Chess Mate
One of the conclusions that seems popularly to have been arrived at since Viswanathan Anand lost his global chess crown to Magnus Carlsen recently in Chennai is that it is the end—emphatic, conclusive and irreversible—of the Indian’s prolonged reign. The apparent consensus unites the cognoscenti with the dilettante though, as usual, the contrasted categories reach their judgment by polar-opposite routes, pavements and all.
What chess loyalists have been heard to say is that Anand has not been at his best, as indicated by ease and fluency or the lack of these, for quite some time now, even when winning major battles. Some in this community have spoken despairingly also of Anand permitting himself rare and gargantuan errors and persisting in them, as seen during the serialised showdown in Chennai. But, truth to tell, most among us in this country have reacted like we have taken a rather nasty sock on the spiritual jaw as a consequence of Anand’s defeat.
It would not be far from the truth to say that this was how we might have been if we had lost one of those silly, eminently superfluous cricket One-Day Internationals or a hockey match in one of those quadrennial international showpieces. Swinging habitually between absolute extremities, we tend to float on pink clouds across a powder blue sky at the slight hint at a false dawn in anything, only to reach for a new suit of sackcloth and ashes whenever required to descend to the prosaic earth under the impact of a high-altitude setback. As a country we thus reveal what a lonely battle Anand has been obliged to fight virtually all his life, the sense of isolation accentuated by our failure critically to appreciate one of our very few true-blue champions, one who has hit the
very highest levels in his preferred discipline. And laced into the sort of media obituaries that have deluged the public domain after the Chennai defeat are muted but grapes-are-sour antagonisms, long-suppressed but never outgrown, surfacing precisely when the stalwart, strangely, seems quite vulnerable.
Carlsen’s admittedly authentic triumph has for the first time in Anand’s spectacularly consistent professional career induced the feeling that his—the Indian’s—time is at long last over. Let us face it: Anand had not been expected to lose the way he eventually did even though everyone and your insurance agent knew that he was up against it this time around. The point is that, back in the early 1980s, when he was targeting glory in the game, there were those in India who frequently found themselves compared with, and rated above, him. There was at least one among them who had corporate assistance of the most generous kind made available to him by one of the country’s best-known captains of industry. Anand, though, shot far ahead of the field by encountering tougher, more experienced opposition abroad, choosing Spain to learn his craft in. It was not as if there were no others who had had doors seven seas away opened to them in equally competitive environments, but they stopped well short of this adventure due in no small measure to the fact that they were not quite sure that they would make it.
While Anand prepared for greatness, many of his Indian contemporaries settled for lesser rewards they would later morosely compare with Anand’s top-of-the-table laurels and, of course, takings. It is no wonder that they want Anand written off. Only time will tell if the Indian has hit the end of the road, but it is those people who never got as far as him who are forecasting the journey’s conclusion. Look up history, and it will tell you what a great Indian odyssey it has been. We can only hope that this classic narrative continues.
