ChinmayC Blog

Shreyas Iyer, one of the most promising youngsters for India in all formats, picked up his second consecutive and equally explosive half-century (in 31 balls) to guide India to a comfortable victory by 7 wickets over the visiting Sri Lanka in the second T20 International match at Dharamshala this evening, again remaining not out with a superb stroke-filled 74 in 44 balls and thus sealing the 3-match Series with an unassailable 2-0 lead. Iyer made 57 not out in just 28 balls in the first T20I match in Lucknow and combined very well with opener Ishan Kishan who came into his own with a fluent 89 runs in 56 balls helping India set a formidable target of 199/2. Sri Lanka batsmen faltered in the chase making only 137 runs losing 6 wickets. Ishan crafted a 111-run opening partnership with Rohit Sharma (44) in that match.   Today India won the toss and elected to field first perhaps because of the possible dew factor. Sri Lanka openers made a good start racing to 67 runs in the 9 t...

According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of ‘Id, Ego and Superego’ the Id trait of a personality was present in the first primitive humans, but not as a part of the brain; in fact, the Freudian tripartite components had nothing to do with the grey cells. The Id trait includes the basic survival, sexual and aggressive instincts/impulses, and it acts unconsciously. Over the centuries the primitive humans started living in communities and societies, and at that time the Ego trait became important as a conscious part of a personality able to distinguish between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ acts in terms of good or harm such acts could cause to the others. With more maturity the Superego trait had emerged as the ethical ‘conscience’ of human beings, always sending correcting messages to Ego whenever the Id trait overpowered it. Freud indicated that any imbalances in these three traits are bound to lead to personality disorders, like if the Id impulses totally dominate the personality that human being tur...

Notwithstanding the complications and the stakes involved in the Ukraine crisis it is just incredible that in an ultra-modern age where the globe becomes one community, international diplomacy should fail so miserably to prevent a war that could have grave multidimensional impact. Again and again, the lust for the superpower status and strategic presence cum military bases has been driving the US and Russia with or without China launch military assaults, occupations, invasions and wars since the era of the cold war ended. With the same aggressive intent and lust Russia has invaded Ukraine just hours ago. President Vladimir Putin calls it a military intervention or operation that has become inevitable after the nationalist ambitions of the Ukrainians and Ukraine’s drive to integrate itself with the European Union and the NATO have threatened Russia’s national security. Putin’s justification has extended to his chilling warning that should any other country interfere in its ‘necessary’ w...

I’m convinced finally that it’s time to put my pen down or rather stop clattering my fingers over the computer keys. Yes, I’ve decided to stop writing here or anywhere with immediate effect. Therefore, effectively, this is my last piece here and wherever it figures. I had already indicated my doubts earlier on this platform. Now, all the doubts are in the final process of getting doubly confirmed. The reasons are both personal and professional. The personal reasons I’ll avoid, because it might be interpreted as passing on the blame; I take the blame squarely on my shoulders and this is my very own decision. The professional reasons are more important and definitive in the emerging scenario of a ‘failed writer’ which is not at all uncommon across the world.   The basic professional reason is that nobody reads my writings, most of them just surfing or watching briefly or passing over accidentally. I have been trying very hard indeed to write across a range of subjects to make these...

The Chairman of the BCCI Selection Committee, Chetan Sharma, has today announced the India squads for the upcoming Test and T20I Series against the visiting Sri Lanka, naming Rohit Sharma as the Test Captain with Jasprit Bumrah as his deputy. The out-of-from batsmen Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane have been dropped along with the experienced pacer Ishant Sharma and reserve wicket-keeper Wriddhiman Saha—the last being dropped on account of his age (37) as he did not figure in any of the matches in the South Africa tour. This announcement is on the expected lines. Chetan Sharma said that Rohit has emerged as the unanimous choice for Test captaincy while future captain materials like KL Rahul, Rishabh Pant and Bumrah are to be groomed under the leadership of Rohit which we speculated about in one of our earlier posts .   If it was an apologetic gesture or not the Chairman said further that Pujara and Rahane have to be left out to make room for a new-generation Team India, adding...

As the title suggests this piece on the raging Ukraine crisis can only be at a perceptive level, because the issue is too complicated with debatable cum controversial angles, and this writer is not much used to write on international politics and cannot authenticate fully the information available on the public domain. Why I have still chosen to write on this is that as a writer with a journalistic bent of mind I cannot escape from this crisis that knocks the doors of my country too. And those ‘perceptions’ I’ve developed are based on the media reports, an international media that is not united objectively, but visibly divided and biased over the crisis. There are primarily two points of view (POV): one is obviously the pro-US mainstream Western Media that has been blaming Russia squarely as the imperialist invader and spreading the idea of an imminent war across the globe; the second is the neutral or the alternative media that is trying to present the real scenario (as per their view...

For the first time I have had the pleasure of watching a movie that strives to capture the pandemic or lockdown-era hassles and problems. Filmmakers the world over in a film industry that has taken the pandemic hit most painfully, wouldn’t like their heroes or heroines masked-up after trying hard to realize the movie at last. However, in this Hitchcockian a thriller titled Kimi that was released by HBO MAX on 10 th February and now streaming on Amazon Prime Video too, we find the female protagonist masked up in the most crucial scenes outside of her home in Seattle. The movie is directed, edited and photographed by Steven Soderbergh, a renowned filmmaker of Hollywood who, at 26 years of age, became the youngest director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival for his debut film Sex, Lies and Video Tapes (1989) and the film was both a commercial success and critically acclaimed; he earned the Oscar for Best Director for Traffic (2000); and then created the immensely popular The ...

The Amazon original Hindi movie Gheraiyaan (Depths) that premiered on Prime Video on 11 th February 2022, is set to give tough competition to quite a number of Hollywood movies in terms of the use of swear words, live-in relationships, passionate love scenes, endless rounds of drinks, brats independent of their families and so on; if not for the promotion of luxury yachts and the tourist spot of Alibaug with its beaches and bungalows near Mumbai. The movie features one of the top heroines of Bollywood Deepika Padukone in the lead role of the protagonist (Ayesha), not exactly that perhaps in hindsight, and other accomplished actors like Siddhant Chaturvedi (Zain), Ananya Panday (Tia), Dhairya Karwa (Karan), Naseeruddin Shah and Rajat Kapoor. It is cowritten and directed by Shakun Batra. The movie is produced jointly by Bollywood tycoon Karan Johar’s Dharma productions, Viacom18 studios and Jouska Films. The shooting schedule and release of the movie had been delayed by the COVID-19 pan...

West Indies has been historically prone to batting collapses, and in the first two matches of the 3-match one-day international (ODI) series the team without any of the famed stalwarts and without even their unfit regular captain Kieron Pollard batted true to their tradition thus conceding the Series to India as the latter has taken an unassailable 2-0 lead. In the second ODI match played today in Ahmedabad India have won comfortably by 44 runs overcoming a late charge led by the spinner duo of Akeal Hosen (34) and Fabian Allen (13), and later by pacer Odean Smith (24) who replaced Pollard with the stand-in captain being Nicholas Pooran. India Team management’s faith in pacer Prasidh Krishna over an experienced Deepak Chahar was justified for the second time as Krishna took an incredible 4-12 in 9 overs and was the Player of the Match. Rohit Sharma, the newly appointed regular ODI captain, had taken up the assignment for the first time and kept his winning record intact whenever he cap...

  Why should I go on writing? This question has been haunting me for quite some time, and this led to an unintentional break in the first week of this month when, in a very unprofessional way, I left the phrase ‘Budget Tomorrow!’ in my last post in January unexplored and unwritten! Well, I am a humble being and never daydreamed about becoming a great writer what they call ‘bestselling’ and all that. Indeed, I had written quite a few ‘solicited’ articles/papers in both English and Assamese newspapers/periodicals over the decades. However, I discovered that in such ‘ventures’ the merit part gets thrown out of the window and only influences/contacts/references matter. Therefore, I had not been a great success in that line. As a writer you send something to a publication in high spirit and hope, thinking that your item had some merit thanks to opinions of a few of your learned friends, for at least a response, but eventually when it sinks in a bottomless well with not even a rejection ...

A voice we grew up with. A voice unimaginably sweet and melodious, also trained in the Indian classical music tradition. A voice that transcends all the three octaves with consummate ease. A voice that became an integral part of an evolving Hindi film industry in the forties and has been one ever since. A voice that paired with almost all the great voices of the legendary Hindi playback singers ranging from the forties to the 2000s, from Mohammad Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Manna Dey,  SP Balasubrahmanyam  and Bhupendra among others to Suresh Wadkar, Udit Narayan, Sonu Nigam and many others. A voice that was worshipped by almost all of the music directors of the country during the same period of nearly seven decades, from Vasant Joglekar, Ghulam Haidar, Vasant Desai, C Ramachandran, Shankar-Jaikishan, Khayyam, SD Burman, Madan Mohan, Salil Chowdhury, Bhupen Hazarika, Laxmikant-Pyarelal, Kalyanji-Anandji, RD Burman and others to Anand-Milind, Nadeem-Shravan, AR Rahman and...