In a moment of intense masochism a couple of weeks ago, I set up a Google Alert for the following piece of text - "it was a lovely december morning" (Yes, I hear you saying "Don't tell me you're still going on about that", but I've been known to be quite persistent about certain things).

So, last night Google sent me the following link - Sulekha Expressions

Now, I was initially a little surprised to see that link there, since JALS hasn't been on the main Sulekha page in ages. So I clicked on the link that took me to the page, and as I expected, my story wasn't there.

Still a little curious, I checked Google's cache. And was taken to this page - Google Cache for Sulekha Expressions. (The cache entry will probably expire soon, so here's a screenshot for the sake of posterity).

As you can imagine, my surprise soon turned to shock. Someone had plagiarised my story on Sulekha itself! Yes, it did get taken off the site within a day or so, but still! The fact that it went through their review process (one that lasted four months the last time I sent them a story of mine) and passed, is proof of a gaping hole in the way Sulekha functions, isn't it?

My disillusionment with Sulekha has been increasing for quite some time.

• The management behind the portal, specially the creative section, is hardly professional anymore.
  Here's a something I heard from a fellow Sulekha author -
  "I submitted the story a few months ago to Sulekha, and they rejected it - quite rudely - telling me that I should consider adding a little humour to it. I then tried submitting it without any changes, a couple of months later under a different name, and this time they published it in a couple of weeks."
  For the record, I considered that particular story quite funny.
• They keep adding new sections to their portal, without bothering to fix serious existing bugs.
• The link to the "Vintage" article on the site hasn't been changed in almost two years.
• Submissions sometimes take months to appear on the site, and then appear without letting the author know.
• Sulekha management is unresponsive.
• Their weblogs were supposed to have RSS support a year ago, and there is no sign of that yet.
• Private submissions magically became public during the last major upgrade, and there is no way to delete them now.
• The site design is confusing to say the least.

And now this.

Unfortunately, it is probably still the most popular forum for the Indian Community on the internet. And until that changes, they won't have any motivation to get their act together.

So, I'd just like to thank the kind soul who pointed the plagiarism out to the authorities. Thank you!

Update: Fixed broken link to JALS

Remember how I'm always saying that it ticks me off when people put my story up on the net without giving me any credit for it?
Well, I found out about yet another one of these. But there's a twist. And maybe because "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" (I'm assuming they liked it, but then assumption is the mother of all f- ... you know), they decided to make a not-so-mega-serial out of it.

My constitution is a little too weak to read the whole thing, but that's probably just me.

So if anyone can go through the whole thing, could you let me know if it's a happy ending? Just that. I'd rather not know the details. Maybe someday. But not right now. Ok?

Updated 15 Nov 2004: Removed link to the mega-serial, based on a request by the author(s). I would like to point out that this is not because I'm backing down from my stand on the unauthorized use of my work. I'm only giving in to a request by the author(s) to allow their work to remain private - even if "private" means being able to find the site using MSN Search using the first few words from my story...

Updated 13 Dec 2004: ... or via links the authors left behind on the comments to this post.