ChinmayC Blog

Such in-a-soup stories need to be told, because they mostly are about all those faceless people who normally have no voice. It doesn’t matter if the stories were my personal ones or somebody else’s. As you must be aware a writer or a storyteller has the choice of being the narrator in the first person or in the third person, and in post-modern storytelling even in the second person. Well, right? As you also must’ve been aware all the time that several essential services like banking were spared during the pandemic lockdowns, and as far as services at the bank branches are concerned the pandemic hit them real hard with thousands of their staff members getting the infection leading to manpower shortages which was really unfortunate. However, the pandemic had a definitive role in making online transactions a way of life, forcing even the traditionally manual-obsessed customers go for online activities. Therefore, when I discovered a bank failing even in that minimum of online presence I h...

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 popula...

If we can assume that people are already familiarized with the concept of lockdown as it has been more than a year since the national lockdown was imposed in India in March 2020, on the basis of this assumption we can go on to opine that the present version of the lockdown in Kolkata and the state of West Bengal has been a remix. Of course, the local media here has been terming this as only a ‘near-lockdown’, and we also know the kind of ‘mixed’ approaches adopted by various states of India to lockdown, but the experience here is unique and not related to most of the other states. We have decided to call it a remix, because under this process the old is often presented in a new getup to attract and excite the common people, and the state lockdown here has been a genuine remix with continuous tweaking to make it more and more user-friendly for the larger interests of the common people of West Bengal, particularly the state capital of Kolkata.   Yes, peoples’ interests. Nothing mov...

A stupendous election victory against the might of the national ruling party; Didi Mamata Bannerjee installed for the third term as Chief Minister of  West Bengal; and the immediate promise to take the fight against the COVID-19 virus in its deadly second wave head on. But, in the days that followed the state government had not shown any real intent to take on the promised fight, deciding only to augment a little the earlier state administration order that was announced a day prior to the counting of votes on 2 nd May 2021, to shut down restaurants, cinema halls, malls, gyms, sport complexes and so on, and to schedule the business hours of the general markets.   The order came the very day of the oath-taking ceremony, no doubt a very subdued affair due to the situation, of Mamata Bannerjee as the new Chief Minister; but, unfortunately, the new order yields precious little in terms of strict curbs or a most-preferred complete lockdown. The order follows largely the same format...

From January of the year called 2020 onwards we had been constantly getting reports of the havoc created by the SARS-Cov-2 or the COVID-19 virus in various pockets of China. From February of the same year stray cases were being reported from some parts of India and from the month of March cases were on an unmistakable rise, particularly in the states of Kerala and Maharashtra. We were also hearing about the dangerous spread in several European countries, and we even saw on television how normal ebullient parts of countries like Italy and Spain were looking like ghost cities because of the lockdown. But somehow, at that point of time neither the Indian authorities nor the public took it seriously and perhaps was not aware of the incredibly fast human-to-human transmission that the virus was capable of. Not surprising at all, because even the World Health Organization did not know much at that time. Lockdown was also a novel concept for us and many thought that lockdown was not a realist...