Scandal dotcom

SEVANTI NINAN

Last fortnight, new media got its come-uppance from the old. The Indian Express said Tehelka had resorted to even more dirty tricks in bringing us their great expose, than the ones we already knew about. One of their reporters had been handed the transcripts of some Tehelka tapes that had not been aired in public so far, and these told us that the great champions of anti-corruption had used not just money and wine to uncover graft in the Defence Ministry, but women as well.

The resulting uproar has been a really curious one. The Great Indian Middle Class apparently thinks that this is no big deal, judging from both Net polls and straw polls. The Mighty Indian Media claims to be appalled. This, it has been thundering through newspaper editorials and TV panels, is not journalism. What will self-styled champions of investigative journalism license themselves to do next?

And between the two you have Tehelka which in a space of five days niftily changed its position on whether it was the right thing to have done, and its version of the truth. But the bottom line is that it video-taped commercial sex workers, at least one of them without their knowledge, and it also used at least one of its own staffers in this episode, a stenographer working with Aniruddh Bahl, but turned extremely vague on what her role was. We are certainly getting into previously uncharted journalistic territory over here.

It is worth asking - what does Tehelka as an instantly successful media brand represent for Indian journalism? What methods, values, goals?

At the time of writing, this dotcom is 14 months old. In that space of time it has achieved brand recognition all over the world, though thanks to its unconventional methods its fortunes have not touched the same height as its fame. But in a world in which perception counts more than performance the perception is that it is a gutsy, stylish dotcom with b---s. That one word pretty much sums up the basis for Tehleka's appeal to the under- 35 online community. (Just sample the chat room talk, and the Usenet postings on Tehelka.)

In fact, long before Operation Westend, by the time it was six months old in December 2000, it was already one of the top five Indian sites in the world, and according to some industry ratings, the leading Indian site in North America. On the basis of its dubious tactics in using Manoj Prabhakar to blow the whistle on Indian cricketers by engaging them in conversation and taping them, and presumably also on the basis of its erotic reader and its literary section. Nobody online or offline has quite the same class of literary biggies writing for them.

That was in December 2000. March 2001 of course brought other pickings, in the shape of one cabinet ministerial head, and those of two party chiefs, both parties that were part of the ruling coalition. Not bad going for a nine-month-old dot com.

So what makes Tehelka different from the rest of the hack community? It looks and sounds different, for one. Thanks to its adventures, its chief now has the same category of security as Sonia Gandhi. So you have this trendy office, with its bilious green frontage marred somewhat by a wall of sandbags, with cops positioned behind them. Its glass frontage has a series of no- entry-without-permission signs. More colour inside: mauve steps, magenta banisters. And more cops.

Tehelka looks different, and Tarun Tejpal sounds different. No other editor in Indian journalism sports the kind of accent he has. Or professes the same methods. "I think sting journalism is completely legitimate in a country like India where brazenness has touched completely new heights, ya." Will they use spycams again? You bet they will.

To get Tehelka this far this soon he has used both spycams and celebrities. Other journalistic establishments in this country do not have

V.S. Naipaul and Amitabh Bachchan sitting on their boards. Why this name collecting? Well you know, small organisation, it needed the ballast, he says. And what do these eminences think of Tehelka's girlie games? They have not been in touch, he says.

Conventional media empires get their money from circulation, ad sales and the market. Tehelka is dependent almost entirely on private placement of its shares and finding strategic partners. When investors turned chary of its taking on the Government, (Zee backed out after a few months of negotiations) it tried to cash in on its public support by launching a Tehelka Investigation fund and proposing grandly that every donation of Rs. 1,000 would amount to the purchase of a single share. But then it discovered that the law does not permit such innovative financing. So the fund got something from the public, but not much. Now he is waiting to nail down sundry non-resident Indians who have professed interest in Tehelka during a June road show in the U.S.. Meanwhile staffers get paid, but contributors do not.

It has also tried selling its content, to the Hindujas among others. Other than that, Tejpal swears that his defence corruption fighting company has had no truck with the band of brothers implicated in India's last big defence scam, Bofors. "I have never met, spoken to, or written to the Hindujas in my life."

Conventional media outfits do not list erotica among their content offerings. Tejpal says he genuinely believes that there is room for stylish erotica but the hypocrisy of the Indian establishment led him to take off his erotic reader after the Government got after him in March, because it could give a handle for legal action against Tehelka.

And conventional media outfits peddle dubious investigative stories with less alacrity than Tehelka does. Last fortnight it carried the story that a Congress (I) leader had paid a hefty sum to the young woman who claimed she was Mahanta's second wife. It then retracted it after Tejpal enquired and found the reporter had no hard evidence. Earlier a strange story on Chandrababu Naidu had the CEO of Andhra Pradesh protesting. Checks and balances, says Tehelka's CEO, will now be in place. No shoddy investigation and no more dubious use of women in the pursuit of journalism. The heat of recent events has led him to discover the virtues of more conventional journalism.

So will Tehelka survive? After you cannot conduct sting operations with the Delhi police in tow. There are other investigators in the team besides Bahl, says Tejpal. And adds that given the three-year gestation period media ventures need, Tehelka will certainly make it, hopefully as a pay site for those who want quality reading on the Web.

* * *

Is "Kaun Banega Crorepati" beginning to pall? Getting tired of trying to figure out whether or not Amitabh is wearing a wig? Well, here is a new diversion. You can tune in an hour later instead to a new show where the focus is a story, and the diversion is trying to guess whether ad man Suhel Seth's moustache is for real. "Jo Bolein Haan so Haan, Jo Bolein Naa, so Naa" is a Hindi tongue twister but Southern audiences should not let that put them off. Come and see this hour-long entertainer licensed by Zee from Globo TV of Brazil. (The English version of the show is called "You Decide".) If nothing else, it tells you something about your countrymen. Or should one say country persons?

What you get is a story line incorporating a dilemma. And the audience decides how it should end. There are two numbers to call for yes and no, in 10 cities. And obviously the final segment is shot in two versions. Seth's role is to walk on at critical points in the story and urge you to call the numbers on the screen. Should the guy lie? We Indians are amazing. The majority said yes in the first episode one watched. And in the second, those who thought he should tell the truth were only 5,000 more in number than those who thought he should not. The latter numbered some 29,000. The programme collects a bunch of people in the street of some city and takes their views off and on as the story is enacted. Said a fat woman cheerfully, "He should not tell the truth because all is fair in love, business, and war."

The script writers need to have some feminists come after them. The husband wants to tell the truth, in each of the two episodes I watched, and the wife does her darnedest to convince him that he should not. At 10 p.m. on Zee, Monday to Wednesday. Because the show is produced by two or three different companies, the quality of production is uneven.

The Mahabharata goes global: Starting on Saturday, September 8, Cartoon Network will feature "Pandavas - The Five Warriors", a serialised version of a 3D animation film produced by the Chennai-based Pentamedia Graphics limited.

It looks and sounds like an animated Amar Chitra Katha. It airs between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. back to back with a 3D version of "Sinbad - Beyond the Vale of Mists".

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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