ChinmayC Blog

His house was less than hundred meters from ours and in the same lane, that is to say, in the immediate neighborhood, and therefore, he could pass as one of our neighbours in the strictest sense. However, our relations with him hadn’t been as good neighbours, it was a doctor-patient relationship . Per our information he rented this flat for his practice while his family lived in the parental house in a nearby locality. Unless in an emergency, he went back to his family every night. At times, his wife and son came over to live with him. The flat is a one-bedroom affair: a small lobby greets you in from the main door and as you turn to your right to enter his little chamber you find straight ahead the kitchen slab which looks hardly ever used staring at you while the room on your left you’re sure is the bedroom; as you pass the door of the chamber you find a few chairs and a table propped up against the wall on your right and in front is the interior of the room containing the doctor’s p...

My source who happens to be a resourceful domestic help of the owner of the building block where I’ve rented a flat with my family informed me the other day that in the vacant flat opposite to mine a youngish individual had moved in. To my immediately obvious query he replied with a smile the said individual is not a bachelor, but has a good family with a working wife in their native place, and on being transferred the individual has rented the flat. Okay, no bachelor parties to disturb us or the family of the owner, I thought with a relaxed mind, yes, the owner as I know him for several years would never invite trouble by letting the flat to just anybody. I wanted to meet my new nextdoor neighbor as we’re are used to, our old-fashioned or rather rustic ways, in our long history of cultivating cordial relations with our neighbours as well as with the respective owners. However, luck didn’t shine on me for quite some time. Several days passed, still no sight of the new neighbor. Then...

Rohit Sharma is among the most aggressive yet elegant, correct and stylish, not to be called pinch hitters, openers of Indian Cricket , starting with Farokh Engineer (mostly in Test Cricket those days except for the World Cup-1975), on to Krishnamachari Srikkanth ,  Sachin Tendulkar , Sourav Ganguly , Ajay Jadeja , Virender Sehwag , Gautam Gambhir and concluding with Yashasvi Jaiswal . They’ve always been a delight to watch and the early fall of their wickets cast a doom for cricket fans invariably, often for the team too. Rohit Sharma has excelled in the limited overs format (making his debut in T20I and in ODI in 2007) with quite a few world records for most runs in T20I, most sixes in international cricket, most double hundreds (3) in ODIs ( One Day Internationals ), most centuries (7) in Cricket World Cups , most centuries (5) in a single World Cup for which he won the ICC Men’s ODI Cricketer of the Year in 2019 and the individual record of the highest 264 runs in ODI cri...

At her ripe age Lakshmi ought to have been in the comfort of her home, resting, cooking and taking loving care of her grandchildren. Lakshmi does have a home if it can be called that. She owes it to her late husband who migrated to the city during the 1971 war along with Lakshmi, a newly-wed couple, and struggled direly in the new environs for food and for a roof over them. She calls him lucky enough to finally come to own a one-room tenement in the sprawling slum thanks to the kindness of a local leader. Although the slum was unauthorized her husband was able to get an illegal electricity connection too, and till today it remains illegal, for Lakshmi cannot afford to acquire a proper electricity connection. Her husband worked as a hand rickshaw puller and her household was running well for the next few years during which their son was born. Then tragedy struck: her husband succumbed to tuberculosis leaving her alone with her school-going son. In spite of her determination to con...

  Call it coincidence or anything of that sort, for it happened again at the same Durga Puja pandal I mentioned in the previous story. This time it was early afternoon. I was sitting on a plastic chair inside the pandal and facing the Goddess Durga idol as the priests went on with the ritualistic puja and mantra. An old man, definitely in his seventies the right or wrong side of which I wasn’t too sure, came in and occupied the empty chair next to me. He was slim, of medium height, clean shaven with a bald head and specs on, and was clad in a pair of blue jeans and a white kurta that went down below his knees. The very next moment he solved my right-or-wrong riddle and announced with a warm smile. “Hi dear! I’m eighty-two, you know! I was born and brought up in this locality, got educated in the nearby schools and the colleges and worked my full career living in our parental house. After more than twenty years of retirement I still live here,” he went on with a spontaneous artic...

  The Durga Puja pandal was quiet in the morning hours, except for the occasional bursts of incantations from the priests, amplified by the mics. Suddenly, there was a commotion. Two street urchins, probably around 7-8 years of age, entered and marched ahead confidently and occupied two empty plastic chairs in the front row. Their tiny skinny bodies black as coal and clad in rags. Somehow, they were in possession of two toy pistols that they were firing continuously. The decent devotees at the adjacent chairs looked askance at them, horrified in some unnamed way. They immediately asked them to silence their pistols, and the kids gestured they wanted food. A senior organizer looked around annoyed, perhaps not finding the volunteers assigned with the duties of crowd control. Even as the firing continued unabated, a seemingly resourceful lady devotee consulted the priests on the altar and eventually managed to collect some particles of food--of sweets and fruits--that she gave away ...