The Padma Bhushan awardee hit the nadir of his career last August, when he was accused of plagiarising from a New Yorker article for his Time magazine column on gun control. His employers dismissed it as a “journalistic lapse”. Even in the midst of the plagiarism episode, there was support: New York Times quoted one of his book researchers as saying he found Zakaria to be a “phenomenally fast, lucid writer who is never known to have had a ghost writer”. Is Zakaria too smart to let an unfortunate episode run him down?