 I joke that he’s Jesus Christ Superstar and we all have to pull up our socks around him! 
An impassioned crusader exposing corruption in high circles…A modern-day Quixote tilting at windmills… Wordsmith and literary animal….The man behind India’s biggest news story in 55 years, Tarun Tejpal, speaks to RENUKA CHATTERJEE about ‘Operation Westend’, the many apostles who soldiered by his side, the Judases who sold out for a bag of silver and the resurgence of Tehelka
I am not sure I am the right person to write this article. Though I have known Tarun Tejpal for close to 15 years, the realisation dawns as I put pen to paper, that I have almost always seen him through the prism of someone else’s eyes. Our first encounter was in the mid ’80s, when he was with India Today. He was introduced to me then as a ‘promising young man’ who wrote the best book reviews in town. A few years later, having crossed the tracks to publishing myself, I met him again, this time as a friend of David Davidar. He would breeze into the Penguin India office and take the boss out for an extended lunch, the reason his appearance was always greeted with joy.
Then, when he joined hands with Sanjeev Saith, to set up IndiaInk, I began to hear of him in publishing circles – often with envy: how many publishers can land a Booker with their very first book, a first novel by a first time writer? Clearly, it took a Tejpal and an Arundhati Roy and a ‘God Above All Things’ to pull it off.
Through all of this, our conversations remained friendly but – strange are the ways of big cities – it was only when I met him for this interview that we really talked. When he was no longer just Tarun Tejpal, but the man behind India’s biggest news story in 55 years; the man who made Tehelka as much a part of the Indian lexicon as yeh dil maange more (though in widely differing contexts, I hasten to add, lest the levity upset Mr Tejpal).
For levity does not seem to find much favour with Tejpal these days. He insists that the ‘madcap’ side of him still exists. (“Ask my daughter, Tiya. She sent an application to an American university the other day where she wrote, ‘My father is a famous journalist and a lunatic!’”) But, gravitas is the order of the day when we meet: it is with the zeal of a crusader that he speaks of the death on the cross of corruption of Tehelka, the website, and its resurrection as Tehelka, the newspaper; the many apostles who soldiered by his side and the Judases who sold out for a bag of silver.
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