Author

Tathagata Roy was born in 1945 in Kolkata into a humble middle-class East Bengali Hindu family. Even as a student, he was brilliant at observing life around him, which has found expression in this book. Roy is something of a polymath. He began life as a civil engineer, joined the Indian railways and played a significant role in building India’s first Metro in Kolkata. He then branched off into law, enquiring into the intersection of law and engineering, the subject he taught at Jadavpur University. He later joined politics and worked to build up the BJP in his home state West Bengal. In 2015 he was appointed the governor of Tripura, and later also of Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. Roy has authored a book on the exodus of Hindus from the erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh, which he later translated into Bengali. He has also written a biography of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of Bharatiya Jan Sangh, which is the forerunner of today’s BJP. He has five books to his credit—two in English and three in Bengali. Roy is widely travelled and has done considerable trekking in the Himalayas, including to places of pilgrimage such Mount Kailash. He is married with two daughters, both married, and has lived most of his life in Kolkata.

Tathagata Roy

Tathagata Roy was born in 1945 in Kolkata into a humble middle-class East Bengali Hindu family. Even as a student, he was brilliant at observing life around him, which has found expression in this book.

Roy is something of a polymath. He began life as a civil engineer, joined the Indian railways and played a significant role in building India’s first Metro in Kolkata. He then branched off into law, enquiring into the intersection of law and engineering, the subject he taught at Jadavpur University. He later joined politics and worked to build up the BJP in his home state West Bengal. In 2015 he was appointed the governor of Tripura, and later also of Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh.

Roy has authored a book on the exodus of Hindus from the erstwhile East Pakistan and Bangladesh, which he later translated into Bengali. He has also written a biography of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of Bharatiya Jan Sangh, which is the forerunner of today’s BJP. He has five books to his credit—two in English and three in Bengali.

Roy is widely travelled and has done considerable trekking in the Himalayas, including to places of pilgrimage such Mount Kailash. He is married with two daughters, both married, and has lived most of his life in Kolkata.

Author's books

Desires Dreams and Powers
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Desires, Dreams and Powers

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Desires, Dreams and Powers is a fascinating saga of the life and times of Tathagata Roy. Not many people may have traipsed into so many fields of life as Roy has. He has been a civil engineer, an encyclopaedic, a university teacher, a researcher, a contract lawyer, a politician, an author in two languages, an intrepid traveller and, lately, a history buff.

 

By writing about his times than his life, Roy covers truly eventful eight decades of a nation in transition, during which British rule transmogrified into the partitions of India and Bengal, the world around him transformed from writing with a quill pen to taming the personal computer and toying with AI, and politics from optimism to Naxalism to hope. His native West Bengal, the crucible of left ideology, finally exorcised the ghost of Marxism by overthrowing the Left Front united in 2011 after 34 years of unbroken communist rule. Through it all, he pranced into high school, segued into engineering college, got his first job with the Indian railways, taught at Jadavpur University, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party and capped it all up by becoming the governor of three north-eastern states of India.

 

The book is as much about the trajectory of a nation on the move as it is about Roy’s life. The parallel is unmissable.

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