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Tarun J. Tejpal

Tarun J. Tejpal Biography

Journalist

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“The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present. The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction. It is much greater. It is a work of art. It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral. It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men. Not animals, not gods. It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served. It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress. But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing. And doing is life. Doing is karma. Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man. You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known. The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man. Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster. The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro. In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles. It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives. Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.”

LifeReligionMahabharata
Book:The Alchemy of Desire
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“His copy was full of lofty echoes: Greek Tragedy; Damocle's sword; manna from heaven; the myth of Sisyphus; the last of the Mohicans; hydra-headed and Circe-voiced; experiments with truth; discovery of India; biblical resonance; the lessons of Vedanta; the centre does not hold; the road not taken; the mimic men; for whom the bell tolls; a hundred visions and revisions; the power and the glory; the heart of the matter; the heart of darkness; the agony and the ecstasy; sands of time; riddle of the Sphinx; test of tantalus; murmurs of mortality; Falstaffian figure; Dickensian darkness; ...”

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Book:The Alchemy of Desire
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“Power is the engine of the world, and sex and money its oil and lubricants. God is at best the invocation before you start the engine-meaningless if you have no engine to start! God is a goli, a multi-flavoured pill, invented by those who have power, money and sex, to give to those who have none! Love is another great goli. Some days we too swallow these golis. They feel good, like a joint, a temporary high! But they are not the reality. The reality is power, money, sex! And yes, there's another goli-morality!”

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Author:Tarun J. Tejpal
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“There is no neatness in any life- great or small. It is only an illusion men foolishly pursue. All lived lives are a mess. The neatness in my life had begun to crumble some time before, but now it disintegrated completely as I vanished into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries. For the first time I began to understand how shallow neatness is. How cramping, how limiting. For the first time I understood neat lives are comatose lives. (the Alchemy of Desire 304)”

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Author:Tarun J. Tejpal
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