The third edition of An Authors Afternoon on October 5, 2012, hosted Sangeeta Bahadur at Taj Bengal, Kolkata presented by Shree cement. Sangeeta Bahadur was engaged in a conversation by Sangeeta Dutta and touched upon topics like fiction, feminism, career, interests of the author and writing as a therapy.

Sangeeta Bahadur, an Indian Foreign Service officer, has served in various Indian missions abroad. She was born in Calcutta in a family of civil servants and was educated in various schools all over India. She completed her post-graduation from Bombay University, India.

Jaal is her first book of the Kaal Trilogy. The author mentioned that her book Jaal isn’t based on any particular mythology, be it Indian, Greek or Egyptian. Its flavour is that of a mythical story whose message is one of light and hope and also has its share of darkness.

The author’s take was that any kind of mythology survives for centuries and millennia because they enshrine within them eternal thoughts that one can never get away from, be it The Ramayana, The Mahabharata or even The Odyssey. People hope that there is something beyond the immediate physical world. Responding to a question -Why she did not have a woman hero in her book? Sangeeta said that writing about a man offered her more freedom of movement. Instead of just exploring the positives of a woman by making her the hero, she wanted to explore the other side.