"Golmaal hai bhai sab golmaal hai!!!..."
This was the song that was ringing in
my ears constantly since the last two weeks.
Do you wonder why?
One of my articles 'Love, Rotis and apinch of wisdom from a mother' on Womensweb was copied and shared blatantly online on
Facebook, Whatsapp and Blogs without my consent. I was not even acknowledged as
the author.
I had written the article originally
for an Indispire prompt, where a mother writes an email to his son asking him to
not laugh at the shapeless rotis that her daughter-in-law makes. It was a top
post on Indiblogger. I then shared it with womensweb where I am registered as an
author. It was published on June 16th 2015. There too it was very popular. The total number of page views on my article is now
nearing 10,000 there. It was shared more than 400 times on Facebook and got
more than 3000 likes.
I was pleased beyond words. Even boasted about it to all my friends and relatives. And then
the Golmal began.
Some person copied it from the women’s
web page and made it into a Whatsapp message. It went viral there. I got it
from a friend in Dubai who forwarded it to me without knowing that I was the
author. Another friend from Mumbai messaged me that my article was going viral
on Whatsapp and that she saw it in 4 different groups in which she was member. A few others too told me the same.
I was still okay with it as it showed
that the article was being loved and the message it conveyed was reaching more
people that way. And mostly because Whatsapp is a very mad world. No one has any control over the things going on there! I couldn't do anything.
Then another friend on Facebook
messaged me that a certain lady Manju Verma had copied the article on Facebook
and that it was going viral. It was copied word by word from the article on the
womensweb.in page. It has been shared on Facebook almost 30,000 times now.
Check the snippet below.
I was furious this time. I tried
contacting her, messaged her through Facebook but there was no response. Then I
put up a status asking for help from friends to report the post to Facebook.
But Facebook merely told me that the
post did not contain anything that violated their community standards. I was so
miserable seeing that message. It just declared that anyone can copy our
articles onto Facebook and pass it on as theirs.
 |
| ( What does that even mean?!!) |
The post is still up. But I have
reported it to Women's Web and they have promised to take definite action.
Though the last two weeks were hard
on me, I found out during this period as to who my well wishers were. I wish to
thank fellow bloggers and writers Aathira Jim, Roshan Radhakrishnan, Ganga Bharani, Sreesha Divakaran, Jaibala Rao, Vishal
Bheero, Sid Balachandran, Rekha Dyani, Sachin Prabhu, Simran Kaur, Jyoti Menon,
Deepti Menon, Sundari Venkitraman, Dinesh Radhakrishnan, Gayatri Aptekar, Anmol Rawat, Sumeetha manikandan, Shrruti Patole, Rhiti Bhose, Bill Bartlett, Devika Fernando and many
others for supporting me.
And a very special Thank you to my
husband who commented on each and every place that he saw the article being
shared, mentioning that it was plagiarized and that I had the copyright. You
are a gem!
So the song has now changed to this!
Too na jaane aas paas hai Khuda!!!
