ChinmayC Blog

The ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup-2023 unfolding in India is not even halfway through as of today, and it’s impossible to say which of the contesting 10 teams are going to make it to the Top 4 in the knockout stage. And there’ve been huge upsets too in terms of the short-format World Champions England losing to Afghanistan and the ebullient South Africa, after they scored in excess of 400 runs against Sri Lanka, falling again to Netherlands. As we write this Pakistan and Australia fighting it out in a very important match for both of them: Pakistan, after making a rollicking start in the tournament, fell apart against India while Australia registered their first win against Afghanistan after three consecutive losses. Therefore, at the current juncture, we can hardly predict which teams are going to stage a fight-back or which teams are going to the top seamlessly, except perhaps for two teams: India and New Zealand. Both of them have won four out of four matches each so far—every win bei...

Powered by an incredible surge of the rising Indian fast bowler Mohammed Siraj India have crushed Sri Lanka by 10 wickets in the Asia Cup-2023 Final played in Colombo today,  winning their 8 th title of the tournament, followed by Sri Lanka with 5 and Pakistan with 2 title wins . The hosts won the toss and as expected chose to bat first. So far in the tournament, all matches were won by teams batting first; however, in the Final today things took a different turn. The match was also delayed by rainy weather and the Indian pacers smelt some swing in the pitch of which they took full advantage. After Jasprit Bumrah removed Kusal Perera in the very first over of the match, Mohammed Siraj achieved the rarest of rare feats by taking four scalps in just one over or in just six balls—his second and only the fourth over of the match. Four wickets in the Lankan top order reducing the hosts to a sorry 12/5. And the slide did not stop there. Siraj fired on to his fifer in just 16 ball...

  Dunith Wellalage Just when this writer expressed his extreme disillusionment with the cricket of Team India thanks to the haphazard style of player selection cum mindless experimentation in the run-ups to all possible international tournaments, and even threatened to permanently lose interest in the matches India play or is going to play, Team India had bounced back to the winning habit by first bamboozling Pakistan into one of its most crushing defeats of all time in the reserve-day yesterday, the 11 th of September 2023 and then defeated the hosts Sri Lanka in a low-scoring match today, the 12 th of September 2023, thus making way to the Asia Cup-2023 Final to be played on Sunday, September 17. India have now 4 points from 2 matches continuing to top the points table with a formidable net run-rate (NRR) and either Pakistan or Sri Lanka can join them in the Final depending on their virtual semi-final clash on Thursday, September 14. Conceding two defeats from their two matches...

  The cricket matches in all three formats of the game between the arch-rivals India and Pakistan have become a rare variety in the recent years with the ardent discerning cricket lovers waiting for their matches at neutral venues. The matches between them in the one-day World Cup, the T-20 World Cup, and the Asia Cup have always been eagerly awaited. However, in the last two years the fan enthusiasm seems to be dwindling with a sense of listlessness seeping in as regards both Team India and their matches. And risking being rough or grossly unjust I have to point the finger at the Head Coach Rahul Dravid who was appointed in the job in November, 2021. No doubt, he had taken over with the ripe legacies of India—not able to break the jinx of not winning a single ICC title since 2011 ; India’s group-stage exit in the T20 World Cup played in 2021; Team India management blinded by too many choices of young cricketers (courtesy IPL ) thus ushering in the mindless and endless experimen...

Aberrations do occur, in any field of activity or operation or management, the airport operations mid-air or at ground level being no exceptions. But unfortunately, such aberrations seem to be the rule at the Guwahati LGBI Airport, even after a complete revamp of the busiest airport of North East India that was done by one of the top-rated industrialists of the     country. As fairly regular passengers over the years in the domestic air routes to Guwahati we’d experienced or had witnessed such aberrations, the horrors, regularly too at this airport, occurring mostly at the Security zone. No doubt, security is the topmost priority in our insurgency-infested country; but there are justifiable ways of doing it and not going berserk and nearly attacking/harassing/shaming normal passengers. The security forces should possess some level of intelligence to be able to detect suspicious passengers instead of intimidating every Tom, Dick and Harry. There have been some news reports...

  There should absolutely be no doubt that our intention here is not to discuss or re-review the all-time epic movie ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991). However, we still hope to derive some brownie points from the movie title about our proposed speculation on the phenomena of the silences of any kind—wholly related to the animal world. Now, this ‘silence’ of the ‘lambs’ is very clear in its obvious manifestation of a paralyzing terrifyingly petrifying fear of the profoundest kind, because the lambs are basically defenseless animals having no effective systems to ward off the free-flowing predators. They have no other option but to remain silent which is not so often of the discreet or non-discreet variety, because, again, they have no other practical choice. Unless, of course, should some marauding defenders appear in great numbers to fight for the rights of the lambs.   As our fully intended title suggests, it’s about the silence of any other species of animals except ...

Don’t confuse the ‘data’ in its statistical implications, here it means ‘giver’ (as per some Indian languages) or rather a ‘service provider’—the latter being the most suitable one for our purpose. Because this story refers to a DTH service provider; a service provider that is believed to have legendary origins as far as its services in a range of arenas is concerned. And this story is as told to me by a friend, and I’ve still kept it in first person, meaning him, the narrator.                                                                                    * One fine morning as I switched on my modest television set I got setup for an unpleasant surprise, literally out of the blue! The message from the service provider, the Dataslay, got fixated at the baseline of the scree...