The moral preoccupations of the young adult
In 2017, I was a panelist at a day-long symposium on Comparative Literature in the 21st century at Jain University in Bangalore. I was glad to share space with Ipshita Chanda and E V Ramakrishnan, both scholars I had met in different conferences over the course of the decade I spent as an academic in India. Chanda is now at EFLU, the place where I did my Masters. And EVR is a star in the field of Comparative Literature. These scholars, along with the illustrious and industrious Mythili Rao made for wonderful intellectual company. My own presentation was on Digital Humanities.
The question-answer session was quite charged and one of the questions I fielded was on Rupi Kaur. I had not read her at that point of time but had read the plagiarism controversy she had gotten herself into. One of the students asked us about how we viewed Rupi Kaur who writes beautifully but was accused of plagiarism. My answer was 1) that in the west, things are very straightforward and unlike in India, there are very specific criteria to decide on these issues. And that if Kaur was let off, she must not have plagiarized. 2) Plagiarism in the Humanities is hard to establish. 3) That life is so homogeneous, especially for the immigrant in western parts of the world such as US and Canada that it is not surprising if two second generation writers wrote about the exact same things. A year is divided into desi events and non-desi events--the desi ones being quite personal in many ways and formatted into festivals, concerts, interactions with relatives and so on and then the non-desi events that form work, school and other interactions. That the heterogeneity that was there in India was not there anywhere else in the world.
In hindsight, I was thinking of a better way to answer this. I think the student was caught in a moral dilemma--how to love an author's work if she was also stealing? With enough experience in life, we learn to say I take what I want--everybody has good and bad things in them. But to an young adult, this dilemma is serious stuff--and as teachers, we cannot ask them to care less about morality nor can we say be moral always. They are at a stage where they are yet to discover the flaws of rigid moralities and the disasters of morality-less society. Also, they want quick and straightforward answers to questions as if such answers are always available. They think they being objective or pursuing truth by asking such questions. Such is the innocence, really.
But I wish I had focused a bit more on how petty morals--the idea of boxing everything into black or white is quite a useless. That as a student of literature, surely she must know from Shakespeare if not other masters that grey is all there is. I wish I had told her--there is no dilemma here, really. You decide, read her if want to, boycott her if you like. What you choose to do is not a reflection of your moral character either. Neither has Kaur's life and work held out promises to the world of morality.
Back home, I read Kaur when I got the chance (The Sun and her flowers & Milk and Honey), loved her work and felt inspired too. I was quite amused when I saw that on Goodreads, she lists her work under Self Help! Wow, some humility, for a best-selling author who has sold a few million copies of her work! Right?
The question-answer session was quite charged and one of the questions I fielded was on Rupi Kaur. I had not read her at that point of time but had read the plagiarism controversy she had gotten herself into. One of the students asked us about how we viewed Rupi Kaur who writes beautifully but was accused of plagiarism. My answer was 1) that in the west, things are very straightforward and unlike in India, there are very specific criteria to decide on these issues. And that if Kaur was let off, she must not have plagiarized. 2) Plagiarism in the Humanities is hard to establish. 3) That life is so homogeneous, especially for the immigrant in western parts of the world such as US and Canada that it is not surprising if two second generation writers wrote about the exact same things. A year is divided into desi events and non-desi events--the desi ones being quite personal in many ways and formatted into festivals, concerts, interactions with relatives and so on and then the non-desi events that form work, school and other interactions. That the heterogeneity that was there in India was not there anywhere else in the world.
In hindsight, I was thinking of a better way to answer this. I think the student was caught in a moral dilemma--how to love an author's work if she was also stealing? With enough experience in life, we learn to say I take what I want--everybody has good and bad things in them. But to an young adult, this dilemma is serious stuff--and as teachers, we cannot ask them to care less about morality nor can we say be moral always. They are at a stage where they are yet to discover the flaws of rigid moralities and the disasters of morality-less society. Also, they want quick and straightforward answers to questions as if such answers are always available. They think they being objective or pursuing truth by asking such questions. Such is the innocence, really.
But I wish I had focused a bit more on how petty morals--the idea of boxing everything into black or white is quite a useless. That as a student of literature, surely she must know from Shakespeare if not other masters that grey is all there is. I wish I had told her--there is no dilemma here, really. You decide, read her if want to, boycott her if you like. What you choose to do is not a reflection of your moral character either. Neither has Kaur's life and work held out promises to the world of morality.
Back home, I read Kaur when I got the chance (The Sun and her flowers & Milk and Honey), loved her work and felt inspired too. I was quite amused when I saw that on Goodreads, she lists her work under Self Help! Wow, some humility, for a best-selling author who has sold a few million copies of her work! Right?
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