TARUN TEJPAL BELATED LESSONS FROM LITERATURE

BELATED
LESSONS FROM
LITERATURE

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I read all of Franz Kafka when I was nineteen and twenty, but I only
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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 Mathew’s 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.

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Give a man control over another man, and his mind begins to camber.
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(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.

And the beast, as Kafka’s everyman character, K, discovers, page after
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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.

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I do not know the answers, and will never know; and at a level it doesn’t
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 Halley’s 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.

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The account of his privations in Homage to Catalonia, about hunkering
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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 militia’s 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.

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Not just the opposition - which did a pretty sorry job of it - but also the
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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.

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IB spooks, their family and such other animals, prowling around the
Tehelka office are most likely to encounter peals of laughter as Tehelka’s
reducing staffers let off steam about cringing lawyers, phoney cases, halfassed
government theories, Delhi’s 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.

Each time a new wild theory about our motives, our origins, our deeds is
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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 countercharges.
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

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Great writing can be a useful guide at all times. Simply because, whether
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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.

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In a 28-year career as a journalist, Tarun Tejpal has been an editor with
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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 Asia’s 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 India’s new elite.

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Tarun Tejpal’s 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’.