Tarun J Tejpal

  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...

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...

  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...

  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...

  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 ...