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

[Tarun Tejpal]

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.