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.
A New Beginning 