64 Squares

Detractors.

I don’t know what the deal is with detractors, but suddenly they seem to be everywhere. Of course, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, so there’s nothing wrong with some good old fashioned detracting. Take, for example, the government – now that’s an entity that’s worthy of a whole lot of detractors – in fact being a detractor for the government could be a full-time job in itself. Come to think of it, such a job already exists – the opposition. Or for that matter, the BCCI or Akshay Kumar – again prime candidates fully deserving of all the detraction that comes their way – and some more.

When it comes to sports, though, it seems that the matter of detractors has gone one step too far. Take for example, the time when Ben Hilfenhaus took four wickets in an IPL match. Suddenly the media was crowing about how Hilfenhaus had silenced his detractors with his performance. Seriously? Here is a bowler who’d made a splendid comeback to the Australian team by bullying the Indian batting line up in a manner I’d last encountered back in the childhood days watching that bulldog from Tom & Jerry who’d made it a habit to screw Tom’s happiness every episode he featured in. Since then he’s cemented his position in an Australian team that’s teeming with fast bowlers. Who are these detractors? And then there was the time when David Warner scored a century in his second IPL match this season – again the media smugly told everyone that he’d now silenced his detractors. This for a man who’s not only an established force in T20 cricket, but had of late started carrying that destructive ability into ODIs and Test cricket as well? Again – who are these detractors?

What really took the cake (along with the icing and the candles!), though, was when Viswanathan Anand held his world championship crown in the recent title battle. Yes – you guessed it right – even the defending world chess champion has his share of detractors! And it isn’t that he merely has detractors – according to the papers he’s been trash-talked, ridiculed and written off (yes, chess is more dramatic than you thought – more on that later)! Never mind that he’d already defended his crown a couple of times already, and was still in the top bracket of chess players. What was even more puzzling for me, though, was the mention of a chess mafia – it seems that Anand had given a fitting reply to the chess mafia with this victory of his.

Chess Mafia.

What on earth could a chess mafia possibly be?

Think about it – could you EVER have thought that chess was the sort of occupation that could have a mafia? Don’t get me wrong – increasingly the mafia has been infiltrating new territory where they may not have earlier been – but even then, you’d think there’s only so much they could infiltrate. Here’s a list of industries/professions that lend themselves to the creation of a mafia – where you wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow if a mafia was mentioned in connection to them:

1. Real Estate / Construction
2. Drugs
3. Weapons
4. Showbiz
5. Gambling
6. Human trafficking
7. Anything involving Lalit Modi

Here, on the other hand is another list of industries / professions that do not lend themselves to the creation of a mafia – where you cannot, in your wildest dreams, imagine the presence of a mafia:

1. Astrophysics
2. Chess
3. Market Research
4. Paramedics
5. Photographers
6. Florists
7. Anything involving Mother Teresa

If you’re not convinced, try this exercise - take a sentence you would regularly use in connection with the mafia – “3 people were killed and 5 injured in a deadly shoot-out involving the X mafia and the Y mafia. All the casualties belonged to the X mafia as the Y mafia delivered a brutal retaliation to the earlier kidnapping of one of their key members by the X mafia” Try replacing X and Y with any of the words from the first list and you’ll see that it makes for a perfectly plausible newspaper piece – while using any words from the second list just sounds plain ridiculous.

So what could the chess mafia be? This is a question that raises interesting possibilities – here are some classified ads with possible explanations on what the chess mafia actually does:

If you’re now thinking “Maybe chess isn’t all that boring these days after all – what with all the off-board drama that surrounds the game” – you’re in for a surprise – it used to be even more interesting during the Cold War era. At first it was the Americans and the Russians. Yes, it wasn’t just space exploration and the arms race that they were trying to outdo each other in – they were also devoting considerable energy to go one up over each other at Chess. Which is why Bobby Fischer was hailed as a hero when he beat the Russians at chess. Unfortunately for the Americans, he then simply vanished and they pretty much gave up on chess after that – leaving it all to the Russians. This brings us to Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, and their rather insane world championship match of 1984-85.

At that point, Karpov was the reigning world champion and the darling of the Soviet establishment – Kasparov, 12 years his junior, was seen as the rebellious upstart – someone who wanted the established order to change in favour of a new Russia. Thus, the match had huge political ramifications – it wasn’t just about the chess – it was billed as the ultimate clash that could well decide which Russia emerges stronger. The chess, though, did not live up to its titanic billing at first – within 9 matches, Karpov was up 4-0 – and well on the way to an easy victory, given that the first person to 6 wins (with no points for a draw) would be declared the winner. That’s when things got exciting. Or tediously boring, depending on the way you look at it.

It’s a bit like the Popeye cartoon – at first Bluto kicks the living shit out of Popeye – thrashing him left, right and centre. And then suddenly Popeye gets hold of his spinach can and the tables are turned – now he’s flinging Bluto from one side to the other and beating him black and blue. Except that this whole thing happened in extreme, ultra-slow motion – over a 5 month period. After getting thrashed, Kasparov decided that he was in no position to beat Karpov the way he was playing. So he figured – let me just keep drawing matches until it bores everyone and life becomes a living nightmare for Karpov. For five months this went on – they played about 40-odd matches – Kasparov accidentally winning one at some point, Karpov winning one at another point – and the rest were all draws.

By now, Karpov didn’t know how on earth he would deal with this – he’d lost 10 kgs due to stress – how much longer would this go on? Questions pertaining to existential angst had started gnawing away at his very core. Kasparov may be a madman who’s perfectly happy to play chess for the rest of his life – but is this what Karpov really wanted from life? Wasn’t there so much more he could’ve done in life the last 5 months instead of playing chess? Especially now that it was almost summer? Was he trapped in the middle of a dystopian movie about hell, where he would be forced to spend the rest of eternity playing chess matches against Kasparov?

This was it – the spinach intake had finally been completed – and Kasparov was ready to strike. The next three games – all won by Kasparov! Karpov was like Bluto – utterly defeated and on the verge of collapse – when the Soviet authorities called off the match citing health concerns for the players. Of course, the matches themselves may have been boring, but for sheer overall drama, chess can be right up there with the other sports.

And the best part – it has detractors too!

Celestial Magic

A full-moon night. 

An ordinary-looking chap goes about his night business – brushing his teeth, changing into his night clothes, about to retire to bed – that sort of stuff. It all seems very run-of-the-mill, but you know from the background music that it really isn’t. This is a scene cocooned with possibilities just waiting to burst forth. Then the clock strikes twelve. Suddenly – his night clothes start to get stretched to breaking point, hair sprouts all over his body, his nails morph into outrageous claws and his face transforms into that of a wolf-like beast completely unrecognizable from the ordinary guy that had just brushed his teeth. The clothes are now just a ragged shred hanging from his waist. He howls into the night – that shrieking primal howl that tells you in an instant that something terrible is about to happen.

Ladies and gentlemen, the first celestial phenomenon (albeit fictional) I’d encountered as a child – the werewolf. 

A boarding school childhood meant that there were enough horror stories doing the rounds (if you ever go to the bathroom late at night...) so a werewolf was really not needed to spice things up, but kids always lap up anything to do with horror stories, don’t they? Sadly though, while there seems to have been a huge revival of interest in vampires and zombies of late, the werewolf is still waiting for its modern-day upgrade. I always thought that the werewolf was the more interesting of the lot – there was a Jekyll-Hyde duality to the werewolf that was missing in others. He was the Batman of the evil creatures set – all conflicted in life sorts.  And unlike a vampire or a superhero, a werewolf had no control over when he could turn into one – it wasn’t a nightly affair, or a matter of simply walking into a phone booth and changing your outfit when trouble was afoot – he had to wait patiently for the full moon night to come along.

But coming back to celestial phenomenon – if an occurrence as commonplace as a full moon could lead to the creation of werewolves, what would people come up with when something more big-ticket happened, like a solar eclipse, or the Halley’s comet, or better still, the Venus transit? In the olden days, when science hadn’t explained so much, I suppose it was more exciting – some people would see it as God being angry, some would think this was the day Satan would snatch your soul if you ventured out while the more crafty ones would take this as an opportunity to sacrifice their in-laws. Today, apart from the media hype, nothing much really happens, does it? And the media hype has also taken on a bit of a “we’re trying so hard to make it sound special that it actually isn’t that special” sort of quality to it. In the sense that yes, it is a big deal that the transit of Venus is happening, but while you know that the next Venus transit may not happen for a 100 years, something else would come along – a solar eclipse, Halley’s comet, Hale-Bopp comet, Shoemaker Levy’s comet or worst case, at least an asteroid or a planetoid from the Kuiper belt.

It’s a bit like those special calendar days that keep coming along ever so often – “Today’s date is 06.06.12. If you notice carefully and follow a complex set of calculations involving quadratic parabolic equations and the like, you’ll arrive at the conclusion that the month and day add up to the year on the date. This is a HUGE thing – it’ll next happen only in 07.07.14 – so savour this day like no other! In China, hundreds of couples are getting married in a mass wedding ceremony in Guangzhou to mark this special date”. Next thing you know it, the next special date comes along “Today is 12.12.12 – all three numbers in the calendar date are the same today. This isn’t just HUGE, it’s positively GIGANTIC – and if you do not realize it, you’ll never amount to anything in life – you’ll never be a Bournville one day! The next such date would only come along in the next millennium – 01.01.01 – that’s 89 years away. In China, hundreds of couples are getting married in a mass wedding ceremony in Guangzhou to mark this special date.”

In the olden days, though, the Venus transit used to be a lot more exciting than people turning up at planetariums and wearing odd-looking glasses. I don’t know if any of you have read “The Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson - read it if you haven’t! It has this hilarious account of a French scientist/astronomer who was keen on the Venus transit. For those not aware, the deal with the Venus transit is that, well…it’s a little psycho. It happens once and then it happens again 8 years later – so that you start getting complacent and think “Hey, what’s the big deal with this whole Venus transit business - once every 8 years – that’s just twice the amount of time it takes for a world cup to come along!” And then it happens next more than 100 years later – not in your lifetime! And then again it’ll happen in 8 years and then again over 100 years later. And so on till the end of time (or till the end of the Sun). So anyway – this French fellow was so keen he thought it would be a good idea to observe it from India – for some inexplicable reason. So he duly sets out for India on a ship – only to encounter rough seas that delayed his journey. Finally on the day of the Venus transit he was still at sea and could do sweet f**k-all in terms of taking observations or anything due to all the turbulence / whatever the equivalent aquatic term for turbulence is. Not to be deterred, he thought he’d anyway proceed to India – after all the next Venus transit was just 8 years away - no point going back, is there? So he lands in India – has all those usual troubles with food, ill-health, natives and all that (this was the 1800s, mind you) – but eventually is all set with his little observatory – waiting to take down observations – only for it to be cloudy on the Venus-transit day – which meant that once again he could do...absolutely nothing!

If you think that’s where his misfortune ended, think again. After 8 years of fruitlessness, he packs up his bags and decides to head back to France – only to discover on landing that he had been declared dead, his estate was divided among his well-wishers and his wife had married someone else! 

So the next time you curse your life for being tough, think of that poor French scientist and thank your lucky stars.