Roy brings POTA and allied terrorism-related laws under the scanner and poses a disturbing question - 'Successful fascism takes hard work. And so does creating a good investment climate. Do the two work well together?'

'Azadi', another essay that first appeared in The Guardian in August 2008, rakes up a controversy - one that leaves most of us squirming in discomfort.

Roy pleads for an 'azad Kashmir' saying 'for all these years, the Indian state, known among knowing as a 'deep state', has done everything it can - subvert, suppress, represent, misrepresent, discredit, intimidate, purchase - and simply snuff out the voice of the Kashmiri people'.

India needs 'azadi' from Kashmir just as much - if not more - than Kashmir needs azadi from India, she writes. Which is well, but the essay fails to address who makes up the Kashmiri people and the holes in history? Can an Azad Kashmir make room for all?

The concluding essay, 'Nine is Not Eleven (And November isn't September) is perhaps the most soul-searching of the lot.

It is a spotlight on th 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks - published in The Guardian in December 2008. The essay, while describing the horrors of the blasts, as beamed across by television channels and the post-mortems that followed the live coverage, makes a pertinent point.

'Dangerous, stupid oversimplification like the police are good/politicians are bad... Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes when people in India were beginning to see that, in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators often exchange roles,' she writes, citing Kashmir as an instance.

The collection is thought-provoking, well-researched and worth reading.

But in retrospect, the thin line between reportage, editorial writing, sermonising and the fine art of non-fiction essay writing seems to overlap too frequently in the anthology.