When I first heard the news about Kaavya Viswanathan, my reactions were mixed - vengeful glee and sympathy. The sympathy is easy to explain. After all, whatever the ethics of the case, one can't help but feel sorry for a 19-year-old whose career as a writer has come to a full stop - or, at least, a long semicolon - when it's just begun. It would take a lot of courage for a publisher to put his money on a manuscript bylined 'Kaavya Viswanathan' again - and a lot of guts for her to write it. The shame and humiliation the poor girl must be going through - can you imagine having 1,020 hits on Google, all of them devoted to debating whether you're a cheat or a victim (ambitious parents pushing their daughter to fame and fortune, unscrupulous book packagers busily introducing passages from another writer's book into her manuscript without a qualm). Not to mention the ignominy of having your book removed from the shelves, the Dreamworks film deal reduced to a pipe dream...

She's even landed with a title that lends itself so well to nasty punning, when the going gets rough. No sooner did the plagiarism scandal break, than How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life turned into headlines like 'How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Caught, Got Recalled and Got a Ruined Career', or 'How Kaavya Viswanathan Got Rich, Famous and Finally Poor', and Net jokes like this one: 'I think it's Kaavya, not Opal who needs a kiss…she got real smooches from the publishers.'

The glee was more personal. At a poolside dinner in Mumbai recently, I was holding forth on one of my pet cribs - how the Indian media gives space only to firangi imprints or their Indian offshoots and ignores writers who are published only by Indian publishers, with no penguins or other foreign animals as their 'parent company'. My ire was directed at the editor of a national daily who for many years had dispensed with book pages altogether, only to reintroduce them with titles like Belfast Confidential, of which you'd find perhaps half a dozen copies in desi bookshops and erudite articles on Gael Greene and Ruth Reichi (all those who know who they are, hands up!).

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