Book Review: Shakti Ghoshal’s ‘The Last Writer Of Kolkata And Other Stories’

Shakti Ghoshal, 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.

“Memory continues to fascinate me because it is deeply personal and yet profoundly unreliable. It shapes identity, relationships, and even our sense of meaning. But when I look around, I realise we are already commodifying fragments of experience.” Reflects Shakti. “Our smart phones and social media encourage us to package moments for visibility. Facebook algorithms decide which memories get resurfaced. Experiences are increasingly curated for consumption rather than lived in their raw spontaneity. Taking that to its logical extreme led to The Last Writer of Kolkata and other stories.”

The deeper question for Shakti is unsettling: if memories can be stored, edited, traded, or optimised, do they remain memories—or do they become products? Human experience derives meaning partly from imperfection, from fading edges, from private emotional ownership. He deduces that once memory becomes marketable, identity itself risks becoming transactional.

“I have always felt that technology is interesting only insofar as it changes human behaviour. A machine, however sophisticated, is not emotionally compelling in itself.” Says Shakti, fascinated by what evolving technology does to love, loneliness, ambition, grief, belonging, or moral choice.

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.

His work is not a collection of sci-fi stories but is mirrors held up to the present, asking readers to notice what is quietly changing around them. If they function as possible maps, then they are incomplete ones, because the future is still being shaped by choices we have yet to make.

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.”

Perhaps that is the philosophical core of the book: the future may test us in unforeseen ways, but what makes us human is not our tools—it is what we choose to preserve despite them.

About the Author

An engineer and an MBA from IIM Bangalore, Shakti Ghoshal has four decades in corporate leadership roles in India and abroad. He is visiting faculty at IIMs in Udaipur and Nagpur. He lives in Kolkata with wife Sanchita. Their daughters, Riya and Raka, and families continue to be his greatest source of joy.