M. J. Akbar Livres

A Mirror to Power takes a sharp look across the wide horizon of the past decade, a time when reputations were wrecked on a high-velocity rollercoaster and events became a jamboree instead of a procession. This tumbledown history of corruption, terrorism, justice delayed, rights denied and governance betrayed still left enough gaps for celebration of laughter in areas outside politics. The cast is extraordinary: from the founding fathers of our partitioned subcontinent to those shaping its future today. This book is especially distinctive because of M.J. Akbar's unerring eye for underlying causes and potential consequences that bookend current events and a prose style that conveys serious thought in lucid sentences and succinct paragraphs. The pieces are on subjects as diverse as politics, cricket, cinema stars, the lost art of reading and the joys of trash, besides long, elegant essays on the history of a community seen through the genius of its poets and the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar. This is an indispensable introduction to what promises to be an Indian century.

A political and personal biography of Nehru to be published before the 100th anniversary of his birth in November 1989, by an Indian journalist. He also wrote "India: The Siege Within".

M.J.Akbar, an Indian journalist and author, traces the origins of Jihad in the struggle against oppression that was part of the earliest consciousness of Muslims. Travelling across centuries and continents, from the triumphant rise of Islam under the Prophet Muhammad to the depression of defeat in the first Crusade, through the renewal of Saladin to the rise and fall of the Ottoman and Mughal empires and the raw passions of Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent, Akbar's gripping story explains how Jihad thrives on complex and shifting notions of persecution, victory and sacrifice.