Category: environment

The House That Time Forgot


A Masai Welcome dance

During our recent safari trip in Kenya, a visit to a Masai village was part of the itinerary. We went with curiosity, but also with the expectations of people accustomed to a very different world.

The Masai Mara is extraordinary not merely because animals still roam freely across its vast savannah, but because the Masai have, for generations, lived alongside that ecosystem without attempting to conquer it. They tend cattle, depend on them for milk and sustenance, and have retained traditions that seem to belong to another age. Yet, paradoxically, they appear to understand something that our supposedly advanced civilisation often forgets: Nature is not a resource to be consumed; it is a system to be lived within.

Masai Mara

The village itself was fascinating. A circular settlement, protected from predators by a dense perimeter of thorny shrubs, with homes around the outside and cattle occupying the central space. The houses were constructed from soil and cow dung. The village, we were told, eventually moves when termites begin destroying the structures. There was no attempt to make the place look modern for visitors. It was what it was. And then came the most revealing part of our visit.

A Masai elder invited us into his home. We entered through a tiny doorway into a dark, compact space. There was a fireplace for cooking, some firewood, a few simple utensils and a single light bulb powered by a solar panel provided for the village. There were small cots for the children. His bedroom had two tiny windows for ventilation and, remarkably, a little peephole through which one could see the outside world. He jokingly called it his television. I smiled at the simplicity of the joke. But it stayed with me. For us, television means hundreds of channels, streaming platforms and a world delivered instantly into our homes. For him, television was a small opening in a wall through which he could watch life unfold.

Then we heard a frail voice from behind a closed door. It was his elderly mother. She had to be kept inside because, having lost her sense of direction, she would wander away and not know how to return. We left the house quietly. Seven people lived in a space smaller than a room in many of our apartments. There was little comfort, almost no privacy and virtually none of the conveniences we consider essential to modern life. And yet, something troubled me about the easy conclusion that this was simply a primitive way of living.

The Masai knew about our world. Their children went to school, spoke English and understood modern technology.  But they rejected coal because in their own words, it would harm the environment. Perhaps, just perhaps, they were not living in the past. Perhaps they were reminding us of something we had left behind. Progress has given us comfort, convenience and extraordinary choice. But has it given us wisdom?

Standing inside that small Masai home, I wondered whether civilisation should be measured only by how much we accumulate—or by how little we need to live responsibly. The Masai may have much less than us. But perhaps, in one important respect, they have understood much more about life and living.

In musing…..                                                                           Shakti Ghosal

Acknowledgement: Masai Home photos (2) by my friend and fellow traveller Partha Banerjee.

When the River Said “Not Yet”


There are some days when nature does not merely show you its beauty. It allows you, for a fleeting moment, to witness its very soul. Today was one such day in the Masai Mara.

We began before sunrise with a hot air balloon ride over the vast Mara savannahs—an experience I shall write about separately. But the real drama of the day was waiting for us at the Mara River, inside the Mara Triangle.

We watched, almost spellbound, as hundreds of wildebeests came thundering down the slopes, accompanied by a sprinkling of zebras. They moved like an army on the march. Then, without hesitation, they plunged into the river.

Continue reading “When the River Said “Not Yet””

Amboselli: Where the Wild still writes it’s Own story….


Amboselli National Park

There are some journeys where you return with photographs. And then there are journeys where you return with a changed sense of perspective. Yesterday was one of those days.

We spent an entire day driving through Amboseli National Park, and for hours the landscape seemed to reinvent itself. One moment, there were vast open plains stretching towards the horizon. Then came a wetland, a cluster of acacia trees, a dusty track disappearing into the distance, or a herd of elephants appearing almost magically against the landscape.

Amboseli is often described as the “home of the African elephant”. It is easy to understand why. We saw elephants in different groups, some quietly grazing, some walking purposefully across the plains, and others simply standing there with that extraordinary, almost contemplative presence that elephants seem to possess.

There were hundreds of zebras and wildebeests, moving across the grasslands in groups that seemed almost endless. Gazelles appeared in the distance, alert and graceful. Giraffes rose above the vegetation like living sentinels. Baboons went about their business with an irreverence that was almost human.

Wilderbeests

And then there were the birds. Some were familiar, others completely new to my eyes. Their colours, shapes and calls added another dimension to the landscape. I came to know that Amboseli is, in fact, an important birding destination, with more than 400 recorded bird species.

What makes this place particularly remarkable is that it is not simply a collection of animals. It is an ecosystem, delicately interconnected through water, grass, wetlands, migration and seasons. We came to know that the seemingly dry landscape also has wetlands and springs fed by water originating from the slopes and underground systems associated with Mount Kilimanjaro. That water sustains an astonishing abundance of life.

And somewhere in the distance, when the clouds allow it, stands Kilimanjaro—Africa’s highest mountain—watching silently over the entire drama.

That contrast stayed with me. A mountain that appears timeless. Animals that seemed to live entirely in the present. And we, the human beings, who spend much of their lives worrying about tomorrow.

For me that seemed to be one of the quiet lessons of yesterday’s safari. The zebra does not know it is part of a magnificent ecosystem. The elephant does not pause to admire the landscape. The giraffe does not contemplate the sunset.They simply live in the here and now. We, on the other hand, are constantly rushing through life while trying to capture it.

Yesterday, sitting in a safari vehicle and watching one landscape after another unfold, I found myself wondering whether wilderness is really about seeing animals. Perhaps it is about seeing ourselves differently.

Amboseli did not need to tell us that life is precious. It simply demonstrated it—silently, continuously, and without asking for our attention. I  only had to be quiet enough to notice.

In musing…..          Shakti Ghosal

Nature Never Reads Our Rulebook


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.

In musing….. Shakti Ghosal

#ClimateChange #Nature #Resilience #TheLastWriterOfKolkata #2056TheYearOfWaterAndFire #SpeculativeFiction #FutureOfHumanity #Sundarbans #EnvironmentalChange #ShaktiGhosal

The Future Doesn’t Arrive All at Once


A piece from the Newspaper

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.

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #Kolkata #2056TheYearOfWaterAndFire #TheLastWriterOfKolkata #SpeculativeFiction  #FutureOfHumanity #Sustainability #ThoughtsThatMatter

When Fiction meets Foresight


 

A BCG Henderson Institute report

When Fiction Meets Foresight: A Reflection on The Last Writer of Kolkata and Other Stories based on the BCG Henderson Institute report.

Author – A BCG Consultant ( name kept confidential)

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 The Last Writer of Kolkata. 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 Echo Chamber, 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: The Year of Water and Fire 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 When the Rain Remembered. 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.

Reference  

1)bcg-scenarios-2050-apr-2026-web.pdf

2) http://www.shaktighosal.com

A Conversation on the Edge of Tomorrow


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.

In Musing….. Shakti Ghosal

#TheLastWriterOfKolkata #ClimateChange #Kolkata #2056TheYearOfWaterAndFire #ShaktiGhosal

Why do so many of your stories seem to end sadly?


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.

In Musing……. Shakti Ghosal

Four futures. Four hard truths. And the fragile choices that still make us human.


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

In musing…… Shakti Ghosal

Those Cries in the Wild….


We had spent years chasing a rumour.

The Royal Bengal Tiger was always just beyond the frame—a whisper in mangroves, a rumour in grasslands, a story told by guides with knowing smiles.

In the Sundarbans, they warned us, “Don’t look too hard. If you see one, chances are you won’t be seen after.” We looked anyway. We saw nothing.

At Ranthambore National Park, dawn and dusk gave us…..
Pugmarks, droppings, and growing humility.

At Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, they didn’t even pretend. “Forget it,” they said kindly.

And then— it was the turn of Tadoba Tiger Reserve……where, quite unexpectedly, fortune decided to shift…. and behave like Lucknow hospitality.

It began like a well-directed play. Our jeep was rolling lazily when the guide suddenly sprang up, as if the forest had whispered directly into his spine—
“Look behind!”

And there she was. A tigress. Standing squarely on the road. Unhurried. Unapologetic. Entirely in charge.



She gazed past us, not at us— as though we were merely an inconvenient paragraph in her story. A low, resonant rumble followed. And then another and another.

“That,” the guide declared with reverence, “is the mother calling her children.”

Of course she was. Even in the wild, mothers don’t wait forever.

What then transpired in front of our eyes was akin to a screenplay. But of the most elegant kind.

As we continued to be transfixed by the one behind, the guide shouted again and pointed. From the front, another tigress appeared—a sibling, perhaps…….She carried a prey in her jaws with the nonchalance of someone bringing snacks to a gathering.

The mother’s rumble deepened.

Translation (we imagined): “Food is fine. But where are the children?”

And then we saw them again. Three grown cubs, walking in a line— like reluctant teenagers responding to a call they had heard thrice already.

They were magnificent. And mildly disobedient.

The mother paced the shoreline now, her calls shifting between soft persuasion and unmistakable authority. It was a language older than words— half love, half command. The forest listened. So did we.



One cub made the first move. It slipped into the water, cutting through it with quiet determination—towards the waiting mother. The other two paused. Of course they did. Every family has those who hesitate at the edge.

The mother, now joined by the brave one, turned and looked back at the rest of the family on the other side. A decision was made and the mother and cub swam again. Not away, but towards the uncertain. And then, as if reminded of something fundamental, the remaining two followed.



For a moment, time forgot to move. Four tigers. Water rippling. Sunlight holding its breath. And us— utterly irrelevant, yet impossibly privileged.

We had spent years trying to see a tiger. This time we were seeing something else. Not power. Not danger. Not even wilderness. We merely saw a mother trying to gather her children.

And in that quiet, persistent calling, echoing across water and time, the jungle revealed its oldest truth: In every world, wild or civilised, the fiercest force is not the hunt—it is the pull of belonging. 

In musing………….. Shakti Ghosal