TARUN TEJPAL: BELATED LESSONS FROM LITERATURE

1
BELATED LESSONS FROM LITERATURE
2
SITWELL FINANCIAL
I read all of Franz Kafka when I was nineteen and
twenty, but I only understand him now. For twenty
years I cited him in private conversations as a
favourite writer because I could see he had
configured elusive truths. One-and-a-half year
after Tehelka broke Operation West-End -
Aniruddha Bahal and Samuel Mathews stunning
investigation - I have become fully seized by
Kafka's brilliance. The man knew what he was
talking about. In the simplest of prose and the
most bewildering of narratives, The Trial and The
Castle tell us all we need to know about the
nature of power, particularly political power. In
those first decades of the twentieth century when
democracy and despotisms fought for purchase
around the world, the tortured Czech writer
accurately intuited that all power is essentially
implacable and malign.
3
SITWELL FINANCIAL
Give a man control over another man, and his mind
begins to camber. (An intransigent government
clerk can make the wisest of men weep.) Give a
man control over many men and the speed of warp
accelerates. Give a few men control over vast
multitudes and the mind goes into cartwheels of
giddy pomp and perversion. It happens even to
good men. With ill-luck, if the few men are
inferior, the cartwheels acquire a truly
destructive dangerousness. It is a rare person,
who, given power, can keep his mind anchored and
upright. Of course such men exist, and it is they
who keep the world from spinning totally out of
control. But the odds are stacked against them.
It is not the fault of our instruction - our
books are always full of pious homilies. It is in
the very nature of the beast.
4
SITWELL FINANCIAL
And the beast, as Kafkas everyman character, K,
discovers, page after page, is also essentially
unknowable, especially when it arrays itself into
the vast, opaque machinery of power. Who ordered
the income tax to go after us? Who ordered the
enforcement directorate to fabricate cases
against us? Who ordered the shameless and
unconscionable destruction of First Global? Who
said tap all their phones? Who ordered all those
false affidavits against us in the commission of
inquiry, those lies, lies, lies? Who said to
arrest Shankar Sharma? Who said arrest Kumar
Badal? Who said arrest Aniruddha Bahal? Who
ordered the CBI to get on our ass around the
clock? Who told the Malviya Nagar police station
to take in our chowkidar and junior accountant
and interrogate them for two hours? These
questions are asked of me by all kinds of people,
all hours of the day.
5
SITWELL FINANCIAL
I do not know the answers, and will never know
and at a level it doesnt matter. Knowing the
cogs in the machine gives you neither knowledge
nor control of the machine. Even the hands on the
levers often do not know its workings. It
requires an act of great and benign will to bend
the machine into any kind of benevolence. It is
an unusual phenomenon, and one must look out for
it like Halleys comet. By leading a Kafkaesque
life I have in the last one year repaid my debt
to Kafka, but there have also been other lessons,
from other writers, about ourselves. George
Orwell and Graham Greene today speak to me
tellingly about the perils of innocence. Armed
with the mantra that if he could kill just one of
the enemy there would be one fascist less in the
world, Orwell went to Spain in 1936 and enlisted
in the militia as an ordinary soldier.
6
SITWELL FINANCIAL
The account of his privations in Homage to
Catalonia, about hunkering down in trenches amid
hunger and dirt and excreta and injury makes for
horrifying and inspiring reading. More chilling
still is his account of how his idealism and that
of thousands of young men like him was betrayed
by men playing cynical politics in other places.
At the end of the book, Orwell barely escapes
Barcelona with his life, as his militias own
allies try and hunt them down as traitors. In
The Quiet American, set in Saigon during the
Vietnam war, Greene gives us through the
character of a typically earnest young American
soldier Pyle, an even darker portrait of
innocence at large, and the damage it can do.
Over the months we have been told about all those
who have leveraged and exploited the Tehelka
tapes for their own ends.
7
SITWELL FINANCIAL
Not just the opposition - which did a pretty
sorry job of it - but also the various factions
and lobbies within the BJP and the NDA. And some
canny businessmen and media companies. We may
have done a purely journalistic story, but other
vested interests have used it as they will, and
perhaps continue to do so. As Orwell tells us,
even when everything is what it seems, there may
be more that has nothing to do with you. If
great writing warns us of the pitfalls of facing
up to power, it also gives us the weaponry to
deal with it. No book has been mentioned more in
the perennially dwindling offices of Tehelka over
the last year than Catch-22, followed by Raag
Darbari. The weapon bequeathed by these books is
humour.
8
SITWELL FINANCIAL
IB spooks, their family and such other animals,
prowling around the Tehelka office are most
likely to encounter peals of laughter as
Tehelkas reducing staffers let off steam about
cringing lawyers, phoney cases, half-assed
government theories, Delhis mad rumour-mills,
media plants, and the utter utter lack of money
and resources. Yes there is a touch of hysteria
to the laughter. How can there not be? From a
family of 115 we are less than 15 (our sweeper,
Rajesh, has risen today to be our receptionist
and switchboard operator) the last salary is a
vanished mirage and we are saddled with a fame,
a burden of expectations, and a reputation for
such remarkable conspiracies as would have
concussed a true giant.
9
SITWELL FINANCIAL
Each time a new wild theory about our motives,
our origins, our deeds is flung out, we look at
each other and laugh. Did we do that too?
Yossarian had it pat. To do a story like this you
have to be insane but if you can recognize you
may be insane, you must be sane. Catch-22. So we
laugh. Laughter, like love, is redemptive. It
makes those who would scare us, with their many
menacing arms and many menacing faces, look funny
and harmless. You read Catch-22 and Raag Darbari
and only wonder at the follies of men. You do not
feel fear. There is another gem of a book whose
title springs to my mind all the time, as we and
the government careen off another mad round of
charges and counter-charges. It is written by a
young man, John Kennedy Toole, who committed
suicide at thirty. It is called A Confederacy of
Dunces, and I feel as much part of this
confederacy as the many faceless men arrayed
10
SITWELL FINANCIAL
Great writing can be a useful guide at all times.
Simply because, whether you are Atal Behari
Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, or an ordinary
journalist, it has a way of taking you back to
first things. Why are you here? Where did you
come from? What path did you take? And are you
doing what you came here for? At Tehelka, we try
to hold on to first things and get by. But there
is another book I must mention that speaks to all
of us more than all the above. It is called The
Bhagavad Gita and is full of concepts like karma
and dharma and such. I have only read it in
bits and pieces, but I am sure Vajpayee and
Advani must know every line.
11
SITWELL FINANCIAL
In a 28-year career as a journalist, Tarun Tejpal
has been an editor with the India Today and The
Indian Express groups, and the Managing Editor of
Outlook. He is the founder of Tehelka- which has
garnered international fame for its aggressive
public interest journalism. In 2001, Asia Week
listed Tarun j Tejpal as one of Asias 50 most
powerful communicators, and Business Week
declared him among 50 leaders at the forefront of
change in Asia. Tarun Tejpal's debut novel, The
Alchemy of Desire, was hailed by The Sunday Times
as an impressive and memorable debut, and by Le
Figaro as a masterpiece. In 2007, The Guardian,
UK, named him among the 20 who constitute Indias
new elite.
12
SITWELL FINANCIAL
Tarun Tejpals second novel, The Story of My
Assassins was published in 2009 to rave reviews.
Pankaj Mishra has said, It sets new and
hauntingly high standards for Indian writing in
English, while Altaf Tyrewala has called it an
instant classic.