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Tarun Tejpal - The Thin Red Line

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I WAS AMONG several who saw him die. His name was Surjit Singh Penta, and the year was 1988. A smartly calibrated siege of the Golden Temple had just ended in the surrender of all the militants holed up inside the Harmandir Sahib, the Temple’s sanctum sanctorum. As they filed out and squatted in the courtyard of the serai on the Temple’s periphery, a sudden commotion broke out. The police spotters had recognised a major militant. But before they could lay hands on him, he had swallowed his cyanide pill, and though the police threw him into a jeep to rush him to hospital, he was dead. Penta’s story deserves telling because it illustrates the pathology of oppression. The young Sikh was a national-level athlete representing Delhi before he became a witness to the brutal Sikh massacres of 1984. By the time he committed suicide a few years later more than 40 killings were attributed to him. Before he became a terrorist Penta had been terrorised by the state — or its malign absence. That is ...
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Tarun Tejpal - Indians on the Booker List: Sunjeev Sahota may have missed by a whisker, but these five winners didn’t

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Fun fact: Arundhati Roy’s Booker winning magnum opus was published by Tarun Tejpal . Read on for less-known details of India’s literary winners It’s an unlikely analogy, even an unfortunate one, but in some ways Arundhati Roy did for India what Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai had done just three years prior. They made Indians pick up their game in categories we often simply hadn’t competed in. It’s not that you can write a Booker-worthy novel simply because you decided to “compete” in that category. But for all the argument that mere representation is not enough, there is a powerful effect to seeing someone who looks like you, speaks like you, has the same broad cultural context as you, succeed in areas that seemed closed to you. The Indian publishing boom, which in some ways has run counter to a decline in publishing or reading in many markets around the world, bears testimony to this, just as the presence of the glamourous Indian woman on world platforms does to the explosive effect o...
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Tarun Tejpal - Remembering the Original Chocolate Boy Of Bollywood in His Birthday Month – Rishi Kapoor

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"The Kapoor khandaan is like the Apple iPhone. The same product, just slimmer in every generation," said Ranbir Kapoor in an interview to Tarun Tejpal September was a month Rishi Kapoor loved just a little more than other months, and while his own birthday — September 4 — was probably part of why, it was September 28 that he often remarked on as being one of the most special days in his life. Not surprising, when one dives into the details. It was, of course, the day his son Ranbir Kapoor — worthy successor to the original "chocolate boy" legend of his father — was born. It was also however the date his first film, a landmark in Indian filmdom, Bobby, was released in 1973. It was also, coincidentally, the birthday of his sister Rima Jain, and of another figure he deeply adored and admired, Lata Mangeshkar. September 2021 should have marked Rishi's 70th birthday but he succumbed to cancer in 2020, leaving an entire generation with the void of a superstar who cam...
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Tarun Tejpal - Rejection. Reinvention. Resilience. Amitabh Bachchan’s storied life has it all

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  In an in-depth interview to tarun tejpal a few years ago, the actor reckoned with failure as much as success The towering giant of Bollywood – Amitabh Bachchan – turns 79 this October, of which over five decades — half a century — are marked by almost ungraspable fame. But fame is an inadequate word for what Bachchan has earned in these decades — he has known adulation, worship, power, privilege, reverence; being treated, in the literal sense, like a god, with idols of his image being prayed to; he has become a multi-generational North Star, the unspoken centre of the cinema industry whether he actively participates in it any longer or not. It is, however, not all that he has accomplished, that might be his most extraordinary feat; it is all that he has bucked, all that he has survived, all the near-misses and almost-failures that he has overcome that are equally extraordinary. He bucked death itself on the sets of Coolie exactly 40 years ago, exactly halfway through his life th...
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Why conviction of Tarun Tejpal would have been a travesty of justice for him and not justice to the “prosecutrix”

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This is a long read. And a detailed one. It tries to go beyond the headlines, selective information, misinformation and various agendas to examine the judgement of the Goa trial court which acquitted former Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal on May 21, 2021. On page 509 of its judgement the Goa district court, while acquitting Tehelka founder Tarun Tejpal , has said, “the IO didn’t supply a copy of unedited CCTV footage of Block 7 to the accused (Tarun Tejpal) due to which the accused had to move to the honourable Supreme Court. The honourable court had directed the prosecution to provide clone copies of the unedited CCTV footage to the accused, which was not done for two years and a clone copy of the CCTV footage was finally handed over to the accused in 2016’. Two important points emerge from this observation of the court. One, it would not have been easy for Tarun Tejpal to defend himself in the court. Second, what actually was in the CCTV footage, that the accused went all the way to the...
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Tarun Tejpal - Public Interest Journalism: Another Side of Media

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  The words journalism and media seems to suggest one thing, one entity, one type of public role in the world but nothing could be further from the truth. The bulk of the world’s media platforms end up being platforms of record. What do we mean by that? They primarily focus on what happened, when, where, and sometimes, maybe by extension, why. They track what happens that they consider noteworthy in their field, and they report it. But while that makes us all better informed, it is a limited — and limiting — framework of what journalism really is, and has the potential to be; a powerful tool of unearthing, revealing, getting behind what those in power do not want revealed, whether that power resides in individuals or governments, in corporations or technocrats. Journalism at its most ethical, at its most truthful, represents national interest, represents citizens’ interest and sometimes might place both those secondary both those in order for something even greater, the idea of hum...
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Tarun J Tejpal - Death of a salesman and other elite ironies

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  Tarun J Tejpal - Rohinton Maloo was shot doing two things he enjoyed immensely. Eating good food and tossing new ideas. He was among the 13 diners at the Kandahar, Trident-Oberoi, who were marched out onto the service staircase, ostensibly as hostages. But the killers had nothing to bargain for. The answers to the big questions -- Babri Masjid, Gujarat, Muslim persecution -- were beyond the power of anyone to deliver neatly to the hotel lobby. The small ones -- of money and materialism -- their crazed indoctrination had already taken them well beyond. With the final banality of all fanaticism, flaunting the paradox of modern technology and medieval fervour -- AK-47 in one hand; mobile phone in the other -- the killers asked their minders, "Udan dein?" The minder, probably a maintainer of cold statistics, said, "Uda do." Rohinton caught seven bullets, and by the time his body was recovered, it could only be identified by the ring on his finger. Rohinton was just 4...
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