It is easy to detect plagiarism!

Thanks to the World Wide Web, it is easy to detect plagiarism, as a former editor of a leading Delhi newspaper learnt to his cost a few years ago.

Now, another clear act of plagiarism has been detected but the offender is unlikely to pay for it for the simple reason that he is the owner-editor. In the latest weekly magazine, the publisher-editor in his customary letter to the readers has reproduced lines from Slate, an America-based online news magazine.

The original and the plagiarised stuff are now doing the rounds on the internet with readers adding their own comments.

One of them commented that "ordinary journalists borrow, great journalists steal", a reference to the fact that the owner-editor had been bestowed with several national and international awards, including a Padma Bhushan.

To be fair to the owner-editor, the note from the publisher need not have been written by him. So, the mischief most likely was done by one of the hacks he employs.