….. a city allows danger to become normal until tragedy makes it visible.
August 2026
The fire in the Free School street building which housed hotels, offices and homes may have started with a short circuit. But tragedies of this magnitude are rarely caused by a single spark. Nine people died in a building where hotels, offices and homes had somehow learnt to coexist within a maze of cramped spaces, narrow passages and questions about fire safety.
Times Of India report
I kept wondering: who allowed this to become normal? Perhaps that is the more uncomfortable question. A city does not become unsafe in one day. It becomes unsafe one ignored violation at a time. One certificate not checked. One inspection postponed. One illegal alteration overlooked. One warning that nobody thought was urgent. And then, one night, the building catches fire.
We will now demand accountability. There will be investigations, committees, audits and perhaps arrests. All these are surely necessary. But does governance have to begin only after people die? The real test of a city is not how efficiently it rescues people from a burning building. It is whether it had the courage to prevent that building from becoming a death trap in the first place.
As I folded the newspaper, I wondered whether we have become too accustomed to calling preventable tragedies accidents. Perhaps the most important responsibility of governance is not to manage disasters better. It is to make fewer disasters possible.
……societies change not because they have become wiser but because they become preoccupied with different anxieties.
August 2026
Nineteen years. That is long enough for a child to become an adult. It is also long enough for governments to rise and fall. Long enough for a city to forget the sound of its own anger.
The other day, the newspaper told me that Taslima Nasrin has returned to Kolkata after nineteen years. The same city that once burned over her presence now seems to have greeted her mostly with routine, security cordons and a curious indifference.
Talima Nasrin report in the Newspaper
It made me wonder. What has really changed? Did we become more tolerant? Did we finally learn that books and what is written within need not be answered with barricades? Or have we simply acquired newer fears that leave us with less energy for old ones?
Perhaps every generation chooses its own battles. Yesterday it was identity. Today it is jobs, examinations, inflation, technology, security and an uncertain future. The loudest outrage of one decade quietly becomes yesterday’s headline.
As I folded the newspaper, I realised that a mature society is not one where everyone agrees. It is one where disagreement no longer needs to be escorted by violence. If Kolkata has truly changed, the victory does not belong to any government, any ideology or any writer.It belongs to the simple belief that ideas should be answered by better ideas, not by frightened crowds.
That is how civilisation grows—almost unnoticed, one quieter street at a time.
A newspaper report I read the other day literally stopped me in my tracks. It spoke about an unexpected consequence of the geopolitical tensions around the Strait of Hormuz. As ships remain berthed for prolonged periods, marine scientists are warning of an increased risk of invasive organisms hitching a ride across oceans, disrupting ecosystems thousands of kilometres away. At first glance, it appeared to be a story about shipping and marine biology. But as I read further, I realised it was really a story about something much larger.
A Times of india report
Nature rarely responds in straight lines. A political conflict can become an environmental risk. A delay in maritime traffic could alter the movement of microscopic life. Human decisions in one corner of the world quietly reshape ecosystems in another.
While writing 2056: The Year of Water and Fire, I had found myself returning repeatedly to this thought. We often imagine climate change as a sequence of visible catastrophes—cyclones, floods, rising seas. Yet the more profound transformations are often quieter. Species migrate. Rivers redraw themselves. New ecological relationships emerge. Life adapts in ways we neither anticipate nor fully understand. Toward the end of the story, after a devastating cyclone had rewritten the geography of the Sundarbans, the first instinct of the survivors was despair. But when the dronobots began mapping the devastation, they uncovered something unexpected. Amid the destruction, nature was already experimenting. Islands were shifting. Mangroves were finding new footholds. Wildlife was adapting. The ecosystem, scarred but alive, was quietly reorganising itself for a different climate. It was neither revenge nor redemption, it was recalibration.
That thought had stayed with me because it challenges one of our deepest assumptions. We often speak of “saving nature,” as though it were a fragile object waiting for human intervention. History suggests something more humbling. Nature has an extraordinary capacity to reinvent itself. It is we who struggle to keep pace with the consequences of that reinvention.
Perhaps the real lesson is this. The future will not unfold as a neat extension of the present. It will emerge through countless interactions we barely notice today—between politics and ecology, technology and biology, human ambition and planetary resilience.
In 2056, Nayanjol, the sentient boat, eventually becomes more than a machine. He becomes a guardian who understands that survival does not lie in resisting nature, but in learning to listen to it.
Maybe that is the question our own times are quietly asking. Not whether nature will adapt. But whether we will.
When I wrote 2056: The Year of the Water and Fire, I imagined a Bengal where climate change was no longer an environmental issue. It had become a way of life.
This newspaper report made me pause.
It says that Kolkata now loses around 80 hours of sleep every year because of rising night-time temperatures. Think about that for a moment. Climate change is no longer confined to distant glaciers, rising seas or violent cyclones. It is quietly entering our bedrooms, stealing our sleep, affecting our health, our emotions, and perhaps even the way we think.
The future, I have often felt, rarely announces itself dramatically. It arrives in small, almost unnoticed ways.
A warmer night. A little less sleep. A little less patience. A little more fatigue.
Until one day, we realise that what we once called unusual has quietly become normal.
In 2056: The Year of the Water and Fire, I explored what might happen when rising waters, stronger storms and changing climates begin to reshape not just our landscape, but our choices, our communities and our humanity.
Perhaps the greatest lesson is this:
Climate change is no longer about saving the planet. It is about preserving the quality of human life on it.
The Earth will endure.
The question is whether we will learn to adapt before adaptation is forced upon us.
When Fiction Meets Foresight: A Reflection on The Last Writer of Kolkata and Other Stories based on the BCG Henderson Institute report.
Author – ABCGConsultant ( namekeptconfidential)
Reading the ‘Last Writer of Kolkata and other stories’ in the context of BCG Henderson Institute’s Beyond Tomorrow: Four Scenarios for the World of 2050 produces an unexpected sensation. I can confirm that the report is the product of rigorous analysis of megatrends, historical data and expert interviews. Shakti Ghosal’s book is speculative fiction. Yet both seem to be looking at the same horizon.
The BCG report reminds us that “the decisions leaders make over the next 5 years will shape the next 25.” It does not attempt to predict the future. Instead, it explores plausible futures emerging from forces already visible today. The four stories in this collection do something remarkably similar.
Consider TheLastWriterofKolkata. BCG’s “AI Abundance” scenario describes a world where AI transforms work, creativity and identity, leaving people searching for “meaning and identity beyond employment.” The ageing writer Rudra Bose inhabits a future shaped by a similar question. If machines can write, create and remember, what remains uniquely human? The story is not really about technology. It is about dignity, relevance and the stubborn human need to leave behind a voice that matters.
The Last Writer of Kolkata
In EchoChamber, technology enters an even more intimate space—memory itself. The BCG report warns that future societies may trade elements of personal freedom for stability, efficiency and social cohesion. The story asks a disturbing question: If our memories can be edited, curated or manipulated, what becomes of our identity? Memory, after all, is not merely a record of our lives. It is our life.
Echo Chamber
The environmental anxieties running through 2056: TheYearofWaterandFire find an echo in BCG’s climate scenarios. The report speaks of a world facing “stress on food and water systems” and increasingly extreme weather. The story translates those trends into human experience. Climate change is no longer a scientific projection; it becomes a force that shapes survival, migration and moral choices.
2056 The year of the Water and Fire
Perhaps the most poignant parallel emerges in WhentheRainRemembered. BCG highlights ageing populations, declining fertility and shifting demographics as defining features of the coming decades. Ghosal imagines the emotional consequences of those trends. The story asks what happens when societies grow older, families become smaller, and loneliness becomes a public condition rather than a private feeling.
When the Rain Remembered’
What makes this collection noteworthy is that it does not offer technological optimism or dystopian despair. Instead, it explores the fragile space in between. Like the BCG report, it understands that the future is not a destination but a series of choices.
The greatest compliment one can pay The Last Writer of Kolkata and Other Stories is this: the book does not feel like fiction written about tomorrow. It feels like tomorrow trying to speak to us today.
Aditi Chakraborty is part of the editorial team of the Outlook India group. She has recently done a ‘Book of the Month’ review of ‘The Last Writer of Kolkata and other stories.’
Aditi writes:
‘Shakti Ghosal, in his new book ‘The Last Writer of Kolkata and other stories’, draws a fascinating balance between speculative imagination and deep human struggles that the characters endure. It is a book that highlights technological advancement with emotional vulnerability and social disruption.
Interestingly, Shakti’s stories do not begin with technology; they begin with human dilemmas. An ageing couple confronting abandonment. A man wrestling with memory and cultural erasure. A mind questioning engineered conformity. A community facing ecological collapse. Once the emotional conflict becomes clear, the speculative framework grows around it organically. Readers may enter through the futuristic premise, but they remain because the emotional stakes feel recognisable. The future changes settings; it does not abolish vulnerability.
Environmental collapse, engineered echo chambers, and optimised living appear throughout the collection. Yet the author emphasises that ‘The Last Writer of Kolkata and other stories’ is a work of fiction and not to be treated as a prophecy. However, he agrees that there is a cautionary dimension. Fictions can illuminate trajectories already visible in the present. For instance, climate anxiety is not speculative. Nor is algorithmic influence speculative. Similarly, the pursuit of frictionless efficiency at the cost of emotional depth is not speculative. These are contemporary realities. What his book allows us to do is emotionally inhabit the consequences before they fully arrive.
Despite the unsettling worlds in the book, there is a recurring emphasis on love, dignity, and human connection at the centre of these narratives. “I do not believe technology, however transformative, can erase the fundamental emotional architecture of being human. Civilisations evolve. Systems collapse. Tools become more intelligent. But a parent’s concern, a child’s longing, the dignity of memory, the need to be seen, the quiet courage of human connection—these remain stubbornly persistent,” he explains. For Shakti, love is not merely sentiment. It is resistance. Dignity is resistance. Choosing connection in increasingly impersonal worlds is resistance. “If my stories contain unsettling futures, it is because I wanted the emotional stakes to feel urgent. But despair alone makes for shallow storytelling. I am more interested in the resilience of tenderness.”
The complete Book of the Month review in Outlook India can be found here.
Yesterday’s storm in Kolkata was not merely weather. It was a warning.
87 kmph winds. Uprooted trees. Flooded streets.
The broken branches would no doubt get cleared. The roads would reopen. And life too will resume its familiar rhythm. But perhaps that is precisely how great changes begin—not as catastrophes, but as interruptions. A little more water. A little more heat. A little more wind. Until one day we realise that what we called “unusual” has become normal.
While writing 2056: The Year of Water and Fire, I imagined a world shaped by rising waters and extreme weather. Yesterday, Kolkata offered a glimpse of that possibility. The future is rarely somewhere ahead of us. Often, it is already knocking at the door.
When I met Dr. Laxmi Parasuram to hear her thoughts on The Last Writer of Kolkata and Other Stories, I expected literary observations. What I received instead was a question that lingered.
She spoke of the emotional weight in the stories—the sentiment, the ache, the quiet melancholy. Then she asked, “Why do so many of your stories seem to end sadly?”
The question took me by surprise. I had never consciously thought of these as sad endings. To me, these stories are about ordinary people standing at extraordinary crossroads—where technology, hard trends, and shifting social realities place pressure on the human spirit. In those moments of disruption, what gets tested is not merely survival, but something deeper: memory, dignity, love, identity, silence, moral choice.
And when the protagonists choose to hold on to some irreducible fragment of their humanness—even at a cost—I had seen that not as tragedy, but as resistance. Yet perhaps this is the paradox of our times.
What one person sees as loss, another may see as courage. What appears to be a sad ending may, in fact, be the final refusal to surrender what makes us human.
It made me wonder: Have we become so accustomed to measuring success by comfort, victory, and neat resolutions that acts of emotional fidelity now look like defeat?
Dr. Parasuram’s question stayed with me. And perhaps that is what literature is meant to do—not provide answers but quietly rearrange the questions we ask ourselves.
Four futures. Four hard truths. And the fragile choices that still make us human.
A few Saturdays back, at South City Club Kolkata, The Last Writer of Kolkata and Other Stories began its journey into the world — not merely as a book launch, but as a conversation about the times we are already living through.
What made the evening truly special was the richness of the panel discussion moderated so thoughtfully by Dr. Vishnupriya Sengupta, alongside the deeply perceptive insights shared by Sanjib Chaudhuri, Poorna Banerjee, and Chitralekha Datta. Shawan Sarkar anchored the evening with warmth and elegance.
The discussion moved across many landscapes:
A Kolkata where memory itself becomes a commodity.
A Sundarbans struggling against rising tides and ecological collapse.
A future where human thought can be manipulated through neural networks.
An aging society where loneliness, migration, and technology redefine the meaning of home.
Yet beneath all these imagined futures lay one central question: ‘As the world changes around us, what does it mean to remain human?’
What touched me most was the engagement of the audience — the reflections, questions, disagreements, and personal stories that followed. It reminded me that fiction, at its best, is not an escape from reality, but a mirror held up to the forces quietly reshaping our lives.
My heartfelt gratitude to everyone who attended, participated, encouraged, photographed, listened, questioned, and stayed back afterwards for conversations over tea.
Books may begin in solitude. But they truly come alive in dialogue.
If the above themes intrigue you, I invite you to explore more about the book and the stories at: www.shaktighosal.com
Set in a near future shaped by forces already gathering momentum, this collection explores what happens when irreversible hard trends collide with ordinary human lives. From climate catastrophe and algorithmic control to cultural erasure and institutionalized ageing, each story follows characters forced to rethink love, loyalty, memory, and courage as familiar worlds quietly transform around them. These are not tales of spectacular collapse, but of subtle reckonings—where survival lies not in resistance alone, but in choosing what must still be remembered, protected, and passed on.
The Last Writer of Kolkata In a near-future Kolkata where memory, culture, and even grief are packaged and sold, an ageing writer quietly records a city that no longer listens. When his private words are appropriated and monetized, the story becomes a haunting meditation on erasure, resistance, and the fragile dignity of remembering in a world that profits from forgetting.
2056: The Year of the Water and Fire In a near-future Sundarbans battered by super-cyclones and rising seas, a grieving environmentalist, his resolute daughter, and a sentient AI boat are caught between prophecy and science as fire erupts beneath the ocean. As water and flame converge, the story asks a haunting question: when nature reclaims its power, is survival an act of technology, faith—or human courage to stand and choose?
Echo Chamber In a near future where minds are seamlessly linked and memories can be accessed, altered, and weaponized, a gifted intelligence analyst uncovers a conspiracy that turns thought itself into a tool of control. As truth, identity, and free will begin to blur, the story confronts a chilling question: when belief is engineered, is freedom still a choice—or merely an illusion?
When the Rain Remembered In a near-future Kolkata where ageing has been systematized and kindness regulated, an elderly couple shelter a displaced child inside a gated retirement enclave that has forgotten laughter. As rain, unrest, and quiet courage unsettle rigid rules, the story becomes a tender meditation on belonging—asking whether homes are built by policy, or by the human instinct to care.
The Last writer of Kolkata and other stories is making waves amongst discerning readers. To know more, visit: http://www.shaktighosal.com
A New Beginning 