About the principle of Varnasrama Vindaloo Dharma [1], my friend Steve Crane [2] (on a mailing list we're both on) send a link to BoingBo ing, saying it's a hoax [3], an April Fools hoax, but yet, according to the original site, it's not [4]:
So it became Monday, and instead of finishing off my nice prank I was going to share with two or three dozen real-life friends, I was faced with all of you people looking for blood. I didn't want blood. What I wanted was irony. Perhaps to facilitate the founding of a scholarship at her school, or get her to donate Hinduism books to the library, or even just to get her to actually write the damn paper. But it was all happening way too fast, and I knew at that point that the site would come around to her way faster than my timeline had projected.
So the e-mail revealing the link went out Tuesday afternoon instead of Wednesday morning, while I still thought there was a slim chance of warning her. Hours later, she found me on im. There was lots I wanted to ask her, and lots I wanted to shame her about. At this point, I figured that the internet had punished her, and she's already an example even if she doesn't get expelled.
“Laura K. Krishna is Just a Dumb Kid With a Nice Mom [5]”
So, is it a hoax? Is the BoingBoing [6] notice a hoax? Hard to say about this one (and if either is an April Fools hoax, they're still a few days early).
But, reguardless, it has brought up a nice debate about plagiarism and whether the punishment (of public ridicule on the Internet) fits the crime (of paying someone to write a college paper). I'm siding with the “not a hoax” theory myself and that Laura K. Krishna (not her real name) is learning a hard hard lesson.
[2] http://craniac.antville.org/
[3] http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/29/plagiarismseeking_im.html
[4] http://www.aweekofkindness.com/blog/archives/2005/03/laura_k_krishna_1.
[5] http://www.aweekofkindness.com/blog/archives/2005/03/laura_k_krishna_1.