ChinmayC Blog

Dadajan Pay, a multinational technology company, has a huge advantage for nonentities like me: it doesn't yet charge the ' platform fee ' which was recently imposed as one more unnecessarily taxing/extracting money from nonentities like me! Yes! All other Pays like Dagger Pay ,  Taser Pay, Knife Pay Fork Pay or whatever are already charging platform fees for all bills, recharges and all! No doubt, Dadajan Pay of the veteran company that boasts of an 'online marketplace for anything' is only trying to compete better with the numerous technology giants that have joined the Pay business, after the introduction and immediate popularity of the UPI system in India . Apart from the no-platform fee Dadajan Pay also offers a variety of Scratch Card Rewards including instant cashback rewards. Therefore, I prefer to make bills/recharges payments on Dadajan Pay. Make hay while the sun shines!  Accordingly on that day I paid for my mobile bill using the Dadajan Pay UPI. I was e...

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...

Called the Lifeline of the Greater Mumbai region, the Mumbai Suburban Railway has so far only around a hundred AC trains —divided between its Western and Central lines with not a single rake available for the Harbor line at the moment. The first AC Mumbai local train was brought into service in 2017 by the Western Railway line while the Central Railway line had to wait till 2020 for its first AC rakes. Then the Pandemic delayed all proposals for more and more AC rakes and only this year there was some news of more than 200 rakes to be inducted. There’d been    suggestions that all the local train services be made airconditioned while a few leaders opposed this by saying only the regular services needed to be increased substantially. The price difference is obviously a factor here, for the fares for the AC trains are nearly six or seven times more than the regular fares as opposed to the contention of the Railways that the AC fares are more or less equal to that of the non...

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...

I seem to enjoy a special relationship with the trains of the Indian Railways, for most of my train journeys always yield a memorable result—at times very amusing and at times dearly painful. Over the decades I must’ve spent quite a few sleepless nights on various railway station platforms thanks to the delayed schedules or freak/serious mishaps on various tracks or my missing a train or the connecting trains, not to mention other sleepless nights I spent on board looking to get a reservation on the way that never came my way! I meet various interesting people on most of the journeys that make my journeys delightful or rather irritating depending on their quality, and most importantly most of those precious guys end up becoming my characters in my short or mini stories (most of which you can find in my various published collections of short stories. A few remain here too!)! Now, I invite you on board a train for a brief journey I undertook recently which actually doesn’t qualify fo...

Breakfast at the dining table. Two ladies are talking in a rapt engagement. They've finished breakfast and the teas, but perhaps the interesting subject of their conversation keeps them engaged still. The younger lady belongs to the host family while the elder lady happens to be a surprise guest. At this moment the younger lady is describing something animatedly. The elder lady listens resting her hands on the table and bending forward to the other lady. Suddenly, a tiny droplet of the younger lady's saliva shoots out and unfortunately, lands directly on the listening lady's right forearm. She, still in the act of listening, looks mournfully at the droplet, but is too courteous lest it draws the other lady's attention and make the whole innocuous happening unnecessarily embarassing. It is not at all known though if the talking lady notices it or misses it, she as innocent as the other lady.  There has to be a bit of squirming inside the affected lady's mind, obvious...

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...

Husband: Looks like the lockdown is not going to be lifted soon. Of course, some curbs are being eased in the green zones, but in red zones no relaxation in near future. We’re boxed in for a much longer time… Wife: Rightly so, the government’s doing very right. No risks need to be taken at this crucial time. The lockdown has yielded a lot of benefits…the spread is checked, contained. It should be extended as long as it’s required.  Husband: I fully agree with you. We’re staying at home, taking all precautions and keeping ourselves safe. However, there are problems too…an extension may really accentuate these problems. About the economy we’re helpless, but consider my problem, it’s, sort of, getting longer and longer!  Wife: Don’t complain. We’re much better off than many other unfortunate people, families, and countries. And hark; never expect human life to be the same after this. Don’t ever think of rushing back to your old ways…dining in restaurants, having parties, shoppin...

He was very sure that he had lost it. Where exactly it happened, however, he  didn't  know. At the time he moved to his permanent home it was very much there with him. But after a few days he started becoming increasingly aware of its absence. He  didn't  know where exactly to look for it or to search for it in an organized way. The term ‘organized way’ seemed to amuse him. ‘Why the hell am I confused about it, and confounding it?’ he thought. The answer eluded him. ‘Yes, I don’t know the spot where I dropped it and lost it, whether it was night or day when I did so; but how careless of me not to have any idea about it!’ his mind raved on aimlessly. Suddenly he remembered one old joke, and at least it managed to cheer him up a lot. One moonless night a pedestrian found a stranger desperately searching for something under the street light on a lonely stretch. The pedestrian sensed that the person did not belong to this part of the town. As the stranger stead...

He took a resolve not to submit the details as required or give in to the new pressure tactics. He considered this move totally unfounded, preposterous and unnecessary. Why should he or any other of his kind at all? How did it relate to the work they all were doing? He was not a broker or an agent or a dealer or a pedlar. He had been a simple honest straightforward employee eking out a living from his salary, didn’t matter at all if it was fat or lean. Whatever he did or didn’t was conditioned by his monthly salary, and he was not ready to share his kitchen details with anyone. Why at all? And what purpose would it serve to the party who wanted such details except for making wrong use of the information. His company suddenly wanted all its employees to submit full property details including family holdings of gold and silver. While most of the employees accepted it as part of duty and were going ahead with the procedure he resisted vehemently publicly announcing his decision never to c...