Sabarna Roy: The Indian Literary Doyen with a Mastery in Multiple Attributes

At this time when the whole world is in constant fear of the ravages of COVID-19 Pandemic, the importance of positivity and hope has increased manifold and without a shred of doubt, literature can always play a pivotal role in spreading a positive message across the society.

In this scenario; where everything seems to have gone haywire, people are in constant search of quality literature.

And, it becomes imperative for authors to take this responsibility with new zeal and it feels great to find the Indian Bestselling author Sabarna Roy who has always impacted society with his literary works.

Sabarna Roy who is a technocrat by qualification and an author by passion has the distinction of graduating with First Class Honors in Civil Engineering from one of the most reputed universities of the country that could be none other than Jadavpur University.

Going with the flow of a fresh graduate, Mr Roy joined the corporate sector and has been serving the Electrosteel Group for the last two and a half decades.

Mr Roy is currently serving as the Senior Vice President taking care of Business Development, Applications Technology and Strategy.

Considering himself a keen observer of urban life whose focus of observation has extended its wings to decadence and hyper-modernization.

The observant eyes of Mr Roy have not either spared the duality of moral and ethics along with the post-modern mix of love and lust. His writings are stripped of sentimentalization as Mr Roy's writings come to a dispassionate zenith of being utterly cold-hearted.

The Bestselling author who has penned down six bestselling titles under the name of Pentacles, Abyss, Frosted Glass, Winter Poems, Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012-2018 along with the latest release Etchings of the First Quarter of 2020 has touched every possible human emotions of love, loss, longing and melancholy.

Mr Roy has practiced his craft through various forms of art in the form of novel, novella, poems, short stories and drama.

Most of the writings of Mr Roy have been set in the premise of Calcutta/Kolkata, one of the metropolitan cities of the country, and the setting of his writings begin with the 1970s, and Kolkata still holds the charm of modern India where caste and class differences are a common sight.

The beauty of his writings reflect in the ability to portray the complex yet obvious emotions as in the case of Abyss, a full length play in two acts where in the pretext of a crime thriller he delves into the critical ideas of land for agriculture versus industrialization apart from decoding the highly decorated mother-daughter relationship in an upper class society.

In the same way in his bestsellers: Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012-2018 and Pentacles, he intentionally leaves many prose pieces incomplete in order to leave his readers in a space of their own imagination and interpretation.

He also does not take a step backward when it comes to experimentation as is quite evident in Duality, the novella from his latest book where he gives the chance to ideas in becoming characters, which is of course an experimental style of writing in Indian English Writing and very few authors in the country have even dared to touch this format.

As with every great writer who makes a mark with their debut work, Mr Roy with his debut work Pentacles proved his mettle to explore the darker side of man avoiding the obvious blunder of labeling his characters as heroes or villains.

He avoided stereotyping with his works as he has constantly experimented with innovative themes and characters with different paradigms of narration.

At a time when modern authors segregate while writing stories and poems, he penned down Frosted Glass consisting of 14 stories and a poem cycle comprising 21 poems and Pentacles consisting of a novella and 4 ballads.

Whereas in his Winter Poems he has dealt with serious topics like death and a philosophical quotient attached with gradual wasting of life.

His mastery over his craft has led him to various accolades as his Winter Poems and Pentacles, the debut work, were converted into Audio Books by Amazon Audible in the voice of a young Australian jazz singer, Colin Newcomer.

In the prestigious Kolkata Book Fair 2014, Abyss, the full length play was on the Bestseller List at the Oxford Bookstore.

The prestigious Kolkata Literary Meet invited him on the opening day to be their honorable speaker to express his views on the Dark Side of the Mind along with once again gracing the Noida International Literary Festival 2019 as a speaker on its opening day.

With an average rating of 4.05 with an excess of 1500 ratings and reviews on Good reads and being in the rating bracket of 4 and 5 on Amazon with excess of 1250 reviews, Mr Roy is far ahead of his contemporary Indian authors.

He has been honored with the prestigious Literoma Laureate Award in 2019 along with the Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012-2018 being adjudged as the Best book of the year. He also won the coveted Literoma Star Achiever Award in 2020, which speaks of his immense popularity.

It's his sheer love towards his craft that apart from writing bestselling fiction and poetry, Mr Roy has authored along with his two co-authors; a book on technical aspects titled 'Ductile Iron Pipelines and Framework Agreement Methodology' being published by the reputed Scholar's Press in European Union.

A must-read considered for the industrial technocrats, this technical masterpiece has been translated into 8 major European languages.

Apart from his literary activities he has been a major participant in various activities of CII (Confederation of Indian Industries), ICID (International Commission of Irrigation and Drainage) apart from other major organizations. Mr Roy is invited to deliver talks on various conferences of national and international repute.

Sabarna Roy has truly been a literary doyen with mastery over his craft and our country needs such intellectuals who not only enthrall the readers with their writings but also help them to imbibe a thought-process, which could add a value to their life!

Let us end with his most favorite poem of his from Winter Poems:

They forgot to put my body on fire

On freshly chopped logs of wood

On oil cracking and boiling

They forgot the charm of cotton ball plugs, the sight of wetted white petals of fecund flowers, the absent-minded twirl of smoke chains, incense sticks, the sonorous trail of holy hymns, crackling sounds of earthen pots and above all, the communal mourning around a corpse.

Instead they hurled me down inside a pit – laboriously excavated, dark and deep

And instantaneously covered it up with fast-setting slurry

With a slight of hands that can be defeated only by mystic magicians at work

So, I exist there frosted miles below

From where you are waging your philosophical wars on trains against commuters struggling to reach their office on time, commissioning ecstatic cocaine soirees on yachts and rafts, executing orgies with strangers on a plane, stealing antiquity from private museums of nouveau billionaires

For you had told me once: I will blow up my life

Indoctrinating me with the scent of your body and introducing me to the nucleus of this explosive club: Death rattle Clan

What holds me here is an intricate web of undefined silence and darkness – so pure in form –

In this marsh of soil, water, plant roots and rotting flesh

You worry sometimes, don't you; struggling in sleep:

Do I remember your face and touch as I crossed over the perimeter of life?

Do I know that your face is one among their faces?

Do I remember all their faces as distinctly as I should?

Do I remember our plot of blowing up our lives?

Might I end up sharing it with a fellow corpse?

Remembering and forgetting are complex phenomena even otherwise; more so after you've crossed the gate

Sometimes – nowadays – I will to laugh at our words – words crafted out of beliefs – mostly non-beliefs – yet preached with so much intensity, precision and timing – a way of time passing for all of us at this explosive club, Death rattle Clan.