Eating India alive is its love of copying, from examination halls to office reports, from homework to thesis, from music to movies, from literature to art, from fashion statements to the love of blogging. In India so many things are being copied so fast that its becoming China. The only difference being that China does it with goods and not with human forms of art but since we are more democratic, we do it with everything especially art.
In India though, copying all forms of art is an art in itself. This art is called the art of inspiration, which is defined by the dictionary as - "the arousal of the mind to special unusual activity or creativity". For real artists the "unusual activity" will be a brainstorming session or watching the rainfall out of their window, for the surreal artist though, any good song in the market, which he/she fallaciously thinks no one else has heard, is good enough. Since this activity of the surreal artist requires no inspiration, its thus called inspiration as a mark of sarcasm, mocking the real artists as they require inspiration from within and things around them.
For the surreal artists, the word "copyright" is a term too literal and they someday would want to include "the right to copy" as a fundamental right of every Indian citizen as a mark of respect to . In fact they just might cite that our very own constitution is an amalgamation of various constitutions from countries around the world and since its so, its an act of "inspiration". (I reserve my comments on this)
But the capability of imagination of these surreal artists is commendable. They have the audacity of brilliance in them to imagine that even if they pick up a song that’s a rage world over, numb it down to their level and dumb it down to sound like what they want, the average person will not be able to recognize the original song from the "inspired" song.
An Indian director is now copying Juno, (the worst part is that these directors don’t even change the characterisation or theme) which very well could have an original Indian story only if people had the courage to get inspired from real life rather than from surreal world. An Indian music director is now being sued over by some bands from outside and who lodged the first complaint about this music director's latest lift? His fellow co-music director.
Why stop there? Its not just music or movies but dressing motifs and (funnily enough) attitude problem (or the stylish perception of it) too is now considered the "in" thing and is thus copied merrily. Even Social Networking profiles too have taken a hit (including mine, which now has been copied hundred times over by people who have no idea what they are copying from every major social site). Australian board of education has now realised that most of Indian thesis' for M.sc and P.hd programs are copied from one source or the other.
Its about time that we stopped dignifing copying and call stuff "inspired" or even "plagiarised" because even the word plagiarism is used so that the common man, who doesn't understand big words, don't get the real meaning. From now, let's call copying as copying :)
