Well if Mr Putin can do that it's ok for Mr Raj Singh to what he wants. 

JB, you're young and might not have read or heard about common practices in the former Soviet Union where Vladimir Putin grew up and was schooled.

Copying and borrowing texts and ideas without due attribution were acceptable generally.

Sometimes, though, a principled person would be brave enough to shout out the culprits.

On September 16, 1974, TIME magazine told the world about one notable case in a report headlined "SOVIET UNION: A Matter of Plagiarism."

Here's the beginning paragraph:

"When the U.S.S.R.'s most popular novelist, Mikhail Sholokhov, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, he was acclaimed by the Swedish Academy for "the artistic force and integrity" of his four-part classic The Quiet Don. This week his fellow Nobel prizewinner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, accused Sholokhov of plagiarism in a preface to a critical study of The Quiet Don* published in Paris. Solzhenitsyn declared that the real author of the epic tale of Don Cossacks in World War I and the Russian civil war was Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack writer."

So, JB, don't judge Mr Putin too harshly. His academic environment made him do that.

I would rather believe in what is printed in the Chronicle than in Time magazine .  

Girl dem all suffering short man inadequacy.

Mr T, during Mikhail Gorbachev's regime of glasnost [openness] it was confirmed that American publications like TIME and those by Western Sovietologists were generally right on some realities in the USSR.

Anyway, back to plagiarism.

In early 1991, I attended a press briefing by the Soviet Ambassador to Guyana at his Kitty residence. The topic was Lithuania's unilateral declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.

The Ambassador read from a typed script. During question time, he answered by rereading selected passages from the same script.

The reports on the press conference that appeared in the papers and were heard on the radio began like this: "Soviet Ambassador XXX XXXX says...."

One could not blame people for believing that it was the Ambassador who actually used the sentences attributed to him.

Actually, the Ambassador was quoting verbatim a communique issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

I know because I had read a text of the communique before attending the press conference. The Ambassador never said he was reading a CPSU statement; he read the thing as if he had written it.