By: Mahmood Farooqui
October 25, 2002

The best thing about the recently demised Tehelka.com was the elan, the ‘tehelka’ with which it did whatever it did. But then, and therefore, it left its critics with nothing to say. Even sympathetic critics
can be easily antagonised, as that great master Swift well knew, if their carping is not well heeded.
The website folded up this week, but it will re-emerge in a more traditional, that is, print format - which
in India still enjoys greater credibility than television, and for good reason. The official response of the editors, and mark the punch, “we are down but not out. We will be back soon.”

The Urdu/Hindi usage of the word ‘tehelka’ subsumes the various meanings of the original Persian, namely, destruction, perdition, consternation, and agony. “My friends, had I not stopped the flow of my tears, this torrent would have brought tehelka upon the world,” says Mir. Yet, as is the case with most Indo-Aryan languages, Urdu brings a new emphasis to bear on the phonetic appeal of the word tehelka, and thereby greatly enriches it. Tehelka thus becomes dhoom, dhamaka, qayamat, shor and much else.

From its inception, till March last year, Tehelka.com had created great waves purely as a high quality journal, even if it was a website. The ‘Who’s Who’ of Indian writers in English and a wide variety of budding stylists adorned its pages. Little short of a tehelka (hereafter T) that was too. Then came the T of match-fixing scandals and then the big bang of the defence scam. That began its descent into perdition.

In that descent, as its editor and co-founder Tarun Tejpal informs me, the team comprising all of five unsalaried employees (down from 115 in March last year), has attained the enlightenment which Urdu poets claim can only come from a sincere tapish-e-dil.

“Who would have shown me the path to Madina

Had suffering (tapish-e-dil) not become my guide”

In part Tarun leaves others with little to say, as I have learnt from my distant gaze, and a solitary meeting, because he is a great Rhetorician, one of the finest in the country. Eighteenth-century English masters (Swift, Pope and so on - the metaphysical and therefore Urdu poets, in a manner of speaking) well knew that Rhetoric, which always preempts and thus co-opts criticism, is a necessary device for poets and writers. They learnt that from the Greeks, via the Arabs. In Europe that process is called the Renaissance, though it was perhaps not a renaissance but natality, nay Nativity itself. For Christianity played no mean part in that appropriation and monopolisation of a heritage that was not only theirs.

I will leave you to potter and ponder over that, over pot if necessary and return to Tarun Tejpal and his antics. He says now that the goodwill his work generated has forced him to grow so much that he now understands Kafka more fully, two decades after reading his entire oeuvre.

He says, “all power is malign, especially political power. Give a man power over another, and the beast goes berserk. It is not the fault of our instruction - our books are full of pious homilies. It is in the very nature of the beast.” The violence of that power is our story too, so succinctly put forth in the Bible, which begins with God’s violence against Adam - that is the creation of Eve from his ribs.

I will trade one year of malign and unprecedented government prosecution for a truer understanding of Kafka, as has Tarun, happily. Hear him: “We laugh at the witch-hunt. Those who would scare us, with their menacing faces, look funny and harmless.”

The critics of T carp either because they distrust its sincerity, or because they disagree with their means. Yet, when our mainstream newspapers are being tabloidised after the west, where hidden cameras - that labyrinth of market - and media ate up the Golden Princess (Diana) forever, a debate on media ethics is irrelevant. You trust them, or you don’t.

The media is the biggest industry in the world, and as a TV journalist friend says, the AOL-Warner merger, the greatest corporate one ever, raises questions that we the media, are yet to apprehend, let alone tackle.

In fact the whole means and ends conundrum, and hankering after facts, is redundant when Sun TV and Jaya TV have their preferred versions of it. Ultimately even truth, when probed harder, is merely a question of preferences amid plenty of options.

Indira Gandhi declared a general Emergency and openly put editors in jail. This government is more clever and therefore more Goebbelsian and evil. It does not put editors in jail. It unleashes the full force and might of the State on the small fry, that is the likes of Shivani Bhatnagar and Tehelka.com, beginning with the local SHO and upwards to the IB, ED, Income Tax, CID and thence to Jaya and Arun Jaitley and George Fernandes. And that, as a senior editor of a leading national magazine confided to me, has scared the shit off the mainstream press.

Gujarat was really the turning point, as the BJP would soon realise. The real battle lines are being
drawn there, and in Kashmir and in Gujarat. I will leave you to your preparation.