Tarun J Tejpal

  It may seem like a particularly nothing month of the year — summer is on its way out but the glories of fall are nowhere yet in sight — but there is one landscape on which August glows like a firefly. Literature One of the greatest novelists of the 20th century — James Baldwin — was born in this month while another towering figure of the form, Toni Morrison, died in August. But not for nothing do they call it “august company”, because you cannot write of the month without acknowledging  that it both gave us and took away one of the most formidable, challenging, contentious geniuses of the literary firmament, a man whose connection to India both formed and deformed him. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul — Nobel laureate, Booker winner, knight of the British Empire, might be among literature’s most improbable stories. Born in Trinidad on August 17, 1932, and dying just short of his 86th birthday, on August 11, 2018, Naipaul was the grandson of an indentured labourer who had tr...

  “Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just gotta sit and watch and wait.”  From Miguel Street, by VS Naipaul There is perhaps no greater mark of a writer’s genius that you cannot read him through his words: anyone who ever heard, saw, or watched V S Naipaul engage in the real world will find this throwaway philosophical aside on life entirely alien to their experience of the man who was famously precise, pitiless, and impatient. Yet, that same experience of the man makes the words inescapably his: economical, deeply weighted, deceptively simple. To describe Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul — or V S Naipaul as he came to be universally known — as a ‘writer' is to describe Einstein as a scientist; in many ways, for many writers of the postcolonial era, he was the writer; inventor of a form, a language, a way of seeing that simply did not exist before him; a man who used the same language available to them ...

  Tarun Tejpal - It seems like both public and mass media's memory limits itself to the worlds of sport and cinema. While two decades of Lagaan trended for days on social media a couple of months ago, and reams of airtime was devoted to it on prime time, a landmark — some might call it defining — moment in politics and in Indian journalism also hit its 20 year anniversary recently. You might remember it as Operation West End. Or you might remember it as the massive defence deals scam unearthed by Tarun Tejpal's magazine Tehelka in its now legendary first sting operation, something for which the magazine and Tejpal were placed firmly in the crosshairs of the BJP for times to come. As conversations about the Rafaele deal — a global web of secrecy, contradictory statements from different governments, and an incomprehensible amount of citizen money — bubble and fade under the watch of a compromised press and an indifferent, even reverent public, one thing is clear. To anyone who h...

Tarun Tejpal - One thing 2021 seems intent on doing: showing that ordinary folk aren't the only ones succumbing to the pressures of the pandemic year gone by. A spate of high-profile A-list break-ups — from Bollywood to Hollywood — are showing no one is immune from the strains of an unprecedented year, whether your last name is Khan or Kardashian. These iconic twosomes — Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West — were just two celebrity pairings that announced they were calling it quits. Celebrity break-ups are hardly a pandemic invention but the timing of some of these is particularly demoralising, as we realise even those who seem to have it all cannot survive this time unscathed. A quick look at the endings playing out in public life this year: Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao: Headlines are hardly new to Aamir and Kiran, but this one was devastating to their fans. Arguably Bollywood's most measured, yet wildly successful actor, Aamir —also known as Mr Perfectionist ...

Tarun Tejpal - DEAR MRS SONIA GANDHI, We all know the cliché that India moves on faith. We love our gods, and it is at their feet that we place all our successes and failures. It is in this department that those who oppose you — and perhaps even some of those who support you — will assert that you have an unfair advantage. Through marriage and masquerade you have acquired all the gods Indian politicians have, while also possessing one you brought along from your faraway home all those aeons ago. Since we do not oppose you, we are happy that you have an extra god. As you know, India has so many gods only because it has so many problems. (Yes, there are men on the far left and far right who think god is the problem, to be banished or to be rescued — but let these men not detain us, since they’ve failed to detain the electorate.) So we are glad that you have an extra god. One more is always handy. Our gods are playful, multi-faced, philosophical. Often their moralities are slippery to gr...

  Tarun Tejpal - THIS WOULD be an interesting question. Not how everyone and their tentwallah judge Manmohan Singh, but what, when he looks into the mirror, does he make of himself? Does he see a professorial economist who bust the seams of possibility by becoming the Prime Minister of the biggest democracy in the world? Or does he see a decent, remarkably inoffensive bloke who also managed to become a decent, remarkably inoffensive politician? Does he see an efficient flunkey, living and dying by the whim of the master? Or does he see an artful leader couched in the skin of an artless follower? Does he see strength in his eyes? Or does he see weakness in his jaw? Is that honesty shining there, or is it timidity? Is he the handwork of a superior will, or is he the creation of a lucky accident? Wide-eyed moralists imagine history to be a fair and lofty judge, full of considered pronouncements. The truth is history struggles to make sense of the snarl of human affairs. By no reasona...

  Tarun Tejpal - ON A BALMY evening at the end of September 2001 I was in the hall of a luxurious hotel in south Mumbai attending a media awards ceremony. The company I represented — a tiny website with a working life of less than a year — was creating ripples in the packed room. By the time the evening was over, of the fourteen awards up for the having, the website would have pulled in six. These would include the Media Brand of the Year (ahead of MTV and Star Plus, which would grab second place); Content Head of the Year; Investigative Story of the Year (for unearthing the goof-ups of Kargil); and Entertainment Story of the Year. The story for which the website was now universally famous was not even in the reckoning. These were awards for the year 2000; the big story belonged to March, 2001. While we were being feted with a string of media awards, a sinister drama connected to us was being played out in the international airport at Chennai. A superbly successful young couple, s...