Know thy People, Tehelka

One of the most valued skills of the twenty first century is to manage people. And to manage people, with all the variety of temperaments and attitudes available, one can never emphasise enough the need to understand them before actually going about managing them.

In the world that is flat, even a slight lack of clarity of purpose or goal would end up making you look like a fool. Like Tarun Tejpal of Tehelka. It is such a pity to see Tehelka continue to run their campaign against Gujarat in their whimpering sidebar almost begging someone , as a matter of fact anyone to see the injustice that has been meted out against Tehelka (not Gujurat mind you) by the world which so disrespectfully ignored their socialist pinhole cameras.

Any other media-corporate in the world would have sacked the entire editorial team in no time for having single-handedly cocked up the unbelievable evidence - a killer confessing to the killing - caught on movable film like never ever before in the history of the criminal world, which, in my view deserved nothing short of a Pulitzer.

The middle-aged editorial team, who imaginably would have eaten so much samosas around their university campuses in the sixties, now with their dangerous cholesterol levels clogging the blood to their brains couldn’t simply know what stance to take as regards the evidence. The press conference was almost like an in-house antakshari competition with every editor snatching the microphone to answer questions randomly, where in the incessant and perpetually repetitive Tarun Tejpal said that being the media he wouldn’t want to be associated with politics(check the video below) but eventually ended up contradicting himself and spilling so much red ink on the website, blaming the congress for inaction that one felt sorry for him. Really.

The moral is the imperative of clarity of thought and purpose in the times we live in. Media is an important axle to judge information , not a browser that passes through all information. But naturally he simply is too old to learn. Last week he ran a cover story about the rise of new generation Tibetans who are hyper-articulate [sic], modern etc. and how they are going to save Tibet , when in reality the last one of them are scattering far away into the world as soon as they can afford.

Never in recent times have we seen so blatant a misjudgement of people as this. You can accuse Bennett and Coleman of sensationalism but never of misjudgement. I am glad that Tejpal and his menopausal-minded friends actually own their publication, else, for the profundity of understanding they reflect of their people they couldn’t even be employed for a substandard Men’s magazine.

Know your people gentlemen, not your ideals. At least you could get the exit-poll right.