Imitation Jewelery

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DonQuixote has left a new comment on your post "Summum Bonum":

The story 'vapas' reminds me of a very similar story in our English reader for class 7 or 8 . It was called "The Refund" by Fritz Karinsky.

I was unable to find the exact story but here is a blog that narrates it and describes one of the questions that was asked by the Math teacher:

http://mukundan.wordpress.com/2005/04/22/again-continuing-from-my-musings-on-language-and-words/

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So, that's it!

I had all along suspected that Vapas was lifted.

In our childhood there was a fantastic serial appearing in a popular Telugu weekly.

It is all about the pranks of a naughty kid named: "Budugu"

The episodes were very topical of our culture...a joint family, nice working father, super beautiful mom, widowed grandma crowing about her grandkid like I do about mine, the girly neighbor...

It was a terrific success and ran into many Ishani-type booklets.

Much later I relaized that Budugu was inspired by Dennis, the Menace.

No harm, as it was done in a masterly fashion.

But the author ran out of ideas after the Budugu series and started publishing story books which sold like hot cakes.

By then I was at IIT KGP and had read all the PGW novels.

And discovered that the Budugu author was lifting episodes from Ukridge, Jeeves, and Lord Emsworth without as much as a ThanQ!

Not all imitations are despicable. Imitation is the homage that the copy pays the original. But making money out of it is another matter...ask Bollywood.

But I was intrigued by a famous 15th century Christian Religious Book called:

"Imitation of Christ"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_of_Christ

Indeed copyright and stuff came about only after John Gutenberg made mass printing possible and commercial.

But deep down I feel that the Budugu author would have lost nothing if he acknowledged his source...he would have been as popular and made more money and less opprobrium.

Good imitation is the starting point of discovery and invention...ask the post-war Japanese.

And the DNA.

And Ishani learns everything by imitation...but how sweet she is!!!


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