ChinmayC Blog

They’ve been worried quite a bit for the last few months, for a doctor of a metro city where they lived regularly before having to move to another city for special work told his wife in no uncertain terms that cataract was developing in both of her eyes and that in the coming three months she had to get the surgeries done. The doctor magnanimously suggested she had a good eye clinic and she would space out the surgeries nicely, apart from giving his wife special discounts on the fees. The husband and the wife discussed the issue in all possible details as they could not avoid moving to the other city: he suggested getting it done in the other city as nowadays cataract surgeries are quite easy and risk-free to which his wife objected saying that as the lady doctor has been very nice and understanding, she’d do it with her only; and finding her determined, if not adamant, he then decided to somehow visit their home city in-between just to get it done and they both agreed playing with th...

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...

Maybe I lied to her when I used to reassure her that she was going to be alright and was going to resume her life in some measure of normalcy in the future years; maybe all my gestures/expressions were false when I used to run my fingers across her forehead or embrace her on occasions when she was able to move around a bit; and maybe all my exhibitions of love care and responsibility were exposed as superficial when I failed to turn up in Delhi where she along with my mother were treated during September-October, 2022 (my mother Urmila Chakravarty was also diagnosed with dental cancer the same month the same year as she was) and when all the members of my parental family and the in-laws converged. Since that fateful day in August, 2022 when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer to that disastrous day of March 6, 2025—the day my younger blood sister Mitali (Mainu) Chakravarty Sarma (November 2, 1963—March 6, 2025) passed away in the wee hours in a hospital in Guwahati after giving 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 has been the most horribly painful and depressing week of my life. There has been the spectre of death and unimaginable sufferings of fellow countrymen across India, from which you cannot turn away; reports are there in all news channels, something even the decidedly pro-government media cannot but report, reports and personal accounts across all social media platforms, the dread of the sudden telephone calls and so on. I am reminded of the horrors suffered by Italy and Spain last year, and shiver to imagine a full repetition in a vast and densely populated country like India; the saving grace so far being that the fatality rate here is fortunately still much lower than witnessed in Italy, Spain and other European countries; but even then, in terms of population the Indian numbers in infections and deaths are numbing, and the mutants are more lethal taking toll equally on the young and the old.         The heart wrenching scenes are everywhere to behold: pe...

  Yes, the title ‘ Ek Doctor Ki Maut ’ (Death of a Doctor) belonged to an award-winning Hindi movie made in 1990 by well-known filmmaker Tapan Sinha (1924- 2009). In the movie the protagonist, a medical doctor played brilliantly by Pankaj Kapoor, makes a rare discovery of a vaccine for leprosy after years of painstaking research, and instead of being recognized for that he is harassed and hounded by the authorities, and the doctor gets deprived of international honour also as he was transferred to a remote village. We cannot dismiss this story as a mere work of fiction, because the movie was based on the real-life story of Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay (1931-1981) who became only the second doctor of the world to use in-vitro fertilization in childbirth. Again, instead of honouring him the then West Bengal government and the Indian Government harassed him thanks to the familiar factors of professional jealousy, manipulative politics and bureaucratic negligence making the doctor face ost...