Tag: The last Writer of Kolkata

What if…


……when a generation no longer asks for privilege, but for credibility.

July 2026

A few mornings back I learnt that an entire movement has chosen to call itself the ‘Cockroach Janta Party’. I smiled. Not because the name is amusing. But because history has always had an odd habit of allowing the insulted to reclaim the insult. (I recall many years back, the Chai-wallah epithet had provided a positive momentum to Prime Minister Modi’s persona)

There was a time when young people marched carrying flags. Today they march carrying memes. Yesterday’s slogans have become today’s hashtags.

Yet beneath the humour, I hear something painfully familiar. It is not anger; it is disappointment.

Every generation believes the next examination will open the next door. When that examination itself becomes the subject of doubt, it is not merely a paper that leaks. Trust does.

The young are often accused of being impatient. Perhaps they are. But there are few things more dangerous than asking an entire generation to wait while uncertainty becomes a way of life.

Governments may negotiate. Oppositions may protest. Television studios will certainly debate. But none of them can afford to overlook the quiet question echoing through millions of homes, ‘If merit itself begins to look negotiable, what exactly are young people expected to believe in?’

As I folded the newspaper, I realised that the greatest examination before our nation is no longer the one written by students. It is the one our institutions are writing every day. And unlike the students, they will not be judged by the answers they give. They will be judged by the trust they restore.

— Rudra Bose,
The Last Writer of Kolkata

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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

The Last Writer of Kolkata


The future does not arrive all at once.
It seeps in quietly — through our cities, our screens, our climate, our homes, and our hearts.

Set in a near future shaped by forces already gathering momentum, this compelling collection explores what happens when irreversible hard trends collide with ordinary human lives. When familiar worlds tilt just enough to reveal what has already begun to change, they become recognisable tomorrows, shaped by powerful forces. A writer watches memory become a commodity in a digitised culture. An environmentalist confronts the fury of a climate unbound. Minds are shaped inside engineered echo chambers. An aging couple discovers that love, not technology, is the last refuge of belonging. These are not science fiction 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.

At once intimate and expansive, the stories follow ordinary people navigating extraordinary transitions — holding on to memory, dignity, connection, and hope as the ground beneath them shifts.

Blending imagination with insight, this book offers fiction as a lens — an exploration not of what gadgets we will build, but of who we may become.

The future is coming.

But the human story is still being written.

In musing…….. Shakti Ghosal