 About
80 fairly affluent, middle-aged Rotarians, most
with a reasonable sense of social responsibility,
are assembled at The Panchsheel Club in Delhi. They
have been invited to a speech by Tarun Tejpal. He
arrives on time. Almost immediately, the National
Anthem begins to play. Tejpal, along with the audience,
stands at attention. Then he takes centre stage.
“I am a child of the 80s’ breed of adversarial,
combative journalism,” he warms up. “But
now, media is no longer independent.” He’s
onto his favourite topic. “In the 50s, we were
gifted with institutions to uphold the rule of the
law and prevent the misuse of power and money. But
one cannot expect such institutions from the current
leadership. The citizens have to create it themselves.
We need a thousand such watchtowers. I’ll be
happy if Tehelka can be one.”
The first time Tehelka tried to do so, it failed.
Tejpal takes the audience back to Operation West
End. He gives a detailed account of the government’s
acts of vengeance. Even as the audience begins to
sympathise with the death of the young, inspired
organisation, Tejpal changes tack, to the rebirth
of Tehelka.
Tejpal now wants to mount Tehelka’s second
crusade. And he wants citizens, like the ones in
the audience, to fund it. He plans to launch a weekend
newspaper, tehelka on the weekend. The website,
too, will be re-launched. But Tejpal needs at least
Rs 15 crore for that. He hopes to raise it mostly
through advance subscriptions of Rs 520 per year
— at least 150,000 of them. The speech has
become a pitch.
This Independence Day, Tejpal will lead an army
of 16,000 direct selling crusaders, put together
by a network of 15 companies, to get subscriptions
for the people’s paper, as he calls it. A massive
ad campaign will kick off the drive.
 Before
that though, Tejpal has been trying to club together
200 founder subscribers — each will pay Rs
1 lakh or $5,000 (Rs 2.35 lakh), adding Rs 4 crore
more to the cause. About 40 founder subscribers
like V.S. Naipaul, Shyam Benegal, Alyque Padamsee,
Shabana Azmi, Pratap Reddy of Apollo Hospitals,
Parmeshwar Godrej and other citizens, have already
signed up.
Since January, Tejpal’s life has been a series
of speeches and meetings. A group of senior managers
at Infosys, Rotary Club meets, a lecture tour in
the US, a lunch meeting in London, small gatherings
hosted by friends — the Panchsheel meeting
was just one among many.
That day at the Panchsheel Club, it was not a tired
wail that emerged from Tejpal’s lips. Nor was
it the full-throated call of a warrior. Instead,
it was a logical exhortation. Tejpal’s spiel
doesn’t rend your heart; it persuades your
mind. There is no anger in his voice, only steely
resolve. Tejpal is not a fiery orator. If his speeches
go down well, it’s because Tehelka’s reputation
precedes him.
After Tejpal wound up his speech, the audience fired
a volley of questions. Will exposing corruption
eradicate it? Isn’t he a sensationalist? Will
he join politics? Tough questions. But the real
crunch would come later, when feedback forms asking
people to become subscribers, or join the Tehelka
Engaged Circle, would be circulated. The Engaged
Circle (Rs 10,000 for six years and Rs 6,000 for
four) is a proactive community of readers. Tejpal
hopes Tehelka will not only talk, but also listen.
And not just listen, but also engage its readers.
 Among
the audience that day was A.P. Gandhi, former president
of Hyundai Motor India. He was everything that Tehelka
seeks in a founder subscriber. He is influential.
He retired last year and wants to contribute to
society. He is a member of We Think For India, a
voluntary organisation. Gandhi sat through the session
but decided not to back Tehelka as he wasn’t
convinced that such exposes could wipe out corruption.
Many others share his view.
But there are others like a 29-year-old marketing
executive who, after a session with Tejpal in Mumbai,
walked to his car, signed a cheque for one lakh
rupees and handed it over. Ad filmmaker Mahesh Mathai
and wife Srila sent cheques for one lakh rupees
each. At least two people have responded to petitions
sent by email.
Last year, when Tejpal was desperately trying
to get Tehelka rolling again, he got two offers
of investments of Rs 15 crore each. Only, they
demanded that Tehelka steer clear of controversies.
They wanted the brand, but not the cause. Theirs
was the easy way out. Tejpal turned down both
offers.
Enter Rajiv Narang, CEO, Erehwon, a Bangalore-based
innovation consultancy. A year ago, Narang remarked
that Tehelka could never work with a few large
investors. It had to be backed by a large base
of investors. “You can’t prosecute anyone
for subscribing to a newspaper,” he said.
Tejpal didn’t pay much attention then; the
implications of those words would resonate only
later.
By this time, Tejpal was the only survivor from
the old Tehelka team. Co-founder Aniruddha Bahal
had moved on and former investor FirstGlobal,
headed by Shankar Sharma, was not part of the
new initiative.
So, this January, a lone Tejpal was in the Bangalore
residence of an Erehwon employee seeking Erehwon’s
help in raising advance subscriptions. The team
was skeptical and set two preconditions —
Tehelka had to put together an advisory board
of eminent people and rope in a top advertising
agency.
The board, with members like Anna Hazare, Kuldip
Nayyar, Ram Jethmalani, Mark Tully, Julio Riberio,
Naipaul and Padamsee, soon took shape. “Tarun’s
contention that most media is no longer independent
is mostly true. Tehelka is a mission, it’s
a matter of faith,” says veteran journalist
Nayyar. “Tehelka is an ideal I have subscribed
to,” adds Padamsee.
Tejpal’s next stop was Ogilvy & Mather
(O&M). He won over managing director Ranjan
Kapur and creative director Piyush Pandey. “(Our)
task,” says Kapur, “was to recreate
a brand that exists, but has gone into... disuse.
Resurrecting a brand is always a challenge.”
When the agency’s client services director
Sharmila Malekar took over the account, the findings
of a six-city brand audit surprised her. About
70% of the respondents had strong positive feelings
towards the brand and 30% equally strong negative
feelings. Normally, in brand recall audits, at
least 20% of the responses are ‘don’t
know’. “We did not come across a single
person who had nothing to say about Tehelka,”
Malekar says. O&M’s diagnosis of Tehelka
— monster brand.
Still, as Erehwon’s Narang puts it, Tehelka
was a brand without a product. Imagine raising
Rs 15 crore in advance purely on the strength
of a brand. Suhel Seth, CEO of ad agency Equus
Red Cell, a Tehelka founder promoter and now a
30% shareholder in Star News’ holding company,
has his doubts: “You cannot run a publication
like a chit fund.”
That’s why Tejpal is not going about the
task like an evangelical preacher. His campaign
looks more like the IPO (initial public offer)
road shows managed by savvy entrepreneurs and
top-notch merchant bankers. “This (raising
the funds) is the bitch. If I get this right,
everything else will fall into place,” says
Tejpal. That is also why he put together the network
of professional firms — direct marketing
companies, sales training companies, Net marketing
outfits, below-the-line agencies — to work
with Erehwon and O&M. Before he did that,
though, there were two hitches.
Tejpal was broke. Here Erehwon set a precedent
by not charging anything (other than costs) until
the project was completed — and the subscription
drive successful. Others agreed to similar ‘terms
of engagement’.
Then, Tehelka was not just a product, it was a
cause. Tejpal didn’t want it to be touted
as a commercial proposition. But how does one
get 15 firms to align with one’s cherished
beliefs?
Thus began a series of meetings at The Taj Mahal
Hotel in Delhi. Tejpal, along with Erehwon’s
Narang and Ranjan Malik, met 52 people from an
initial shortlist of 30 companies. The meetings
would start in the morning and go on till late
in the night. “These were unlike any client-agency
interaction,” recalls Malik. The Tehelka
and agency teams would sit next to each other
so the agencies feel they, too, own the cause.
Even the discussions were unique. “They were
more like lateral conversations. The idea was
to provoke creative thinking,” says Malik.
Tejpal was in no hurry to close a deal. The approach
worked.
Take Door Training International, a global sales
training and management firm. Its director Lavleen
Raheja initially opposed the idea. “It was
the sheer scope of work that made us bite,”
he now says. Typically, Door retains 30% of profits
from any assignment and distributes the rest to
employees. But with Tehelka, profits would be
split into 18 equal shares and distributed to
the 17-member team. Door gets the last share.
Door put together a 100-page docket outlining
sales processes for the crusaders. All 16,000
crusaders have to develop a passion for the cause
and communicate it ‘crisply, emotionally
and logically’.
SO will it work? Narang concedes Tehelka has never
coped with something of this scale. Nayyar says
other experiments with advance sub- scriptions
— the first, soon after the Emergency and
the second, about four years ago — failed.
Others like O&M’s Kapur see a marketing
challenge. “This will be a test of the brand’s
residual equity, and how well we can reposition
it,” he says. Tejpal himself does not consider
failure. “Tehelka cannot be a story where
the good guys lose. It has to be a story where
the good guys suffer, but succeed in the end,”
he says.
But raising advance subscriptions is only the
start of the challenge. “Publications are
run on advertising, not subscriptions,” says
Equus’ Seth. Advertisers will steer clear
of a controversial platform like Tehelka, he argues.
O&M’s Kapur admits Tehelka will be an
‘edgy’ product: advertisers will be
polarised in their like or dislike of Tehelka.
“But a target audience (like NRIs) that will
appeal to advertisers will emerge,” he claims.
Tehelka has another problem — Tejpal himself.
“If Tarun becomes a manager he will lose
his edge,” says Kapur. “Tarun is a good
journalist, but a bad businessman,” says
Seth. His partners say Tejpal isn’t involved
in the nitty-gritty of business. Kapur has a different
take: “Tarun’s challenge is not about
managing, it is about leadership. He has not hired
O&M, he has motivated us.” Tejpal is
clear that being an entrepreneur, businessman,
administrator, is incidental to his call to journalism.
The Tehelka crusade will take off in a fortnight.
The 16,000 crusaders will hit the street and stay
there till Gandhi Jayanthi, when Tejpal hopes
to launch the first issue of tehelka on the weekend.
The 47 intervening days will decide if Tehelka
lives to fight another day.
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