But this ‘maverick’ was – as he ensured – the centre of their universe. “Everything revolved around him. Be it marketing or HR, every single person brought into The Asian Age was hired by him. He decided what happened, who got what designation and who got what salary,” says Suparna Sharma, Resident Editor of The Asian Age, to The Quint. She had worked under MJ Akbar in 1993 when he was editor at the paper.

“He hired everyone, whether it was a sub-editor or a trainee, Akbar was the one hiring them,” says Suparna.

But this ‘maverick’ was also a terror, with his bouts of shouting and berating. “He would change the atmosphere within a second.”

“He marked our copy with his red-ink-filled Mont Blanc pen, crumpled our printouts and often threw them in the garbage bin, as we shuddered. There was never a day when he didn’t shout at one of us at the top of his voice. We rarely measured up to his standards,” recounts Pallavi Gogoi in The Washington Post, who worked under Akbar when she was 22 and barely out of college.

“Akbar wore his erudition lightly. A little too lightly. He screamed, he swore, and he drank in the office,” Ghazala Wahab recounted in a piece for The Wire.