Category: Near Future

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

Book of the Month review by Outlook India


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.

https://www.outlookindia.com/amp/story/announcements/news-media-wire/book-review-shakti-ghoshals-the-last-writer-of-kolkata-and-other-stories

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

That memory of so many years back started reeling through in striking hues.


Ron with his wife Oishi were staying in their serviced apartment in Pakhiralaya; they were on a visit to Sundarbans. Their daughter Rusha had not accompanied them on that trip because of college work. That evening was heavy and suffocating, as a cyclone loomed. Oishi, with a set of volunteers, was working to strengthen bandhs and send supplies to an isolated fishermen community.

Despite Ron entreating with her to come hinterland to safety, Oishi had remained stubborn.

Rasping breath, hurried footsteps—Oishi’s silhouette moved through the dense mangrove shadows, her figure flickering in the erratic glow of distant lightning. The wind howled through the tangled branches, the sound merging with the guttural cries of unseen creatures.

Her breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. She clutched her shawl tightly around her, the fabric soaked and heavy against her skin. The path back to the apartment was barely visible, obscured by the relentless downpour. The ground beneath her feet was treacherous, a shifting sludge of mud and tangled roots.

A sudden gust slammed against her like a malevolent force, making her stumble. She somehow caught herself against a tree, the bark was slick, unforgiving. Behind her, something creaked ominously. The storm was trying to shift the forest itself, bending it to its fury.

The sound came, low at first, then a deafening crack. The air trembled with it. A loud whooshing sound accompanied the toppling of a tree. Oishi turned, eyes wide, searching. A massive limb, gaunt and jagged, descended toward her in an unstoppable arc. The sharp end glinted in the erratic lightning, a spear of nature’s wrath.

She tried to move. But it was too late. A piercing scream became a crescendo, riding atop the growls and grumbles of thunder, rising between the heavens and earth. And then, silence, it was swallowed by the storm.”

The mysterious Pakhiralaya in Sundarbans, the planet’s largest surviving estuarine mangrove forest, features in the story ‘2056: The year of the Water and Fire’, part of my book ‘The Last Writer of Kolkata and other stories’. The book is making waves amongst discerning readers. For more details, visit: http://www.shaktighosal.com.

Ma Is Coming


Ma is Coming

North Kolkata, 16th October 2042. A few days before Durga Pujo.

The first light of the morning came and sat on the window grille, hesitated, then leapt in. Like an old song, tired and familiar, trying to be remembered.

Rudra Bose sat by the window, a cup of tea steaming beside him. The cup was chipped, the saucer mismatched, the tea, a stubborn blend of milk, tea dust, and habit. Outside, the lane yawned into a waking slumber, its air thick with last night’s incense, stale samosa oil, and the ever-present, low-grade air pollution.

“Ma is coming,” he had heard someone shout on the street last evening.

She was, of course. Ma came every year. Only nowadays she arrived on a cloud of holograms, flanked by LED lions and thunderous drumbeats pouring through subwoofers. The city had found new ways to worship, more theatrical, more saleable.

Rudra shifted in his chair, his bones protesting like rusted hinges. In his lap, his journal lay open, an old pen resting across the page like a reluctant weapon. He hadn’t written yet. He was waiting, unsure of something. Was he waiting for a thought, a familiar smell, or the comfort of a Kolkata that seemed to slip further away each year?

Durga Pujo. Once, it had been magic.

As a boy, he had spent mornings watching Mashis, aunts and Boudis, sisters-in-law threading marigolds for the Pandal and Thakurer Bedi. In the afternoons it would be the decorators stringing up festoon lights of different colours all along the lane. Nights were all about rehearsing lines for the Natok, stage play they would perform on Nabami.

He had once accompanied his mother, walking barefoot to the river to collect Gangajal, the sacred waters of Ganga. He remembered his father reading out the Chandipath under a suffused light. Long buried memories of his parents surfaced and meandered.

“Rudra, you were born with too much silence,” his mother had once said, as she used a hand fan during load shedding. “You are eleven. Most boys your age chase dragonflies. You chase metaphors.”

“I like listening,” he had replied, “Words sound different when you don’t rush to answer them.”

His mother had turned towards him, “Then promise me, don’t let the noise teach you to forget what silence feels like.”

North Kolkata is the soul of the city, where the past isn’t just remembered—it’s lived. Often called “Babu Kolkata,” this region is a labyrinth of narrow lanes, grand 19th-century mansions, and centuries-old traditions that remain untouched by modernity. Historically, the British referred to the area inhabited by the native Bengali elite as the “Black Town,” in contrast to the “White Town” of Central Kolkata where the British lived.

North Kolkata features in the ‘Last writer of Kolkata’, part of my forthcoming book of the same name. Should you wish to receive exclusive previews and the chance of winning a free copy of the book, do write to me @ author.esgee@gmail.com

Shakti Ghosal