QED

First Sem was a bizi sem and we were even bizier creatures. That book
report was enough to qualify as a nightmare in the daydream for me.
Selecting the right kind of book could alleviate the situation. The
right kind of book should have a bright cover, big print, small size
and exactly one page more than the minimum prescribed by the course
instructor. Most importantly, the book should have such a simple
english which should not look harder than differential calculus
anywhere. So, among those n<<(infinity) books in the library, I came
up with “First men to the moon”. Added benefit, it was prescribed by
Tanmay. Looking at its size and its print size, it was damn
irresistible. I didn’t even bother to read its preface or about the
author. I really meant quick business then. Actually, it turned out to
be a good lesson on ‘appearances can be deceptive’.

My expectations from the book were: It was a book about Neil Armstrong
or about space exploration atleast. It was a non-fiction. It was a
benchmark kind of a book. Above all, it was a book I could mention in
my orkut profile. It was really was “First men to the moon”.

Having read the book for 2 days, I realised the title of the book was
“First men ‘IN’ the moon”. (We don’t read each and every word of a
sentence, we read a few and guess the others) Think, how could you
expect the title of the book to be ‘First men ‘IN’ the moon’. So,
there i was, stuck with a kiddish kind of fiction which i couldn’t
even mention about it on the my orkut profile. And yes, the
protagonists( a word I later learnt from the preface), actually went
into the moon and fought with the crazy creatures there. I found
through the internet that it was a blockbuster when it was published
back in the 60s-70s. Look how quickly can the value of a fiction
deteriorate in a span of 4 decades. Nevertheless, my book report was
‘exhaustive’ in every respect. Afterall, I had read a book for the
first time from cover to cover, noting down the main points every now
and then.

Then came the report writing. I was nuts with reading and writing by
that time. So, this time around i was looking for shortcuts: cunnier,
but constitutional. Having brainstormed on a plethora of topics, I
found a gem of a topic in ‘plagiarism’. Remember that path breaking CAT
answer for ‘what is risk?’ – Leave the whole page and in the end write
‘this is risk’. I was more than impressed by this sweet-outrageous explanation.

Starting off constitutionally, i read about plagiarism, right from
wikipedia to answers.com. To my disillusionment, i found that every
project work which I ever submitted was plagiarized to some degree. I
can bet that even you are not an exception to this. Even not citing
the references at the proper time is a crime. Different organizations
had different degrees of harshness, some even had non-pragmatic
utopian schemes. The bright part was that that plagiarism was here,
there and everywhere. I got familiar with so many ways to copy without
leaving a trace. I could feel the thrill by then. I wrote a few
‘not-so-original’ original paragraphs. Then, plunged into the vicious
cycle of ‘read-sift-prune-modify-copy’ with occasional ‘proper
referencing’. Work began to end as soon as it began. Plagiarism in
action? No way. I just happened to know the right way to the right
thing. I had my softcopy ready a good 2 days before submission.
(That’s amazing, coz that never happens to me…. Submitted my previous
DIP assignments at 8:52 am and 8:18 am when the deadline was 9 am and
had a class at 8:30 am). I submitted the assignment and didn’t turn up
on the day of evaluation. I was sensing serious trouble that day.

End of the story, not yet. After an year of that incident, a fresher
came to me to ask for a topic for report writing. I could not resist.
I gave him the cunning method in a very constitutional way. Plagiarism
is double-ended! Though after an year, I had my example ready!

PSeS:

1. All characters are fixnal.. It has nothing to do with me.
2. 1 is a lie.
3. 2 is a lie
4. 3 is the truth.
5. What did you do in your CN and PoPl assignment
0. Yuck! Yet another first year post.

7. ‘cunnier’ is not a word, sounds good anyways.