On April 26, 2006, Viswanathan had told "The New York Times", "I've never read a novel with an Indian-American protagonist ... The plot points are reflections of my own experience. I'm an Indian-American." Subsequently, on May 3, 2006, "The Harvard Independent" noted three passages in "Opal Mehta" similar to Tanuja Desai Hidier's "Born Confused" (2002), another young adult novel about an Indian-American teenager in New Jersey. They cited "uncanny resemblance in imagery, sentence structure, and paragraph organization" between the two books. Hidier later stated that she had "ironically" been alerted to the allegations on the day Viswanathan was quoted in "The New York Times". Hidier said: