The now-widely circulated email by investigative magazine Tehelka’s founder Tarun Tejpal, in which he admits to sexually assaulting a colleague and then spells his own terms of self-punishment, has benumbed the public. The glibness with which he dismisses the incident as “a bad lapse of judgment” and goes on to exalt his magazine is telling of how normalised the rot of sexual violence is in the country.

Nirmala Samant Prabhavalkar