You say I am a dreamer

People Civil engineer-turned-writer Sabarna Roy writes to connect with himself

Poetry. Plays. Novellas. Different forms of writing spill almost effortlessly from Sabarna Roy’s mind, “I am in the business of creating stories and I pen them down in whichever form they germinate,” he says.

This 44-year-old Civil Engineer from Jadavpur University manages to balance both his identities almost effortlessly. Despite working in a senior management position at a manufacturing and engineering construction company, Sabarna has managed to churn out four books, “My employers are very supportive,” he says. “I even write at work if the muse strikes me.”

The Kolkata-based writer admits that the environment in which he grew in was hugely conducive to him developing a penchant for the written word, “I studied in Bengal University during the 80’s. All of us wanted to write then,” he says adding that while he wrote in his university days, he stopped once he left college and started working.

Nineteen years would pass by before he started writing again “To reconnect with myself,” he says and went on to release four books — Winter Poems, Frosted Glass, Abyss and Pentacles . Portraying myriad aspects of human existence and impulse, every single book creates situations and raises questions that delve deep into the human psyche leaving the reader with a certain lingering discomfort.

“It is the study of nothingness, of loneliness, of emptiness. It questions death, beliefs, relationships,” he says, talking about Frosted Glass, which comprises a story cycle consisting of 14 stories and one poem cycle consisting of 21 poems. The stories, which revolve around a central character called Rahul who symbolises the modern man, raises contemporary issues like man-woman relationships and its strains, morals and ethics, environmental degradation, class inequality and rapid and mass-scale unmindful urbanisation.

“I am an urban, educated Bengali — this is the milieu I come from, the environment I know very well and I write mostly about that,” he says.

A film buff, an intrepid traveller who has coursed the globe and a voracious reader who enjoys an eclectic variety of books including the works of Tolstoy, Coetzee and Pamuk, Sabarna hopes to continue living the dream by writing more and releasing more books, “Dreams are so important to me. I dream all the time—more so when I am awake,” he says.

Source: www.thehindu.com