanuman, you will recall from the nine-hour Broadway production of the Mahabarata, cannot remember his powers unless someone else tells him what they are:

You are as powerful as the wind (Hanumanji was the son of Pawan, God of wind);

You are intelligent, illustrious & an inventor.

There is nothing in this world that’s too difficult for you;

Whenever stuck, you are the one who can help.

Mary Shelley seems a little pedestrian compared to all that.
--MC