From the tenth floor of a hotel room, Kolkata offers an interesting perspective.
Below me, traffic rushes towards destinations I can only guess at. The Metro glides above the road. Beyond the concrete, patches of green survive, almost defiantly, against the advancing city.
At night, the landscape transforms. Buildings light up, roads become rivers of red and white, and the city acquires a certain grandeur.
Kolkata oh!
Yet I find myself wondering about the Kolkata that lies beyond these views.
The person hurrying to work. The family waiting for someone to return. The lives unfolding behind those illuminated windows.
A city is never merely what we see. It is everything that remains unseen.
Perhaps that is why I continue to observe, to question and to write.
Every window offers a view. Every view conceals a thousand stories.
And somewhere among them, there may be another story waiting for Rudra Bose. Shakti Ghosal
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.
