Author Sabarna Roy is an interesting blend of technology, management, creative literary prose, poetics and critical thinking. He initiated a global intellectual storm through his six literary works that have shelf lives for decades to come.
A trained Civil Engineer having secured a First-Class Honors Civil Engineering Degree from Jadavpur University, he is currently working as Senior Vice President having spent 25 eventful years of his 31-years career with the Electrosteel Group.
It is amazing that a person giving leadership to Business Development, Applications Technology and Key Strategic Areas in the Electrosteel Group, writes dark literature giving voice to the multifarious fissures and fractions of post-modern industrial society.
His technical book Articles on Ductile Iron Pipelines and Framework Agreement Contracting Methodology published by Scholars’ Press, Latvia, European Union with two of his Co-authors was translated into 8 major European languages.
Sabarna Roy’s six bestsellers are: Pentacles; Frosted Glass; Abyss; Winter Poems; Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 – 2018, and Etchings of the First Quarter of 2020. His last work Etchings of the First Quarter of 2020 is Bestseller 1 on Amazon.
A Goodreads author with present rating of 4.05 with reviews and ratings in excess of 1,250; he is also on Amazon rated between 4 and 5 with reviews and ratings in excess of 1,000.
Actively participating in the activities of International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, and Confederation of Indian Industries, Sabarna Roy was invited on the opening day at the Noida International Literary Festival 2019 for an exclusive reading session.
He was also a panelist at the Tata Steel Literary Meet on the opening day at a session, which discussed the Dark Side of the Mind.
A recipient of the Literoma Laureate Award in 2019 and Literoma Star Achiever Award 2020; SALISMANIA.com selected his Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 – 2018 as the best book of the year in 2019.
Let us now have a look at his six works that reflect human life in its different shades.
Pentacles
One long story and four ballads, this is a unique example how Sabarna Roy bridges the gap between the mundane and arcane world of post-modern existence.
New Life, a long story dealing with a man successful in life yet having a void as his mother deserted the family for another man’s love, portrays teenage angst and psychic scars left behind on the character.
The ballads portray stories of love, loss and longing using urban imagery that we are used to in our everyday life yet recreated sparklingly with a touch of surrealism and magic realism.
The Tower, the opening ballad, particularly needs a mention due to its wonderful way of depicting pathos, poignancy and magic of a crumbling world.
Frosted Glass
Comprising one story cycle consisting of 14 stories and one poem cycle consisting of 21 poems, it is set in Calcutta showing darkness lurking in human psyche of the characters and their baser instincts. The metropolis also features as a looming backdrop in almost all the stories and poems similar to Gotham City in a Batman movie.
Crisp conversations in the stories add novelty to the story cycle that has Rahul as its protagonist. It portrays man-woman relationships in the backdrop of crises of morality, ethics, environmental degradation, class inequality, rapid and mass-scale unmindful urbanization.
Rahul, as a character found in all the stories, often shake our belief in human existence and one feels, he is not just a singular character but all of us rolled into one: a symbol of helplessness and despair in an industrial society.
Abyss
A full-length play in Two Acts with an interval in between, is a racy crime thriller and yet it shows through multiple layers the ugly face of upper-class civil society behind the glossy veneer. Crescendo of conflicts between personalities and ideas are the book’s beauty.
This book is a portrayal of conflict between a mother and her daughter and its female sleuth Renuka takes the readers to the very labyrinths of our societal order. The play also raises fundamental questions: whether agricultural land should be used for industry and the working ethics of a practicing author.
Winter Poems
It reflects the season’s myriad moods through imaginative narrations of intricate human stories occurring on Calcutta’s horizon; possibly aroused by the subtle festivities of Durga and Kali Puja in the city at the beginning of the season.
Most of the poems deal with imaginations of death and home reflected in a tenor of lyrical melancholy, which is remotely distant from self-loathing.
Random Subterranean Mosaic 2012 – 2018
It is a kaleidoscope of random, yet mysteriously structured to a pattern, fiction, semi-autobiographical, and autobiographical pieces, covering poems, short-shorts, opinions, observations, and conversations. This book is known for its lucidity in language and expression.
Etchings of the First Quarter of 2020
It is an anthology of a wonderful novella and a poem cycle of 20 poesies. The novella is set in the background of conversations between a step-father and a step-daughter over dualism of human life expressed through literary characters like, Lolita, Humbert Humbert, Anna Karenina, and Nikhilesh. It is an experimental literary venture.
It deals with thought-leaders like Hegel, Marx, and Heisenberg; political phenomena like the Bolshevik Revolution; schizophrenia, marine conservation, love as an idea, and the secret love story of T S Eliot.
The poems reflect the conflicts of the poet with his alter-ego.
Sabarna Roy, truly, is a manifestation of a person of many dimensions!
