His prescience in picking the titles of the two books he wrote must be the darkest irony in Tarun Tejpal’s life. The Alchemy of Desire and The Story of My Assassins seem to be have sequentially made their import felt in the seismic shift of fortunes he has experienced over the last fortnight.
His life has turned into the kind of epic tale of lust, greed, hubris and downfall of a king maker which is probably right now stirring the authorial ambitions of many who know him. Today, the man and his brand, are perilously close to annihilation. His ex-colleague of India Today vintage, Binoo John, mustered all the bathos at his command when he ended his recent blog on Tejpal with the words: ‘And now he cannot live any more.”
If life is a metaphor for success, Tejpal certainly hacked away at his own longevity.
He was famous for his ability to spot opportunities, to pick the doors that were ajar and pushed them to conquer new vistas.
As he entered the infamous elevator in a hotel in Goa early last month with his young female colleague, if only Tejpal could have seen his future with the same clarity he did his career and politicking after India Today, he would have probably taken the stairs. But the man wears blinkers. He didn’t take them off even after the elevator reached the ground floor and he stepped out into a world that had changed for him forever.
He continued to strut about, believing he was invincible. Even in the deluge of emails that hit him — from the young female colleague he molested, other employees at Tehelka who resigned, including his priceless acolyte Shoma Chaudhury, his blinkers wouldn’t come off. (Shoma did her best to save him but soon realised she needed to save herself first.)
Tejpal could sight the “light-hearted banter” but not his explicit acts of molestation; he could see the “thunderclouds” on that “ill-fated” evening but not the lightning about to strike him. He could see political machinations but couldn’t see the ludicrousness of annexing a personal crime to a political context.
This has probably been Tejpal’s fatal flaw — his inability to see where he was headed. To want to supplant a luminous intellect with lumpen business interests and pick philandering over a purposeful mission is a mendacious trait of the self-absorbed.
The man who made Indian media feel he was an achiever of the kind whose DNA was the rarest of the rare has bust that myth and turned out to be a garden-variety egotist and coward, who evaded the law till he could no more.
It’s not just Tejpal’s personal motives that are under scrutiny; the wrecking ball of time is headed for Tejpal’s business empire as well. As for the political floss and froth he has been attracting, it was expected thanks to the archetypical predilection of Indian politicians to further their self-serving interests.
What is the future of Tehelka? The question, as well as the answer, has an expiry date. And that is indeed sad. In a country ridden with corruption in high places, rife with crimes against women and an institutionalised apathy towards the have-nots, Tehelka offered hope.
Thirteen years ago, it set out to expose the wrong-doers, shame the shameless and lend an ear to the silently suffering. It galvanised many young minds to choose fearless investigation of the truth as a career. And then, it got seduced by its own fame because by then, Tejpal had set off beyond the green fields of journalism in search of more money, power and politicking. He got them all. But it’s what he has lost that must matter to him the most today.
