ChinmayC Blog

  The fair bright-faced boy with curly black hair, the sweet smile that never ceases to linger on his face and his eyes, his carefree ways and a great sense of humour, his brutal honesty and equally brutally outspoken, and yet the simplicity of his magnetic personality is overwhelming. These are the images that come to my mind whenever I think of him or his songs; even more now when his sudden untimely tragic accidental demise has shattered millions and millions across Assam , across India and across the world. These images are of the late 90s and early 2000s (unfortunately, I don’t have personal photographs as personal cameras or mobiles were conspicuously absent those days.). He is Zubeen Garg . He has been  a living legend of Assam, second only to Bhupen Hazarika , till destiny took him away just when the people of Assam have started celebrating the birth centenary of Sudhakantha Bhupen Hazarika. Zubeen, possibly the greatest singer-artiste ever produced in Assam, in terms...

     Isn't our Sun getting increasingly autocratic nowadays? During the hot humid days He disperses all dark-looking clouds that are apparently willing to satiate the scorched souls and the parched lands, and rules supreme! When He's done for the day in our part of Earth only then the clouds are allowed to pour if they so desire! But nope! The clouds seem to whisper "He pissed us off!" and blow away! But of course, they vent their accumulated frustration at the slightest opportunity! Poor us! 

When we returned to Kolkata by the third week of January 2023 we hoped we still had a chance of catching the winter that we miss most often due to our compulsory visits to Maharashtra. As per our own experience in previous years in the city of joy the month of February could still be cold or even chilly if you're lucky! We had the stock of the woollens ready to welcome us in. However, to our utter disappointment the temperatures kept on climbing making the use of all my sweaters, jackets, blazers and so on an wasted thought. The summer looked to be around very early this time. In fact, in several regions of the country there were heat waves! February heat waves, imagine!  Early March we came to Assam as another integral part of our compulsive itinerary. The first few days were almost the same in terms of heat, except that the nights were much cooler, but still not enough to justify the use of sweaters one of which I carried in my bag as a reasonable discretion. From the 15th of tha...

Climate change and global warming are by now household words, and more frighteningly, the impact of these terms have been cruelly discernible in the daily lives of the citizens in many parts of India and the world. The world leaders must understand the deadly reality of our only habitat getting hotter and hotter by the day, and if this is not checked immediately by whatever possible means in our command this planet is set to be uninhabitable very soon, sooner than we think. The South West Monsoon, still the mainstay of agriculture in India, has been uneven this year in the extremes—some traditionally dry regions getting excess rains to a huge extent, some regions getting their full quota delivered in a matter of days and some traditionally wet regions still not having a monsoon with its usual flow and downpours. Therefore, in all such cases the monsoon is not helping the farmers at all, and on the other hand, people in many areas with scarce rainfall are suffering from continuous heat ...

The South West Monsoon has always been the mainstay of Indian agriculture, being the main source of rainfall accounting for more than 75% of total rainfall in the country every year. Most often than not, the IMD (Indian Meteorological Department) forecasts a normal or near-normal monsoon with about -/+ 5% margin of error, and this year (2022) too it had predicted a normal monsoon which, in fact, was supposed to arrive at least a week in advance. And, it did indeed arrive early hitting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands by middle of May, and then advancing to Kerala, to Maharashtra and gradually the whole country. Unfortunately, its early arrival hasn’t benefited even Kerala and Maharashtra, patiently queuing up for the early-bird offers,  while venting its wrath in the North East, particularly in the state of Assam creating unprecedented floods in the main city of Guwahati and many other districts. In a few days the monsoon had exceeded its monthly quota of rains in Assam by more than...

In a historic move today the Indian Home Minister Amit Shah has announced a reduction in the ambit of the dreaded Armed Forces Special Powers Act-1958 (AFSPA) in three North Eastern states of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur. As per the details of the announcement the AFSPA has been removed in 23 districts of Assam, in 7 in Nagaland and in 6 districts of Manipur (under 20 police stations). The home minister said that this decision is made following a drastic improvement in the security situation of the insurgency-infested states and a palpable progress in moving toward peace and development. He claims the move as a credit for the devoted commitment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. No doubt, the present Chief Minister of Assam Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma, after defecting from the Congress, had led BJP (ruling Bharatiya Janata Party) to victory in Assam in 2016 and in 2021, and has contributed immensely in establishing dominance of the BJP in nearly all states of the region. So then, some credit ...

The only political party that is always having the last laughs on the pathetically prolonged Congress dilemma and its manifestations is obviously the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and is greatly advantaged to stage a hat-trick of victory in the 2024 General Elections, even though the biggest national democratic exercise is more than two and half years away. The oldest political party of India, the Indian National Congress (INC or simply Congress), has been suffering consecutive routs in both the General Elections since 2014 and in most of the Assembly Elections in recent times, leading everyone to believe that the only second pan-India party, apart from the BJP since 2014, is caught in the throes of an irreversible decline and fall. It still remains a party bound irrevocably to the Gandhi family, despite the repeated failures of the leadership and internal conflicts led by several veteran Congress leaders called the G-23 demanding a change in leadership and holding organizational...

While reading the latest book by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen , Home in the World—A Memoir , I found one incident or rather an experience of this great economist-researcher-scholar-writer-Nobel Prize winner in 1998- Bharat Ratna winner in 1999, concerning a book-stall owner that he frequented in the fifties in the famed college street area of Kolkata , then Calcutta . I was enthralled to find that experience having a strong similarity with my experience of a book-stall owner in the seventies. Well, two mandatory clarifications here: first, I’ve titled my piece not after Sen’s great book which means that this is not going to be a review, but just a story, and I’m still going through the book which, in my view, is of epic proportions, particularly in relation to the history, culture, economics and heritage of Bengal from the pre-partition days; and second, there can absolutely be no imaginable comparison between the living legend and this nonentity, as I said this is just a story of a...

That was sometime in the month of May 2018. I was a bit late to wake up and my brother-in-law had already left. He had to attend a high-level meeting in Guwahati and so had to leave very early in the morning. I got up immediately and looked out of the window that opened upon the front side of their quarters, and was just in time to see my brother-in-law getting into the car and the car moving slowly away. As it turned out that was the last time I saw him. Of course, he called me up several times during that day inquiring about the status of my wait-listed train ticket for which he trying with the railway officials, and finally, in the afternoon he only informed me that the reservation was confirmed. As I was seen off by my sister in the Bongaigaon railway station for my journey back to Kolkata I felt unusually sad, didn’t know the reason why.   I visited my hometown Guwahati in May 2018 as my mother, Urmila Chakravarty who continues to write books even in her early eighties, was ...

It was many years ago, we were not exactly little ones then, we were about high school leaving age: myself and my younger brother. Thanks to our father’s ways we used to be sent to our native village absolutely alone since our primary school age; he used to request the government transport service bus conductor to look after us and to put us in a bus going to our village after arriving at the major preceding bus stations. All the time nothing adverse had happened, and therefore, we were quite used to travel alone or the both of us brothers. It is not at all necessary to identify the state, towns or localities; suffice it’d be that it was somewhere in India a long time back.   We boarded the bus at around eight o’clock in the morning after taking a light breakfast at home, from the then home city we were living in, heading for our native village to spend our summer holidays. Our journey was to take at least 8/9 hours which was to deposit us first in the preceding major station fro...