Jane devoured herself in her favourite author Angelique Harper’s new book gifted by Michael. Only after reading it, she paused. Did an “mhmm”. She was bewildered, furious, confused, and all at once angry. Angelique Harper had plagiarised her work! She was in a frenzy and wanted to take legal action, confront Angelique and tell her what she did was absolutely wrong. Jane The Virgin is a delightful romantic satirical show with brilliant telenovela storytelling. But it's not just that. Each episode is unique and beautifully transcribes some of the greatest life lessons about — sex and religion, faith, immigration, race, and more importantly the nitty-gritty of daily life.
The anecdote presented above is one such lesson that many of us perhaps need to take away. Jane went to the bookstore for confrontation where Angelique was having her book signing but unfortunately, she couldn't have it as Petra (her friend?) went into labour pain and she had to drive her to the hospital. To drive Petra’s mind away from the pain, Jane started reading Angelique’s book aloud to her. Did the pain subside? Not really. But as she re-read the book and ruminated more on the story plot, she reflected that despite the plot and the words being similar to her raw work, it wasn't really that similar. Had it not been for Jane, I would've never known that Shakespeare used Chaucer’s work.
You probably might be wondering, what exactly is my point? Well, a few more observations first.
Being an economics student is not an easy task. An idea strikes you, and convincing yourself, “It is the most unique idea and perhaps no one ever wrote a paper on it” you set yourself to discover “the trend”. But alas, only when you get to Literature Review you realise there are plenty of brilliant minds out there thinking the exact same thing, their trail of thought as precisely as yours, only they employed a T-test and not a Chi-Square Test, or maybe took a p-value of 0.05 because obviously just like everyone has a unique writing style, researchers also use a unique sample and statistical tools.
A few days back, I and my friend were discussing the flaws of Left Economic policies and why Capitalism, not in totality, is required in a population boom era as that of ours. She was the first one to send this whole theory in a Voice Note and I shot back “I think exactly the same, only I didn't think about the population boom being one of the factors”. I sent her another voice note with some other political theory I have analysed and she texted back, “DUDE SAME SAME”. Interesting. We are different individuals and didn't talk a lot about this before so none of us knew what inclination the other one had, so how is it we were thinking the exact same thing?
These instances left me with a lingering thought, are we at all original thinkers? Or is it that our thought process trails to someone else’s, unconsciously? Oh, did you know that Petra named her twins Anna and Elsa? No! not after the Frozen sisters. She didn't even know that was a thing!
We, humans, have a tendency of associating the worst-case scenario to a person we don't know about and when we see a piece of our work out there authored, painted, photographed by someone else our instant thought is — copied! Where is the benefit of a doubt? The idea that there are billions of minds out there and what are the odds that two of them think starkly in tandem to what the other thinks? Ask me, the probability is really high. Some just happen to put their thoughts out there in the form of art and some don't but that doesn't mean that the ones who haven't ascribed a tangible meaning to it never resonated with the idea. Does this make sense? Probability not. Probably yes. Who knows. When my friend sent me that voice note explaining her economic theory I asked her if there is an article about the same for a nuanced understanding. She told me its all her idea but maybe unconsciously she might have read somewhere. So the question is, is anyone an original thinker? Try Googling your work.
