ChinmayC Blog

I never had the slightest element of doubt about the professionalism and fair practices of the fish markets of the great city. Those markets have always been places of joy for the fish eaters, not only for the rich assortment of the fishes—from the biggest to the smallest varieties—but also for the unfailing freshness and taste of the fishes. The priciest is almost always the most coveted Hilsa or the Ilish which is never less than a thousand bucks per kg and going upward depending on the size. The next local attraction is the Katla the cut pieces of the biggest size of which usually cost from four hundred to five hundred per kg—on the busy Sunday the prices hit the upper ceiling. Taking into account other fishes like Rohu and the smaller ones the markets somehow manage to fit everybody’s budget, except of course, for the highly spirited locals who prefer to go for the Ilish or the rather scarce and equally pricey Bhetki varieties only come what may, i.e. the money in their pock...

  Call it population explosion, focused development, urbanisation or congested residential buildings and offices, every place in India has been becoming real tough for people to move around whether in cars, bikes, autos & rickshaws, public transport or even while walking , barring perhaps the countryside and the farmhouses, if you’re lucky. You could be better placed for peaceful walks if you happen to live near parks , lake gardens, playgrounds and the like; however, even parks are often crowded thanks to the increasing number of likeminded people as you in search of peaceful walks along with some mental exercises too. Else, your options are extremely limited. The moment you step out of your house into the roads or small lanes all sorts of hurdles surround you: the bikes rushing at you from all sides as if the bikers were the busiest souls on earth, also having a fascination for shortcuts to make it faster; cars inside which the drivers think more like the opportunistic b...

I’ve got the following text from an AI analysis on Google and I’m using it here as a quote, although I had no idea who’s written it or when—the analysis is not revealing its source, if any. Of course, it’s only a part of the analysis that impressed me most, and therefore I thought of putting it down here for all people of the same ilk. And yes, I’ve tweaked it bit to cover more of the categories of people obviously involved.   "Many emerging or existing artists/writers/discoverers feel ignored, with their work going unnoticed, which is often a burden of being in creative industries , rather than a reflection of talent."  Very right indeed! Creative people who have put out their work in the public domain would most naturally like to be noticed and be told if their work is poor or mediocre or even good. When nothing of that sort happens they most naturally get frustrated and even indignant that nobody is even aware of their work and the very few who have indeed gone throug...

Can't really blame anyone! It's a universal tendency of the Sapiens to covet for the fast buck and try to make it by all means anytime anywhere. However, in the digi-modern era this tendency has become fully class barriers neutral--meaning all from the micro/petty operators to the biggest of all tycoons and also including even government agencies and PSUs tend to make hay with the fast buck. Although individual profit or commission has been the real motive, greed of the lowest order has mostly penetrated the urge, making it overpowering for the makers and scarily irritating for the gullible customers.  Even if you are a regularly-paying good customer the agents from the paanwallahs to the giant service providers keep on pestering you to consider various 'offers' that help them make the fast buck and irritate you to no small extent. Asking for 'feedback' is another way to egg you on. You may think you've paid full for the service and have no time to enter...

What I’d consider most remarkable is that it wasn’t an elaborate whole dream of a particular night, but it was a series of quite a few dreams, consistently dealing with the same question whirring in my head, spread over several nights. I can’t explain why or how this is possible, and I don’t need to, for this whole exercise is not about dream analysis , but about something more important! And due to this important something I went to bed searching solutions for my query over the past few nights and perhaps my dreams got naturally shaped as per my requirement, so to say. Anyway, after a lot of beating around the bush my dreams started getting more to the point and relevant, and last night I got my solution. I’ll tell my boss tomorrow and I’m sure he’d jump for it. I don’t really know why there’s been such an urge in everybody’s mind nowadays for things that are distinctly different—normal mundane things that we do every single day, but now we want to do or accomplish those with a reso...

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...