Kolkata, Monday, December 14, 2021: The first solo book of writer Pallab Halder, ‘Arko Samagra – vol 1’ was released last Sunday, 12th December at Boichitra Gallery at the famed college street Coffee House in Kolkata. It was a Lit Adda organised by the publisher, Dhee Prakashoni where many eminent writers and dignitaries were present namely writers like Monish Mukhopadhyay, Tamoghno Naskar, Dr. Pallab Basu, Ronodip Nandi and others.
The author now based at Lagos in Nigeria, spoke about the evolution of his central character Dr. Arko who is a consultant psychiatrist based in Lagos itself and how he solves psychological cases of his patients which often involves the social and ritualistic customs of West Africa predominantly. The author also added that his literary journey started more than seven years back through the social media.
Mr. Mukherjee in his speech applauded the very first publication from Dhee Prakashoni and credited the cover-man Abhibrata for the impressive cover design of the book. Writer Pallab Basu emphasised that the publisher would continue to do such good work in future publications as well.
The publisher co-founder Arnab spoke about the hard work that his team had put in this publication and shared trivia for the readers-audience present, who all got their books signed by the author. Some of them talked about their experience of knowing about Dr. Arko from audio stories in YouTube and reading in social media and wanted to know more from the author.
Pallab in his concluding note reiterated that his protagonist Arko is a human being only and not a superhero and he has his share of success and failures in solving mystery cases and stressed, that differentiates his stories from the present genre of Bengali literature in trending. He expressed his hope that the book would also be equally popular like the stories were in social media when the Dr. Arko first appeared in Facebook 6 years back.