ChinmayC Blog

The fourth collection of stories titled ' Randomized: A Dozen Short Stories ' by Chinmay Chakravarty has been released on Amazon KDP just now! This collection, short stories in a lighter vein plus with mild satire like the previous collections, has been published in both the E-book and Paperback formats. The links are given below:  International: Click Here ! India: Click Here !  Other collections of short stories by the same author: The Cheerless Chauffeur and Other Tales (2021)-- Notion Press . Funny and Fishy Tales (2022)--KDP. The Weirdos (2022)-- Ukiyoto Publishing . All books of the author are available on Goodreads , apart from Amazon and other outlets! Have a look!

When we were school students the Television was not there in our regions, and so, nothing about ‘watching’ cricket. Those days we caught up with the radio whenever India were playing, I remember lying awake the whole night till daylight, particularly when the matches were going on in the West Indies; and those were only the five-day Test matches as the shorter formats were also unknown except for our gully or home cricket being always limited-overs encounters. And we were free of any superstitious beliefs because listening didn’t necessarily involve them. It’s only when we started getting blessed with the live telecasts (early eighties in India) and began watching our favorite players in action that such superstitions began to emerge. Perhaps watching it live made the exchange of vibes or thoughts between us and the players possible with what you call the body language behaviors of both sides affecting the prospects, somewhat. And in came the superstitions, beliefs or say superstitious...

Well! What the heck! Invisibility is infinite because our own God Himself is invisible! Some scientists say that even ZERO is a concept akin to being infinite! Therefore, both ways, it’s only great to be invisible! While God hides Himself behind whatever you don’t need to know, He has created the humans that are immensely visible; once you’re born as one you cannot hide anywhere in the universe until you drop dead in which case you’re either burnt to ashes or buried under, making you finally invisible as far as the ‘real you’ is concerned, because you continue to exist virtually in family albums and the social media, and if you happen to be a huge celebrity you continue to have an extremely dominant virtual existence till perhaps when earth itself gets obliterated. However, problems are more obnoxious when you and other ordinary mortals like us are kicking alive! Even if you wish to disappear instantly from all human views, like Sita in Ramayana did, you fail to accomplish that. In thi...

Well, I have decided to be socially active again! Like in the case of political parties this can also be called a 'necessary evil', even though most of the younger people would never agree! Okay! It's necessary, one likes it or not! Virtual presence in this post-modern age is absolutely essential, more than the physical presence that can be beheld only by a few. However, this doesn't mean that I will be hyperactive with my old wine in a new bottle , meaning my new blog where I backed up almost all of my pieces!  And, to continue with my die-hard habit I have to inform you of my new book, ' The Weirdos ' which is a collection of short stories. I wanted to publish it before Christmas and I have succeeded in doing that! Like it or not, the links are put up below to celebrate the upcoming festive occasions: In India: In USA:

We’d been growing up with the dictum that ‘everything is fair in love and war’; however, in view of our increasingly awesome experience with the phenomenon of digital marketing we urgently need to revise the dictum to ‘everything is fair in love, war and marketing’, for our own solace. I’m not at all exaggerating this. In spite of being very particular about paying all your dues on time all your life and enjoying a healthy credit score as a result your service providers shall not cease to hound you all the time for payment. They’d start at least a week before the approaching payment-due date and their irksome and utterly useless verbosity will flood all your resources of a digital existence. This ‘logorrhea’ of the post-modern times has become a disease like the good old ‘diarrhea’! The disorder cannot be corrected even if you resort to a digital bank transfer system with specific instructions for the payment on the due date. At most of the times the all-encompassing reminders would ke...

Based on my lifelong experience as a rather discerning and somewhat fastidious movie buff I beg to offer here a few of my rather bovine (no necessarily offending anyone) observations about movie watching. You may or may not agree with these which is quite natural, movie watching being kinda of subjective entertainment. You can also choose the near-absent option of putting your views too here in a way to enrich or annihilate my observations. My observations here dwell on characteristics that adversely affect the viewing pleasure which are more important, because the absence of those acts on the positive side. Ø   In quite a few movies I fervently expect something to happen at some point of the narration, and if that takes too long a time or doesn’t happen at all I get impatient and immediately try confirming again the genre of the film. Most often, I find Suspense as the one. Well, heady kind of suspense that! This phenomenon mostly happens in Hollywood productions where the filmma...

  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 ...

Use of abusive words or slang has been universal in daily conversations of human beings across the globe, since times immemorial perhaps. However, in this piece we’re only interested as to how such cuss words have progressed to more hardened and stronger forms on the celluloid and how they have conquered other very conservative celluloid forms. This is not at all a research paper either; but, interestingly, there is lot of research on the progressively hardening swear words in Hollywood movies—researchers even listing out movies with the maximum number of swear-words used in the dialogues by the characters, one finding a maximum of a near thousand such expressions in a movie of around 90 minutes’ duration. In early times societies in the west too were more conservative, and therefore the swear-words were of the relatively innocent types like ‘heck’, ‘what the hell’, ‘damn’ ‘shit’ and so on. The shift toward the hardened cuss words involving the ‘f***’ or ‘f******’ or ‘as****e’ varieti...

He is facing an existential crisis: should he stop watching news television forthwith or continue watching at his own peril! He is not able to decide the best course of action. Some of his friends, why his own wife too on many occasions, have been advising him to strictly not watch news channels. Because, they opine, it’s been very negative with everything, and, essentially, why should one go on being a mute witness to the reports of how many millions had been infected with the virus and how many thousands had succumbed to it. It affects you in the wrong way, makes you despondent and depressed, they add most emphatically. But, how can he just give up on news? He has to keep up with the local, national and the world scenario for his information, understanding and possibly analysis, particularly in this pandemic situation. And what are the alternatives? He does not still get his newspapers, and he quickly gets tired of reading e-papers. His mind goes into a spin. Some friends even hav...