ChinmayC Blog

Psychological thrillers have always been a very popular variant of the larger genre of crime-mystery-suspense-detective-horror spins both for novels and movies—then for the television and latest for the OTT streaming platforms. The unfailing appeal of such sagas to the audiences of the world had its origin in the 18 th century as far as writing and publishing of Gothic fiction or dark romanticism-terror is concerned. Horace Walpole (1717-1797) is believed to be the founder of Gothic novels and his novel The Castle of Otranto , published in 1764, brought the concept of haunted castles or mansions into literature for the first time and the novel has endured ever since, it’s still being read. Stories and novels of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and Bram Stoker (1847-1912) among quite a few others including the authors of the American Gothic fiction, and of course, the Bronte sisters, have been feeding the curious human mind ever since with almost all regions of t...

It’s only natural that in today’s digital world readers as well as writers know about many writers/authors, particularly those having international bestsellers, without even reading their books. Same here! One such author is James Patterson who has been a prolific writer of numerous novels quite a few of which are bestselling ones, although I’m yet to read any of his books. Now, why am I talking about this author? So suddenly and without any reference to the context? Nope! There’s indeed a reference and a very interesting one at that! I’ve received an email from him! James Patterson! I discovered that while checking the spam before deleting forever the mails inside! The name is there in full with a some added letters/numbers to it and, of course, sent from a Gmail account, as is the norm. From my experience for the last few years I immediately knew it was a scammer or a con book promoter. That it was directed to the Spam could well be due to my action over the years to mark so many...

  The contrast and the irony of a writer! Several years back I celebrated the achievement of a million views of the previous version of this blog. I just did the formality for formality’s sake as I was well aware of the real scenario. I started my blog in all sincerity and the zeal of a writer enthralled by the coming of a desktop to my writing table and the exciting opportunities of writing online. Back in 2006 when I had my personal computer I started contributing articles/stories/snippets to many of the online magazines and article directories. Then I started my blog the next year and for two years or so found little time to do justice to it. I really opened up from around 2010 and by that time views were increasing. I consider the year of 2012 to be the most productive when I think I wrote blogposts almost every day. At that time Google was having a very prestigious page-rank algorithm . The page-rank number for my blog was zero at first, then 2 and then it climbed to a respect...

This is indeed a huge relief! Like the Pandavas in Mahabharata had to undergo an Agyatvas (incognito exile) we're too having a similar phase without, of course, any kind of force or politics being applied in our case! We don't know how long this Agyatvas is going to last. But it was necessary to outsmart all those bots, malevolent elements, casual surfers and so on from visiting our erstwhile site uninvited and always with malafide intentions. They can no longer spot us and harm our virtual platform. All of my social media accounts have also been deactivated, because I was convinced that these spaces attract more enemies than friends, and also the extremely dangerous species of disguised friends, apart from the arrows of the malevolent fraudsters. No visitors, no issues; no readers, no cramps! Amen! 

We’ve been very much used to lament ‘all the taxpayers’ money’ whenever we come across some embezzlement of public funds or plain acts of bribery and corruption. In this piece we’ve decided to confront a new but emerging phenomenon as should be clear from the title given. That day during a writer-authors’ conference one author made a disturbing observation on or perhaps lamented that ‘nowadays the number of authors has exceeded the number of readers’! That observation instantly found a sympathetic supporter in none other than this writer; because I’d dwelt on this post-modern phenomenon quite often and I’d even extended this realization to ‘there are more singers than listeners nowadays’ and of that kind. However, I don’t intend to analyze the nitty-gritty of such phenomena here apart from just saying that such brazenly emerging facts of life have been owed entirely to the social media and all digital formats that convinced a huge chunk of the users that they could indeed write and ca...