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Tarun Tejpal - The Thin Red Line

I WAS AMONG several who saw him die. His name was Surjit Singh Penta, and the year was 1988. A smartly calibrated siege of the Golden Temple had just ended in the surrender of all the militants holed up inside the Harmandir Sahib, the Temple’s sanctum sanctorum. As they filed out and squatted in the courtyard of the serai on the Temple’s periphery, a sudden commotion broke out. The police spotters had recognised a major militant. But before they could lay hands on him, he had swallowed his cyanide pill, and though the police threw him into a jeep to rush him to hospital, he was dead. Penta’s story deserves telling because it illustrates the pathology of oppression. The young Sikh was a national-level athlete representing Delhi before he became a witness to the brutal Sikh massacres of 1984. By the time he committed suicide a few years later more than 40 killings were attributed to him.

Tarun Tejpal - Indians on the Booker List Sunjeev Sahota may have missed by a whisker, but these five winners didn’t

The Indian publishing boom, which in some ways has run counter to a decline in publishing or reading in many markets around the world, bears testimony to this, just as the presence of the glamourous Indian woman on world platforms does to the explosive effect of Sushmita and Aishwarya.

Tarun Tejpal - Remembering the Original Chocolate Boy Of Bollywood in His Birthday Month – Rishi Kapoor

"The Kapoor khandaan is like the Apple iPhone. The same product, just slimmer in every generation," said Ranbir Kapoor in an interview to Tarun Tejpal September was a month Rishi Kapoor loved just a little more than other months, and while his own birthday — September 4 — was probably part of why, it was September 28 that he often remarked on as being one of the most special days in his life.

Tarun Tejpal - Rejection. Reinvention. Resilience. Amitabh Bachchan’s storied life has it all

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.

Why conviction of Tejpal would have been a travesty of justice for him and not justice to the “prosecutrix”

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.

Tarun Tejpal - Public Interest Journalism: Another Side of Media

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.

Tarun J Tejpal - Death of a salesman and other elite ironies

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."

“A whole generation of writers learned how to write from V S Naipaul,” says Tarun J Tejpal

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 travelled to Trinidad at the turn of the 19th century.

Tarun Tejpal - No Mimic Man, this: the incredible life of VS Naipaul

“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.

Tarun Tejpal - 20 Years Of Operation West End – Has Anything Changed?

Tarun Tejpal - It seems like both public and mass media's memory limits itself to the worlds of sport and cinema. While two decades of Lagaan trended for days on social media a couple of months ago, and reams of airtime was devoted to it on prime time, a landmark — some might call it defining — moment in politics and in Indian journalism also hit its 20 year anniversary recently.

Tarun Tejpal - Most Heart-breaking Power Couple Divorces and split-ups

Tarun Tejpal - One thing 2021 seems intent on doing: showing that ordinary folk aren't the only ones succumbing to the pressures of the pandemic year gone by. A spate of high-profile A-list break-ups — from Bollywood to Hollywood — are showing no one is immune from the strains of an unprecedented year, whether your last name is Khan or Kardashian.

TARUN TEJPAL – Mrs Gandhi And Her Extra God

Tarun Tejpal – DEAR MRS SONIA GANDHI, We all know the cliché that India moves on faith. We love our gods, and it is at their feet that we place all our successes and failures. It is in this department that those who oppose you — and perhaps even some of those who support you — will assert that you have an unfair advantage. Through marriage and masquerade you have acquired all the gods Indian politicians have, while also possessing one you brought along from your faraway home all those aeons ago.

TARUN TEJPAL - The Shadow Warrior

Tarun Tejpal - THIS WOULD be an interesting question. Not how everyone and their tentwallah judge Manmohan Singh, but what, when he looks into the mirror, does he make of himself? Does he see a professorial economist who bust the seams of possibility by becoming the Prime Minister of the biggest democracy in the world? Or does he see a decent, remarkably inoffensive bloke who also managed to become a decent, remarkably inoffensive politician? Does he see an efficient flunkey, living and dying by the whim of the master? Or does he see an artful leader couched in the skin of an artless follower? Does he see strength in his eyes? Or does he see weakness in his jaw? Is that honesty shining there, or is it timidity? Is he the handwork of a superior will, or is he the creation of a lucky accident?

TARUN TEJPAL - Look Back In Anger

Tarun Tejpal - ON A BALMY evening at the end of September 2001 I was in the hall of a luxurious hotel in south Mumbai attending a media awards ceremony. The company I represented — a tiny website with a working life of less than a year — was creating ripples in the packed room. By the time the evening was over, of the fourteen awards up for the having, the website would have pulled in six. These would include the Media Brand of the Year (ahead of MTV and Star Plus, which would grab second place); Content Head of the Year; Investigative Story of the Year (for unearthing the goof-ups of Kargil); and Entertainment Story of the Year. The story for which the website was now universally famous was not even in the reckoning. These were awards for the year 2000; the big story belonged to March, 2001.

Tarun J Tejpal - The Missionary Position

Tarun J Tejpal - We all love sentimental trash, especially if it can masquerade as something artistic and meaningful. Often it needn't even do that — in an act of self-affirmation we invest it with these virtues. Slumdog Millionaire is one more representation of India as the white man sees it, not as we do. It's a five-hundred-year old tradition. Look carefully, the triumphant picture in the papers could be the enlightened missionary with the tribal boys. The tradition is strong: we've always been cosy with the representations. It's worthwhile to remember we did not tell an Indian story and force the world to recognise it. They told us an Indian story and forced us to applaud it.

Tarun Tejpal - Season-2! Most Awaited Sequels of Hit Web Series

Tarun Tejpal - 2020 might well come to be known as the year the movies died — but it might also come to mark the moment web series well and truly became a juggernaut that will not be stemmed. With movie theatres shut and humankind suddenly being turned into a wholly indoor species, OTT platforms gained not just ground lost by movie halls, but became the salvation of hundreds of millions across the globe. It was also the year we could call the blooming of the Indian web series genre, with some wildly popular breakout hits — and the year we could finally see Indian television shrug off its decades-long obsession with daily television soaps.

Tarun J Tejpal - Dilip Kumar’s Death: A legend lost by Indian Cinema

Tarun J Tejpal - He might well be the single most defining actor in Indian cinema — and now he’s gone. In an industry that saw seminal figures like Raj Kapoor, paradigm-shifting heartthrobs like Rajesh Khanna, cult figures like Dev Anand, and the towering presence of the actor called Amitabh Bachchan — not to mention the supersonic stardom of the triple-whammy called Khan, those who watched Dilip Kumar entirely invent a new technique of acting are unanimous that he remains unsurpassable for almost single-handedly redefining the craft. It’s why, when the stalwart passed away on 7th July 2021 in Mumbai at the age of 98, it feels like an age that has irrevocably passed.

Tarun J Tejpal - 20 Years of Lagaan: A Film Worth Remembering

Tarun J Tejpal - Aamir Khan starrer film Lagaan has completed 20 years of its release on 15th June 2021. Lagaan was a remarkable movie in the history of Indian cinema. The period epic was directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar and Aamir Khan’snow-estranged wife Kiran Rao was the assistant director of the movie — it is perhaps particularly bittersweet that as the seminal film hit the two decade milestone, merely a couple of weeks later the power couple of Khan and Rao announced they were separating after 15 years of marriage.

TARUN TEJPAL’S POLITICAL PERSECUTION THAT HAS BEEN A FINANCIAL NIGHTMARE FOR GOA’S TAXPAYERS

Tarun Tejpal - Courts of Law are a forum to Prosecute and never to Persecute. The Goa Government should come clean making public the total expenditure incurred so far on the Tarun Tejpal Case which has been on for almost eight years. With the trial at the Sessions Court, the case on various issues traveled to the High Court and Supreme Court several times.

TARUN J TEJPAL - WHEN THE BJP DID NOT HAVE ITS WAY IN THE TARUN TEJPAL CASE

Tarun J Tejpal - With Justice N. V. Ramana having taken over as Chief Justice of India there is a ray of hope with the Judiciary now reasserting itself. Over the last few years it is the perception of the common man that judicial standards had been dithering while the independence of this very vital organ clearly compromised.

Tarun Tejpal

Tarun J Tejpal is a very renowned Indian Journalist, publisher, novelist, and former editor-in-chief of Tehelka magazine. He was born on 15th March 1963 in Jalandhar, Punjab. With his hard work and de