FRAGILE STATE – REVIEW OF M J AKBAR’S “TINDERBOX”

I remember reading, back in my college days, M J Akbar’s India: The Siege Within (1985) with a sense of discovery and excitement. Akbar came across as a stylish writer and I learnt many things about my country’s history from that book. His recent work is Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan (2011) in which he begins the history of Pakistan right from Mahmud of Ghazni’s plunder of Somanath in 1026 and even earlier.

OF AFRICAN BELIEFS: REVIEW OF V S NAIPAUL’S “THE MASQUE OF AFRICA”

V. S. Naipaul came from a remote corner of the earth, a literary abyss, and captured the attention of the world. He wrote a couple of novels – The Mystic Masseur (1957) and Miguel Street (1959) – focusing on his early years in Trinidad. If he had carried on in that vein, he could have become an exemplary tragic-comic storyteller like R K Narayan. Instead he resolved to make the world his stage and strode on it like a colossus, culminating in his Nobel Prize in 2001.