This was the tableau that transfixed fans over three weeks in the just concluded world chess championship match between Ding Liren and Dommaraju Gukesh.
Liren wears a white shirt and nervously covers his mouth with his hand. Gukesh, dressed nattily in a powderblue suit, sports the results of a teenager’s first, brash attempt at growing a beard. He closes his eyes and leans back as if for a power nap, but in reality, a contemplation of the position in the movie theatre of the mind’s eye.
Absolute silence reigns. The stage, enclosed by a soundproof glass wall, is dubbed the fishtank. To the uninitiated this contest mainly consists of two men locked in a room for six hours, who spend it alternately staring at the board and at each other. To chess fans, it is a cerebral Olympus.
The apparent calm masks the furious thoughts raging below the surface, as move and countermoves are considered, analysed and rejected in a soundless mental symphony.
The match, which saw Gukesh triumph in the final game after a plot twist deep in the endgame, is a link in the chain that goes back nearly 140 years. A world championship match is always intensely personal. It goes to the very root of what makes chess tick — the drive to impose your will upon another. Cicero is supposed to have said that the wise are instructed by reason and the brute by instinct, but in chess one has to be a bit of both. The demands the match makes on the players are absolute. It is akin to climbing mount Everest, and then writing the IIT entrance exam on its peak.Mikhail Botvinnik, the sixth world champion, said that playing a match shaves 5 years off your life. (Though it has to be said that he played seven in all, and lived till he was 84). Its haanikarak nature was known from the outset. The very first match in the modern era saw William Steinitz triumph over bitter rival Johannes Zukertort in 1886. “After this defeat, Zukertort’s health suffered and he was a greatly weakened player for the remaining two years of his life. Diagnoses of his ailments include rheumatism, coronary heart disease, kidney problems, and arteriosclerosis”. But this intensity also promotes a curious strain of intimacy. Your opponent is the only one who knows what you are going through because he is going through the same. Alexander Nikitin, a former trainer of Kasparov, once said that players in world championship matches can “come to resemble married couples, who have lived together for years and years. They knew each other so well that even the look in the opponent’s eyes before the game tells them about his mood”.
And hence the imperative to be as impassive as possible, to turn oneself into a calculating machine, to keep the face a blank mask reflecting nothing. But our essential nature bubbles up. Viswanathan Anand once said that he listened to his opponent’s breathing. “You observe someone suddenly not breathing and that’s when you know something has happened. It’s like background noise. If it suddenly goes completely silent, you look around. You can smell a blunder. You try to calm down but maybe your body betrays you.”
And then at the end, as the now famous video of Gukesh crying uncontrollably showed, an eruption of a frozen volcano, a cathartic return to humanity, as raw emotion took over.
A 7-year-old’s dream
Another match, Chennai 2013. The press room is deathly quiet. This is Game 9 of the world championship match where Anand has launched a doomed assault on Carlsen’s king. Trailing the match by two points it is a final desperado attempt to keep his kingdom but Magnus holds it off and wins by racing his pawn down the board.
There is a sepulchral silence amongst all the fans. We know we are witnessing one era closing.
The Elo list, the official ranking prepared by the world chess federation, FIDE, came out soon after. Anand was ranked 9th in the world, the next Indian after him was P. Harikrishna who was 42nd, and the next Indian after that was ranked 77th. In all, there were four Indians in the world top 100. Anand was so unique it was still an open question whether there would be a successor.
For nearly three weeks, the lobby of the star hotel which was the venue had been filled with kids, chessmad kids who ran around, hoping to glimpse their idol, sprawled on the floor, equally adept at hide-and-seek as they were at blitz chess.
As we talked amongst ourselves, we were sure this could not be the end, that India would have a worldbeater in the future, perhaps several decades from now. We just didn’t know that the successor was right there. One of the kids was a sevenyear-old Gukesh, who would stand with his father and gaze awe-struck at this gladiatorial contest. In the press conference Gukesh would say, “When Magnus won that world championship by defeating Vishy sir (in Chennai), I thought I really want to be the one to bring back the title to India. This dream that I had over 10 years ago is the single-most important thing in my life so far”.
The December list this year has 3 Indians in the top 10, the most from any country.
Soviet supremacy
In late 1945, ten of the top American players filed into the upmarket Hudson Hotel in New York. Europe was in ruins, and a new post-war world order was coming into place. They were there to play a match with the Soviet Union. But the opponents were thousands of miles away, waiting at the Moscow central club. This was the famous Radio Match where the moves would be transmitted through radio — each move taking 5 minutes to transmit. The Americans expected an easy day at the office, for they’d been the dominant nation for decades , sweeping the Olympiads time and again. The Soviet team seemed to consist of obscurities, led by their one star player Botvinnik. The results, though, shocked the world, for the Americans were utterly routed.
Far from the prying eyes of the West, the Krylenko programme — named after the commissar who initiated it and wrote: “we must organize shockbrigades of chessplayers, and begin immediate realization of a five-year plan for chess” — was bearing spectacular fruit.
There was no respite for after Botvinnik, came a stampede — titans of immortal stature such as Tal, Petrosian and Spassky. Krylenko himself would not live to see it, finding himself in an unmarked grave, a victim of Stalin’s purges. Botvinnik, post-retirement, would then establish a chess school devoted to picking promising youngsters, which would yield students like Karpov, Kasparov, Shirov and Kramnik.
Indeed it could be argued that Krylenko’s five-year plan outlasted the civilisation that birthed it and only ended when Anand decisively defeated Kramnik in 2006. India now is in a similar commanding position. Anand has taken on a mentorship role, and there are so many young talents like Gukesh, while the world champion is not even the India #1. That honour belongs to 21-year-old Arjun Erigaisi, who is part of a wolfpack that includes Praggnanandhaa, and Nihal Sarin.
India did it in its own way, blending south Indian middle-class work ethic with a game built on an ultra-sharp, concrete style that draws on deep calculation and strategic patience — a combination that European and Russian players simply are not able to handle.
Unudurti is a writer and chess enthusiast
