On śabdacaurya (plagiarism) and Being Different (from the way one really is) [2]

Companies and corporations in trouble occasionally appoint (expensive) 

external advisors: their purpose is to facilitate sometimes difficult

decisions in order to make the enterprise as a whole again "healthy" and profitable. 

The external advisor's personal strategy is usually to keep the top

management happy and convinced. Whether the measures proposed by the advisor

were helpful or counterproductive (or even fake) will usually become 

clear after they have received their remuneration and when it is too late

to turn back. 

From recently published statements as in the "firstpost" referred to earlier, one may infer that RM aspires to such position as "external advisor" to 

"Indological India Inc." by giving encouraging verbal advise (basically ok) AND by 

adding counterproductive de facto advise: (a) a little plagiarism does no harm (can

be washed away if discovered) and (b) stop interacting with scholars from abroad 

(I propose to label this latter move the NAVEL U-TURN). The best universities in 

the world in all other domains of science and scholarship have the exact opposite 

policies: 

(a) eradicate even seemingly innocent forms of plagiarism; (b) exchange

knowledge, discussions, scholars with top universities elsewhere in the world. 

It is not difficult to predict the long-term consequences if such counterproductie 

advise -- as if advising to a car factory to neglect basic mechanical laws and technology --

presented as the way to corporate success, is really put into practice. 

The conglomerate of issues presented by RM is definitely original and strategically

suitable to his proposed projects. 

One of these, the relative neglect of serious and reliable Indian scholars, has

been recognized by authors such as Laury Patton and, earlier, by Jan Gonda who in his contributions to the History of Indian Literature always made extensive effort to refer to all relevant modern indological authors on an issue, western, eastern, indian. 

To parade the washing away of plagiarism as a "decolonization" is an insult also 

to these, and all current, serious scholars of India. 

Quotation from a well-known text of the Sanskrit tradition 

(Kāvyamīmāṁsā of Rājaśekhara, ed. by C.D. Dalal and R.A. Sastry, Baroda 1934, p. 57): 

पुंसः कालातिपातेन  चौर्यमन्यद्विशीर्यते ।

अपि पुत्रेषु पौत्रेषु  वाक्चौर्यं च न शीर्यते ॥

My English translation: 

Any other case of stealing committed by a man fades with the passage of time, 

but the stealing of language (plagiarism) never fades away, not even in one's sons 

and grandsons.