Chequered Life
Posted: Sun Nov 14 2010, 16:34 hrs
Updated: Sat Nov 13 2010, 20:46 hrs
New Delhi:

Parimarjan Negi balances life as India’s youngest chess grandmaster and a regular 17-year-old.

There is one place where the maudlin croon of Enrique Iglesias doesn’t belong: inside the glass walls where a chess tournament is progressing, where a bishop quietly knocks down a pawn and a knight jumps in subsonic hum, where the quick thump of the hand on the timer is all that you hear. But there is one place where it truly belongs: on a teenager’s iPod playlist. And 17-year-old Parimarjan Negi, India’s youngest chess grandmaster and now the youngest Arjuna awardee, whose hello tune is Enrique weeping “Maybe I’m addicted, I am out of control”, is sorting out the two sides of his world: Enrique and Eminem, and the e4 opening.

“There are too many distractions,” said Negi, lounging in a white “Kiss Me” tee at his home, one of the many low-roofed houses in the residential colony for airport officers in Safdarjung, Delhi. Too much time at social networking sites, for one, he said: “I must cut down on my chatting. I spend far too much time on it.” And, then, plugging in his iPod every now and then. Such adolescent delights, but these could cut into his daily eight-hour practice sessions on the laptop.

Negi, though, has gotten used to this slanging match between temptation and training. He knows how it ends — with him staring at a board on his computer, the cursor pushing a white pawn two squares ahead. “Everything gets sidelined when my practice begins. I don’t sit down to think how I have to strike a balance between chess and my other interests. If I put pressure on me like that, then it will turn into the biggest distraction of all.”

As we meet, he is preparing to fly to The Netherlands to play at the Unive Open, followed by league championships across Europe, and he will come back to Delhi in December to take part in the National Premier Championships. Winning that would ensure a berth in the Indian team at the 2011 World Chess Championship.

While Negi will be holed up in Europe with his coach and Belgian grandmaster Vladimir Chuchelov, his classmates at Amity International, Saket, will be preparing for Class XII boards. “My biggest fear is the mathematics paper,” confessed Negi. And this from a boy who became the world’s second youngest grandmaster at 13 years, 3 months and 22 days, ahead of Bobby Fischer and Judith Polgar and even the current sensation Magnus Carlsen. Once the nationals are over, Negi says he would give chess a break till the exams. “Because I had to focus on studies, my game suffered this year,” he said. He is not thinking of college yet, maybe he would take a year’s break and concentrate on chess.

Touring and playing can be a lonely affair. “There are no close friendships in the circuit. Occasionally when I am on the Internet Chess Club, I chat with a few other players.” His friends are in Delhi and when in town his to-do list includes hanging out with them or ordering in a pizza for all. “I miss my friends and school when I travel, but I don’t complain. I have taken up something that has given me so many good things.”

The elder son of JB Singh Negi — an air traffic controller whose job, Parimarjan reminds, is like playing chess in the air with planes — and Paridhi, a deputy secretary at LIC, Parimarjan wants to do well in his board exams, but he knows what is at stake: “I am not thinking seriously of anything but chess, so being the best chess player is the only option for me.”

Full article here.

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