Bertolt Brecht in his play, The Life of Galileo, had warned that &ldquo;unhappy is the land that is in need of heroes&rdquo; because the moment we abandon our own reason and rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. Many others have said much the same thing in different ways but at a time when the conspiracy of courtesy &ndash; call it political correctness, if you like &ndash; has become the accepted way of life, all it leads to is each side telling the other what the other would like to hear. What is needed is continuous doubt and the cut and thrust of debate or, as Christopher Hitchens puts in his latest collection of essays, Arguably (Atlantic Books, &pound;16.99), an extension of his earlier books like In the Line of Argument, Prepared for the Worst, and many others that challenge conventional ways of seeing over a range of issues in politics, literature and religion.

V V: The argumentative Christopher Hitchens

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Jihad as an idea is central to Islamic faith and ethics but its meanings have been highly contested with the rise of militant Islam in recent years. These have ranged from the philosophical struggle to live an ethical life to a political injunction to wage war against the enemies of Islam. Today, with all the turmoil in the Islamic world stretching across West Asia down to Afghanistan and Pakistan, jihad signifies the political opposition between Islam and the West. It isn&rsquo;t surprising then that Dilip Hiro, a London-based writer and journalist who has written extensively on the Islamic world in the Middle East and Central Asia, should also come up with Jihad on Two Fronts: South Asia&rsquo;s Unfolding Drama (Harper Collins, Rs 699): one front within Pakistan and the other without in India.

V V: A potpourri on jihad

Jonathan Glancey, Guardian&rsquo;s architecture and design correspondent, has given a potpourri in Nagaland: A Journey to India&rsquo;s Forgotten Frontier (Faber, Special Indian Price: Rs 650). It is part travelogue, part memoir and part a potted anecdotal history of Nagaland to trace the roots of its multiple identities.

V V: Nagaland's tribal complexities

You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there&rsquo;s no occasion to,&rdquo; said British poet Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940).

V V: An apologia for Pakistan Army

Tahmima Anam, London-based Bangladeshi social anthropologist and writer, is the best chronicler of the post-war Bangladesh scene.

V V: Bangladesh - in search of an identity

In the past &hellip; the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic &ndash; political, moral, religious or aesthetic &ndash; was one who refused to outrage his own conscience... [Nowadays] the dangerous proposition [is that] freedom is undesirable and intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness ... [But] to write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox&hellip; The enemy of clear language is insincerity.&rdquo;(George Orwell,&ldquo;The prevention of literature&rdquo;, 1945).

V V: Why Orwell matters

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a brilliant and engaging Marxist intellectual and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist tradition. Born a Polish Jew, she was a polyglot, writing in Russian, German and English besides Polish. She also participated in the creation of the German Communist Party and rapidly rose to the party echelons to become a star. In the words of another Jewish intellectual, Hannah Arendt, she was &ndash; and remained &ndash; a Polish Jew in a country &ldquo;she disliked and a party she came to despise&rdquo;.

V V: Red Rosa and the poetics of revolution

Academic sport history has not made it big with mainstream publishers because of a commonly held view that sport is too enjoyable a business to be entrusted to academics. The thrills of sport, especially team games, must be reproduced as far as possible on page and TV screens. If an exception has to be made it would be in cricket, which has a considerable body of literature, imperial and post imperial: the first dominated by English publishers for the best part of three centuries, the second by an internationalism that removed England as the centre of cricket.

V V: Cricket in literature

Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago once said, &ldquo;If I had died when I was 60, I would have written nothing.&rdquo; While this glosses over his major successes in fiction, with A Novel of Painting and Calligraphy (1977) and a number of books of poetry, plays and essays, there was little in Saramago&rsquo;s background till the late seventies to suggest a flowering of success at an age when many are ready to pack up. Novels followed in quick succession, including bestsellers, All the Names, Blindness, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Cave and others that have been translated into 40 languages and established him as one of the world&rsquo;s most influential writers. In the last years of his life &ndash; he died in 2010 &ndash; he wrote a blog on all the happenings in the world. They have been put together in The Notebook, with a foreword by Umberto Eco (Verso paperback, &pound;8.99).

V V: Jose Saramago's last notes

Are closed and claustrophobic societies a necessary condition for satire and irony? Certainly, censorship, which has been described as the mother of metaphor, drives anger underground. It emerges later in disguise, transformed into sarcasm or icy calm from which it is hard to deduce the fury that lies beneath it. So it would appear when you read the underground literature of east Europe and the Soviet Union under communism that was smuggled out to the West. Or, if it managed to survive at home, it was because the Censor, usually party hacks, was unable to detect the subtext between the lines.

V V: A guided tour of communism

It matters if individuals are to maintain any capacity to form their own judgements and opinions that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they must be read and in their own interest. You can read to pass the time, or you can read with overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock&hellip; The ideal reader is Dr Samuel Johnson who said that like every other activity of the mind, it must satisfy &lsquo;what comes near to oneself, what we can put to use&rsquo;. Bacon gave the advice, &lsquo;read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.&rsquo; And Emerson who remarked that the best books &lsquo;impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same nature reads&rsquo;.

V V: Literature as liberation

NRIs, or non-resident Indians, revisiting home reminds of your first love whom you long to see but dread to see again. What you get is never a balanced picture: it is either a romanticised past that never was or a future that always works. That there are many Indias, warts and all, that can&rsquo;t be slotted into either category doesn&rsquo;t seem to cross their minds. Maybe this is because NRIs end up writing for western audiences who want it all in a capsule with no &ldquo;ifs&rdquo; and &ldquo;buts&rdquo;, something skimmed through without too much fuss. Anand Giridharadas&rsquo; India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation&rsquo;s Remaking (Fourth Estate, Special Indian Price, Rs 499) falls neatly into this stereotype: you see the scene and can foretell the rest, something that resident Indians know all too well but check out all the same to see how far removed from home our NRI cousins have gone.

V V: An NRI's view of India

As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) attempts to bail out the crisis-ridden Portuguese, Irish and Greek economies from the profligacy of consumer capitalism and the limitations of neo-liberalism become increasingly apparent, there is a growing appreciation for Marx&rsquo;s predictions of globalisation, rampant capitalism and the instability of international finance. Students of economics and political science had never lost faith in their master but Stalinism and Soviet Gulags that finally climaxed with the collapse of command economies smothered further debates on Marxism in the nineties. The philosophical beliefs of Marxism came to be associated with the terrible atrocities of the 20th century because many believed that theory and practice were merely two sides of the same coin, though the two often diverged because of the demands of the time.

V V: Why Marx was right

The recent killing of Osama bin Laden on the outskirts of Abbottabad on the North-West Frontier Province, the raid on the naval base near Karachi and the almost daily suicide bombings raise fresh questions about the nature and destiny of Pakistan. For some commentators it provides additional proof that Pakistan is a &ldquo;failed state&rdquo;, too weak and too fragmented to know, let alone to control, what&rsquo;s going on within its borders. For some others, especially to us in India, it is indicative of how Islamic doctrines and jihadist philosophies have eaten away at the fabric of Pakistan. So, the question is whether Pakistan is governable any more.

V V: Is Pakistan governable?

Is there an answer to the Biblical question why the poor will always be with us? Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both developmental economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have now come with their take on this perennial question in Poor Economics: A Radical Thinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Random House, Rs 499). Their book, which is based on field studies and extensive interviews with the poor in the villages of India, Indonesia, Morocco, Kenya and other developing countries, has a single premise: &ldquo;Leave the big questions aside and focus on the lives and choices of the poor people&rdquo; to ask why interventions by governments or NGOs do or don&rsquo;t work. It includes microstudies on a vast canvas. &ldquo;Small is beautiful&rdquo; techniques are then presented to debunk the conventional wisdom that big problems need big solutions to get over them.

V V: Beyond the poverty trap

Oliver Sacks, the foremost interpreter of neurology for a reader, has transformed the relationship between brain and mind into an almost literary one. In his classic work, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, published over 25 years ago, Dr Sacks had said in his introduction that neurology&rsquo;s favourite word was &ldquo;deficit&rdquo;, denoting an impairment or incapacity in neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity, &ldquo;and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions or faculties&rdquo;. In his 11th book, The Mind&rsquo;s Eye (Picador, Rs 535), he has continued with his study of &ldquo;deficits&rdquo; or our sensibilities dulled by what the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins describes as &ldquo;the anaesthetic of familiarity&rdquo;.

V V: Uncommon senses

Pakistan isn&rsquo;t a failed state that some media critics would like us to believe. But is it heading towards a meltdown of governance or a permanent state of anarchy even as Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many supporters take over the commanding heights of state power? Prima facie, this is what circumstantial evidence on the Osama bin Laden case (and earlier incidents) would tell us. So, can we conclude that a slow, insidious and long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis has been lit by the Taliban and Islamists that the state is unable, or partly unwilling, to put out? Superficially, this is what many of us would believe but Anatol Lieven, a professor of International Relations and Terrorism in King&rsquo;s College, London, doesn&rsquo;t believe so in Pakistan: A Hard Country (Allen Lane, Special Indian Price, Rs 499) as he tries to tell us in what could be described as The Idea of Pakistan.

V V: Is Pakistan on the brink?

With developments in print and communications technology led by Google&rsquo;s search engines, the Internet, Rights to Information Acts and now WikiLeaks, there is hardly any piece of information that can be kept under wraps. In fact, there has been information overkill in the last decade. But hardly anyone has bothered to ask: What is the problem to which this surfeit of information is the answer? The technology may be dazzling but is there really a place for it? If the answer is more information faster, then it&rsquo;s a waste of time.

V V: Googlising the world

If there has been an explosion of travel writing in the past few decades, it is because its most obvious attraction is in what it represents: escape. It is an escape from the monoculture of consumerism, packaged holidays in five star hotels and the extraordinary imperialism of fast food joints. Those of us who had a little money to throw around have been there and done that &mdash; and found there was nothing in it. So we want to go back to a world uncontaminated by the manifestations of modernity. It isn&rsquo;t surprising then that all great travel writing is an attempt to &ldquo;discover the past&rdquo; before it is bulldozed off the planet.

V V: To mount Kailas and beyond....

Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

V V: Inside Af-Pak's wild West

Bengali is the richest of the 18 officially recognised Indian languages but if you had any doubts, Kalpana Bardhan&rsquo;s two-volume The (Oxford India) Anthology of Bengali Literature, I861-1941and 1941-1991 (Rs 695 each) should close the debate about how it compares with the rest, including Malayalam and Hindi, its two closest competitors. All literary anthologies are, by definition, exercises in unravelling the basic landmarks of a literary culture by providing a &ldquo;historical depth&rdquo; in categories of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that would attract the intelligent common reader.

V V: Bengali literary jewels - rendering and beyond

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