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