Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (39 page)

When I began to compete in international tournaments at the age of fifteen, I and the other Indian chess players competing would put our names on a waiting list with the foreign players. Then, in the few hours before our matches, we’d pore over the tournament bulletins, trying frantically to memorize each and every game that had been played. Fortunately, back then, preparation was easier since the available information was limited.

When I first visited Moscow in the late 1980s, I was so intimidated. I thought I could be checkmated by every cabdriver. Such was the esteem in which India held the Russian chess school. I remember the trepidation with which I entered Moscow’s Central House of Chess, the grand institution that had hosted the likes of Boris Spassky and Mikhail Botvinnik, and is now known as the Botvinnik Central Chess Club in honor of the great patriarch of Soviet chess who dominated the game when I was still in elementary school.

In 1991, I had to play Alexey Dreev, who was as young as I was and already one of Russia’s strongest players, for a spot in the world championship cycle. The match was held in Chennai at the Trident Hotel. My friend Ferdinand Hellers doubled as my trainer. To prepare, we would work for a few hours, then watch
Terminator
(which seemed always to be playing on the hotel TV when I was about to play a match) and listen to Queen and the Pet Shop Boys on the Walkman. Dreev arrived in Chennai with a six-member delegation, complete with a physical trainer, psychologist, and manager. This was my introduction to the Russians’ approach to chess. They had raised chess training to a high science with precise routines and rigorously structured strategies. But perhaps they were thrown off by my playing style, which was intuitive—and perhaps a little influenced by vodka. I ran away with the match early. The result was overwhelmingly in my favor: four wins, five draws, and only one loss—an annihilation. The Russians were stunned. I was pretty surprised myself.

By winning that match, I qualified to play later that year in the Candidates Tournament of the World Chess Championship. By then I had wised up a little. I had found my own Russian trainer, Mikhail Gurevich, who immediately said
nyet!
to the television and the Walkman. He helped me understand that training for chess was serious business. I practiced ten to twelve hours every day and did a great deal of pretournament preparation. The aim was to preserve my intuitive style but strengthen
it by equipping me with a broader grasp of openings and defenses, and an ability to pick patterns based on a more detailed knowledge of chess history. In the quarter-final match in Brussels, I faced Anatoly Karpov, a formidable opponent who, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, vied with Garry Kasparov for the title of world champion. I lost narrowly but emerged confident that with discipline and the right training, I could hold my own against any challenger at chess’s highest levels.

I lost to Karpov again in 1998, in a controversial match. I had come to the table immediately after a grueling final with Michael Adams while Karpov was granted a direct seed and arrived well rested. But my training was rewarded in 2000, when I defeated Alexei Shirov at the World Chess Championship in Tehran to become the first Indian ever to win the title.

Since the mid-1990s, technology has taken some of the sheen off the Russian trainers and their methods. Access to information and efficient chess-analyzing software and databases have made chess training very different. The Russian stranglehold on the game was broken; Moscow cabbies are no longer a competitive threat (although many can still expound at length on the nuances of the Chebanenko gambit!). Players have begun to emerge from China, Norway, Armenia, Israel, and elsewhere. However, the concentration, approach, and dedication the Russians bring to their play are still their hallmark.

One of the things I bring to my play is my Indian identity—my ability to shrug off a loss as destiny and hope for a better tomorrow. I am often described as a “natural” or “intuitive” player. I agree there is something to that. I learned to play chess at high speed. At the Mikhail Tal Chess Club in Chennai, where I began playing chess, we used to play “blitz”—the shortest format of chess in which players use a timer and neither is allowed more than five minutes of total playing time. We embraced blitz to make playing fun; the club was crowded, and blitz was the best way to ensure that the maximum
number of players got time on the board. The winner stayed and the loser had to go back in queue. It made the evening more exciting. We all loved it. I learned to play fast, without agonizing about strategy or overanalyzing individual moves. Maybe this is a form of Indian ingenuity: making the most of a situation in which there isn’t much structure.

And then there’s God. I have what I think is an extremely Indian relationship with God. In 2010, when a volcano prevented us from traveling by air to Sofia for the world championship, we had to hire a minivan and travel forty hours through four countries. I asked God why this volcano had to erupt right then. I did not get an answer. Similarly, in Moscow before the tiebreaker of the world championship in May 2012, I again entreated God: “Just stay on my side of the board.” I think this way of dealing with the divine is peculiarly Indian; everyone feels a direct connection, everyone is free to offer a deal, to ask for special favors. We appease God in victory and give him the cold shoulder in disappointment.

As a young kid sprouting a wispy mustache, I was sometimes dismissed by the Russians as an upstart; I have even been referred to as a “coffeehouse player.” For the Soviets, chess was in their DNA. For me, becoming the first Indian world champion brought a great sense of achievement. When I started out, Indians didn’t have much interest in chess. No one talked about it. The Indian media didn’t cover matches. Certainly, it wasn’t the sort of thing anyone thought of pursuing as a career.

Now India seems to spawn new chess academies every day. The game is really taking off. In a sense I feel proud that many young Indians have taken to the game and are doing well in the international arena. In some small way, I believe that I may have made it possible, if only by showing that a “coffeehouse player” from Chennai without a physical trainer or psychological coach could hold his own against competitors from the Russian school.

Whenever I look at how chess has developed over the years in India, there is one project that is closest to my heart: the NIIT MindChampions’
Academy, a partnership with one of India’s most trusted educational brands, formed to bring children into contact with chess. Since the academy was established in 2002, we have fostered 15,600 chess clubs in schools all over India and now count more than 1.5 million students in the program. We teach in several different languages and use a combination of video tutorials, instructional software, and online matches to help participants learn chess strategies and, perhaps more important, the fundamentals of analysis and logical thinking. Apart from producing domestic champions, the schools have seen a marked increase in academic performance. Chess forces players to think spatially and keep stepping back to look at the big picture. You have to plan strategy, think ahead, engage in abstract reasoning and, at the same time, develop a keen sense of empathy. To succeed in chess, you need to work your way into your opponent’s head. Perhaps because of this, many state governments have now partnered with us to introduce the program in their states.

My dream is to see chess played in every school in India. The Soviets would include a chessboard along with the bride’s wedding trousseau to ensure that the children born of that marriage knew the rules of chess. With time and effort, our more intuitive Indian way of introducing a child to chess and letting his or her mind capture the essence of the game won’t do too badly either.

Manu Joseph

Manu Joseph is editor of
OPEN
magazine and a columnist for the
International Herald Tribune.
His most recent novel is
The Illicit Happiness of Other People.

A chartered accountant, a director of strategy, and a product line manager walk into a bar in Delhi.

The friendship of men often has the quality of a feud, and it is in this way that they are friends. The three men graduated from the same college of commerce in Mumbai, where they first met as adolescents. For years they have played tennis in the same clubs in Mumbai—clubs to which their fathers belonged and passed many hours drinking single-malt whiskey and agreeing that India can be saved only by a “benign dictator.” The friends are in their mid-thirties now, important men in their fields. They live in different cities but have gathered in Delhi for the wedding reception of a fourth friend, a banker who plays golf for professional reasons and has mastered the art of winning impressively against his white clients and of losing gracefully against his Asian clients.

The Accountant is the kind of man who holds the view that women should not be given important tasks in his profession. The evidence of his own intellect, he presumes, is in his power of memory. He can name the capital city of every nation in the world and deftly engineers conversations to furnish him a chance to mention the capitals of obscure countries. The Director of Strategy’s preferred conversational gambit is quoting passages from the
Economist
—just as, in his college days, he reveled in quoting from newspaper editorials. The Line Manager, who works for a sports apparel manufacturer, is a good-natured athletic
man, whose only grievance with the world is that it expects people to be “knowledgeable.” He finds it too taxing to read for the sake of acquiring general information.

Every time the friends reunite, they delight in retelling the same anecdotes, chiefly embellished tales of wild mischief perpetrated in their youth. But, inevitably, the conversation now turns to the state of the nation: How corrupt it has become. How inefficient. How dirty and horrible.

And yet it is a nation they adore. For them, India is a paradise. To be acknowledged by the entire nation that they are “big people,” the three friends need only emerge each morning from their homes. They live their lives in a comfortable archipelago, ferrying from one sturdy middle-class island to the next, oblivious of the Other India, with its miseries, injustices, and governments of dark rustics. To minister to their daily needs, the friends rely upon drivers, house help, and nannies, whose services can be had for a pittance. Nor need they fear for their safety—at least at the hands of the poor. For citizens of the Other India, police stations and prisons are brutal places; for those suspected of crimes against the nation’s “elite,” extrajudicial retaliations can be severe.

When the Accountant, the Director of Strategy, the Line Manager, and all the middle-class friends who surround them in the bar were born, the die was cast in their favor. They alone would have the opportunities to realize their talents, to succeed in a manner disproportionate to their gifts, while those from the Other India, the hundreds of millions, scrambled to eat, languished in schools without benches or roofs—and, in many cases, without teachers. In everything they did, the three old friends competed not with India’s fierce millions but with just a few thousand.

For the Other Indian to lay a claim to a beautiful life, India offers not a single avenue—unless he or she is deeply corrupt or happens to
be a global sports prodigy. The best-paying jobs require a bouquet of qualities and social contacts that can be seeded only at birth. Thus the upper crust of India’s job market is a stratum in which places are 100 percent “reserved” for the well-born. Yet among the things that most disgust the three friends about India are the “reservations,” or special quotas, in employment and education set aside by the state for what are called the nation’s “backward castes.”

“Merit,” cry India’s urban middle classes with righteous indignation. “Why can’t India respect merit?” But it was not merit that took the three friends to American colleges in their early twenties after they had graduated from the college of commerce. It was a destiny foreseen and sponsored by their responsible parents.

When the friends arrived in the United States, in the mid-nineties, they were shocked by how insignificant they were. In India, girls had fawned over them and recognized them as good catches—even the portly Director of Strategy. But in America, they were condemned to chastity. All those hot girls barely cognizant of their existence; of course none of three friends had the nerve to go talk to one.

In India, the three friends were among the Chosen—good talkers, good swimmers, and good tennis players. In America, they were suddenly ordinary. Lowly shop attendants addressed them without the slightest sign of reverence. Bus drivers rebuked them for not saying “Thank you.” Even waiters intimidated them. The three friends found themselves dragged from the pinnacle of India’s social hierarchy to the lowest rung of the Western world’s invisible caste system.

And that was when they learned to love India. Sweet home, India, where they were kings. And where they reign as kings today.

Thus we discover a major wellspring of modern Indian nationalism. The cosseted children of India’s middle class have contracted a fever—a contagion born of shock that they, justly worshipped at home as kings,
should in the West be so diminished. This fever then infects the entire nation, fanning one quest after another: an arsenal of nuclear weapons; the second-rate scientific institutes that have achieved almost nothing; extravagant space missions to the moon, and very soon to Mars; the clamor for election of a ruthless Hindu chauvinist. This last quest is, in essence, the modern fulfillment of their fathers’ great fantasy: the “benign dictator,” unfettered by the formalities of excess democracy and the absurd distractions of protecting human rights.

This same impulse animates the recent middle-class movement against the nation’s political class, which was less a national anticorruption movement than a class war in drag—a conflict pitting the educated urban middle class against the rogues whom India’s poor had elected leaders; the English-speaking employees of India’s corporates against the usually vernacular politicians; the bribe givers against the bribe takers.