Disruptive experiences make us who we are

[Applause]

hello everyone

i would like to share with you

some of my experiences

the most disruptive ones um

so the the first big challenge i faced

was becoming a grand master

until 1987 no india had ever

become a grandmaster what is involved in

becoming a grandmaster is simply

completing a certain number of

grandmaster performances

and if you finish enough performances

over a certain number of games that used

to be 24 then

you get the title after that

it’s like a doctorate you know you keep

it for life but

attaining it was a big challenge

in my first tournament when i seriously

started trying for it

i actually came very close and i missed

the norm by only

half a point you know if i was so close

in my first attempt

perhaps in a couple of attempts i’ll

make it

but in fact it was much harder than that

that whole year of 1986 i kept

missing the norm sometimes

by half a point sometimes by more but

luckily

school intervened and i have run up very

close to my

last two exams so which is going to

happen in march april of course

and so in december

i had to stop my chest completely

and one of the nice the pleasant things

about this

was that i couldn’t even blame myself

something like the plus two exams uh

well what can you do you have to turn up

and you have to do it right

so uh i didn’t have to feel guilty about

the fact that i was

not spending any time on chess

and the nice thing was that in april

i don’t i don’t recall another time when

i was so hungry to play chess

as april 1987.

having finished my school exams i had to

go and play a zonal tournament

um then i started again

playing in uh events where i could make

a grand master norm

and life just resumed on the way to the

grand master title

an even better thing happened to me so i

was trying to become the first indian to

ever become a grandmaster

and suddenly i

to my surprise as well i ended up being

becoming the first asian

ever to win the world junior

championship and

that was a really nice boost because

i had gone into the tournament without

expecting anything i mean i felt there

were stronger players

so i would just see how it went but

after the sixth round i was leading and

after that the only thing i could do and

think was

what could possibly go wrong this was

fantastic because

this was an achievement which very very

few people had

and at that point

the last three world champions had all

been virginia champions so there was

even some kind of historical uh

backup for this another two events where

things didn’t go according to plan

and then finally in december i played

two tournaments

coincidentally both were held in india

and i finished my title

after all the time of missing it

suddenly it came almost again

too easily okay what’s the disruption

you went to school

but uh sometimes we find it difficult to

take a break

in our you know pause in our lives

and chance to focus on my school exams

was very very good because the next year

a lot of the doubt and hesitation in my

playhead

had simply passed so that

was one pleasant event

that i remembered then the next question

was what should i aim for

after this i mean a few months of being

a grandmaster already told me

that it’s quite hard to do things

without some sort of goal in front of

you

so what should i do exactly

and it seemed to me that i should begin

to uh play for the world championships

there was really that was the obvious

thing

and because it was such a general goal

in the sense that

there were like five or six hurdles that

had to be crossed to get there it’s not

just one event

i had to first qualify geographically

speaking

into higher and higher groups then i

would have to become one of the last 16

the last 16 would play knockout matches

still one player was remaining and this

player would challenge the world

champions

i had a couple of very wonderful years

you know the way i remember it because

as a young grandmaster and as a world

junior champion

a lot of those were opening for me i had

very pleasant uh

invitations chance opportunities chances

and so on

and uh steadily i was making progress

once again um in 1990 i suddenly had

this jump

which was um i played the interzonal

i i felt i would still need a lot more

experience

and out of a 14 round event

by round nine or ten i was somewhere in

the middle lost in the back

but suddenly i had

three wins in a row and lo and behold i

found myself

only needing a draw to qualify for the

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for the last 16 in the world

championship the connection i see

between these two early successes is

simply

the fact that sometimes you need to give

things

a chance to work themselves out you

focus on

getting better you focus on doing what

you

do and you have the patience and the

confidence and

things will work out as long as you’re

enjoying yourself and

you’re moving forward

then the first big change

well of course it was a global change

but it had a particular

resonance in chess was the fact that at

the end of

uh 91 the

soviet union disappeared

initially it seems like there was a lot

of competition uh

because um you know you could be number

eight or nine in the soviet union and

you’d still be one of the best players

in the world

so imagine all of them suddenly

traveling around trying to play

tournaments

uh some emigrated um started working

with youngsters

a big kind of change in the chess world

happened

and i made a friend i made friends with

a lot of them i mean initially

they were kind of mysterious world to me

but i made a friend made friends with a

lot of them

in fact most of my best trainers were

you know people who grew up in the

soviet union and then moved to other

countries

i worked with one friend who was in

belgium one was in

germany one who was in spain uh

interacted a lot i

gained a lot of knowledge from them

including how to think

how to learn and this opportunity would

simply have been lacking

two to three years before

so change sometimes can it’s not only

how many doors it closes it’s also how

many doors it opens

another big change was starting to

appear this was the computer revolution

by this i mean this trend of first

everyone having

a computer to work with and then around

about 93 94

i joined some private somebody told me

if you

join this group called compuserv there

they will

they post every week all the games

played in the world and they’re

collecting all that

and so i started to work with that at

that point

it just seemed like a wonderful thing i

was

let’s say a little bit relaxed or lazy

and i didn’t like

putting a lot of games and putting a lot

of material but here

all i had to do was to import the stuff

into my computer and i can work on it

and

the first chest playing engines appeared

of course very very weak

but they you could use them

at roughly the level that we use

calculators in our life which is just to

make sure the

boring stuff you are a check or

something like that

but in about two or three years

they became strong enough to beat us in

the faster time controls

then another two years later

uh they got strong enough that they

actually

beat the best chess players in matches

and

by the end of that decade they had

simply stopped losing to humans i mean

man versus machine contests

essentially disappeared around about 99

2000

because there was no interest there was

no point

um this was disappointing because at the

beginning

it seemed like just something useful and

made you more productive

nice thing but here suddenly it

changed everything

first of all it meant that you couldn’t

rely on your natural understanding for

everything anymore

generally before uh if i felt that i

knew something better than

my opponent i could rely on that and i

could

you know go to the game confident that

i’d probably be able to outplay

my opponent uh but now i have to take

into account well wait what if

the computer suggested something that uh

overalls

so you i had to incorporate that into

my learning so

by the year 2000 we couldn’t uh we had

to think of an idea and then

just give it to the computer to see uh

what it would tell us

you know was it right or wrong was there

a detail we left out

or not um

and then a few years later we got to

these artificial intelligence neural

nets

and those completely started to rewrite

the whole

game and the way we played it and so

this whole time

it’s not so much that the computers are

stronger than us

at some point it becomes a question of

is this plane faster than that plane but

that’s irrelevant from a human’s

perspective because

the most primitive plane was much faster

than us already

and the other thing is because the

computer

almost always tells you that

some part of your understanding of chess

is wrong uh

this also there’s a there’s a lot of ego

involved there’s a lot of internal

resistance to

even emotional resistance i’d say if

there’s something i learned when i was

17 years old

from my first opponent or something like

that

this has an emotional component to it

and when the computer contradicts that

and you have to do things differently

it’s hard the first time and you resent

it you try to prove it wrong you know

you

spend a dollar a lot of time like that

but once you finally get past that

you find that it’s a powerful thing the

ability to

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take all the things you know and say

wait i’m not sure about this

i’m you know i’ll keep an open mind and

let me see what i can learn from this

that attitude is uh the most important

thing that you can have

of course it was a huge disruption in

fact computers are greater than the

world of chess so to speak

but at the same time i would say that

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because it happened slowly we had time

to adjust

there are other moments where something

happens in your life

which you know totally comes out of the

blue

and you know you’re unprepared for

and then you know it’s on you and how do

you recover from those

um i remember one particular

it was when my mother passed away so

there was no sign of

uh i mean she wasn’t she was not

particularly ill or anything

we spoke quite nicely the previous day

and then suddenly

one morning my father called me and said

come quickly

and that was one of the

hardest things that you can ever deal

with

you have there is no way you can imagine

that

um till it hits you

and the problem was just how to uh

find some you know meaning to your uh

life in that stage i uh

nothing seemed very important anymore

you you would almost give anything else

to get a chance

to be with her again but at the same

time life has to continue yo

as cruel as it sounds you have to put it

aside and

move on and i think in an emotional

level that’s probably the hardest thing

that i’ve dealt with um

very i mean my first tournament i would

literally

uh feel quite cheerful when i went for

the game

so i was able to block thoughts uh out

during the game

but then when i got back uh you would

follow

fall apart again and you know in the

privacy of your room

and this was a recurring process

it’s not something you can train for

and obviously but i just mean to say

that

that kind of emotional turmoil as well

can affect you for a very

uh long time and your ability to

you know put it in some pocket in one

part of your life and then

move on is how you deal with it

and finally let’s come to one of the

biggest disruptions of all which is

this pandemic

there has been nothing that i can

compare it to in my life

despite all the travel i’ve had

and all the events i have witnessed

first of all in january this year if you

ask me to predict i don’t think

if i had a thousand tries i would have

come up with a scenario like this

even though the concept has been

floating around but it feels like you

know one of these movies about an

asteroid hitting the earth

it’s so unlikely you can’t take it

seriously when you think about it

and this even more than a school exam

uh it has the feel of something which

uh stops your life but in a way

it’s nice that you don’t have to blame

yourself for this uh

this was simply one of those things

above and beyond us

you don’t have to feel guilty about

anything but

you still have to decide how you’re

going to go forward

i thought to myself well every every

year i tell myself oh it’d be nice if i

spend more time with the family i i

took things a little bit easier so let

me

do that and i actually at least managed

to do a little bit of that

that’s maybe the positive thing here

the second thing is it’s it’s very nice

sometimes to step back

and a step back is not stopping your

career it’s more in the

range of pausing

and letting your brain put

its affairs in order uh there’s a lot of

stuff always going in our heads

and when you have some time sometimes

you get some clarity and things work out

so it’s not clear when the patterning

will come to an end even though

it at least appears that there are some

signs of hope

but by now i think uh you know get as

much

useful work done

don’t have unrealistic ideas of what you

can achieve

just because we have six months it

doesn’t mean we gotta i mean all of us

know that

just because we had six months before

our school exams we didn’t do a better

job

than otherwise there’s a certain float

there’s a certain

way of motivating ourselves and we’re

working which will always take

precedence

but um one day

things were returned to normal just like

we couldn’t predict when things would

shut down we cannot predict when things

will open up either

but one day when things get back to

normal then we must be ready to

start again so i think

the main thing is to understand that

it’s very hard for us to

predict and write very precise plans but

that doesn’t mean we

shouldn’t do the things which will be

right in almost all scenarios learning

new things is never going to be a wrong

decision

taking time out to feel better about

yourself is never going to be a wrong

decision so those are the sort of things

we can do now

and hopefully that’s the way forward at

least that’s what i’m

working on right now