Backstage

Sumanta Bose was shaped first by a middle-class home in central Kolkata—where space was tight, conversations were rich, and every purchase carried a calculation. Scarcity wasn’t an idea; it was routine: ration lines, careful counting, the discipline of waiting, and the quiet pride of making things last. Those lanes taught him how society really works—who gets seen, who gets served, who gets to speak, and who is expected to adjust. Life then was slower: landlines, PCO calls, borrowed minutes, news that travelled by word of mouth. Work and circumstance later carried him across almost every kind of India—old cities with long memories, new towns with impatient skylines, and in-between places where ambition arrives before comfort. He watched the country flip its rhythm: from patience to speed, from saving to swiping, into a culture of instant gratification where everything is available—except time, and sometimes, meaning. Technology gave people the power to reach anyone anywhere in the world, yet it also sharpened a strange modern loneliness: constant connection, thin belonging. And now AI is arriving—quietly, quickly—slipping into offices, phones, and decisions, promising efficiency while forcing new questions about identity, work, and what it means to be human. Mumbai held him for almost last eight years,mostly alone—separated from family, teaching him pace, reinvention, and solitude inside crowds. Along the way he met every kind of person—the generous and the transactional, the rooted and the restless—and began noticing the backstage mechanics of life, love, and relationships: what people perform, what they hide, what they repair, what they abandon. The Backstage is that inward journey put on the page—an attempt to listen again, to name what changed in his surroundings and the world at large and in him, and what did not change… and to understand what remains when the lights go out.