The Battle of the Board - Behind the Scenes

Ding Liren, Vishy Anand, Vidit Gujrathi, Praggnanandhaa, and I – what do we all have in common? Rain or shine, we regularly attend chess tournaments, sitting through hours of gameplay, and at the end, nodding at people with a smile, irrespective of the result. But unlike them, to move the pieces around on the board, I'd need unnaturally long arms that might have to bend at odd angles and sometimes navigate through walls that separate the players' hall and the parents' waiting area.

Being a chess mom is much less glamorous than one would imagine. For one, you don't get to see your child play as you would if they were playing cricket or badminton. Sure, there are live telecasts on certain websites. However, I learned only much later (than I'd like to admit in public) that such privileges are reserved only for the first 5 or 10 boards. Until your child reaches one of those 'top' tables, you'll have to make do with their hurriedly scribbled, blotched, scratched, and incomplete scoresheets they bring back after the games.

The waiting rooms for parents are usually top-notch – you might occasionally be lucky enough to find a roof overhead or luxurious furnishings such as slightly faded plastic stools or chairs (perhaps standing in solidarity with color diversity?). They might have a slightly broken backrest or armrest, but why would any rational person lean back on the backrest or rest their arms on the armrest, I fail to understand. You can enjoy the comfort of the company of 8 to 10 other sweaty, slightly sunburnt prodigy-producing parents and coaches, seated back-to-back, side-to-back, or even arm-over-arm squeezed under small patches of broken shadow cast by a few parched trees scattered around the venue.

A good number of these individuals can be caught staring at their phones – which is what a good number of any good people are caught doing these days. Some are lost in parallel realms, their noses buried deep in books thicker than medieval castle walls. And then there's the I-must-stay-adequately-hydrated population taking swigs from their own private flasks - or bottles as we muggles call it (I've had my doubts that the flasks secretly contain Polyjuice potion and the drinkers are paid babysitters filling in for the insufferably bored parents/coaches).  Not to mention the I-eat-when-I’m bored lot munching on homemade (that sometimes look like they have been half sat-on) sandwiches or digestive biscuits or toasted almonds or anything else typically labelled ‘healdhy’ as they wait for their cerebral champs to come back with a grim or a grinning face.

Real-life sample of a scoresheet

Once your child is back from the game, you'll have the excitement of decoding the scoresheets. Reading them can be as complicated as the game itself when your child's handwriting makes every alphabet curiously resemble every other English alphabet. Some people resort to approaching their child's opponent to ask for their scoresheets in order to scout for clues and deduce missing bits of mission-critical information. In the chess world, it's often encouraged to convert the game into .pgn files reading the scoresheets by using simple-as-calculus apps meant for the purpose. 

The best part of the entire ordeal is listening to your child excitedly jabber nonstop about how they used a newly learned tactic to capture the opponent's bishop on g3, how the opponent forked their pawn and knight with their queen on b6, and how they still managed to finish off the opponent with a brilliant mate-in-4. Nodding along, throwing in a couple of questions like 'wow, really?' and 'are you serious?!' and occasionally sprinkling in a few deeper questions like 'did your opponent blunder?' and 'what opening did you play?' or 'did you finally get the dream position today?' might make you seem like the intelligent, dedicated Chess Mom that you are.

Image for illustration
purpose only. 

At the end of every tournament, which can run from anywhere between 1 to 5 days, parents (and children) are taught invaluable life lessons of patience and tolerance for hunger, while building resilience among the older population for whiny, grumpy, and genuinely tired children. With grumbling stomachs one must inevitably learn to spar with the tiny, abhorrent needles extending from a mosquito's face while they wait for the trophies and medals (which are, much to everybody’s admiration, distributed well before the clock strikes midnight). And just when you're promising yourself that you won't register for another tournament for at least a couple of weeks (so that you can live the life of a normal parent, pamper yourself with a few late hours of Netflix binge-watching and unhealthy snacks instead of being precariously perched on poorly moulded pieces of busted plastic or on the least dirty patch on the ground), you find yourself making the payment for the next U-07 tournament scheduled in 3 days. 

Behold, what other path shall a parent tread when their child's heart is captivated by the art of chess?

 

F.R.I.E.N.D.S with 6 little dots and all that

 I remember the days when I eagerly devoured series after series on my laptop and hoarded more movies than I could watch in a good decade. It had reached a point where even the boot screen would take an agonizing fifteen minutes to load – forget the home page. One could take a brisk walk, come back home and, off-key sing four whole songs behind the safety of the shower curtain, wolf down an entire pack of chips (some people do this and deserve not to be judged) and lick clean all their fingers one-by-one (again, one should not be judged for what they do when they think no one is watching them) and then come to find my laptop's home page huff, puff, pant, and wheeze into the last bit of loading.

“Game of Thrones” was all the rage in those days, and so were “How I Met Your Mother” and “Flash” and “Supernatural” and “Arrow” and “Sherlock” and a whole lot of other shows that we had to painfully scour a compatible subtitle file for. Every file was deleted promptly after a single viewing to make room for the next torrent download that was also destined to vanish into the vast digital abyss.

Amidst this digital chaos, there remained one folder in my laptop that stood untouched. No matter how many times the OS threw the Low Disk Space window in my face, begging me and sometimes even threatening me to “Manage” my space. (I was a true Engineer and was not cut out to “manage” things. Pffft.) That sacred folder bore the name 'F.R.I.E.N.D.S,' for it was, in fact my own collection of every single episode of the sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S. I wanted my unwavering devotion to the show to be evident, even in matters as trivial as the folder name. Even if it meant typing out 6 extra little dots and having the CAPS lock on and all that.

Many times, I had to make difficult choices between a series and a movie, as my laptop would let me have only either. While I honed the art of deliberation and careful consideration in making important entertainment choices (which subsequently felt like life choices), I continued to let my cherished F.R.I.E.N.D.S take up all the space it desired. If memory allocation had been within my control, I would have gladly granted a few extra bytes to that folder, just for the heck of it.

But was I being an evil stepmother to the rest of the movies and series? No! I regarded this dear little folder as my ultimate source of solace and stress relief. It acted as my personal sanctuary, my sanity-restorer. My own hip flask of Endorphin. I could play just about any episode of any season at any point in the day (or night) and still find it relevant and soothing like the consoling shoulder of a best friend.

The best part is that even though every one of those 6 characters could have been very successful in their lives, they fumbled and floundered their way through life like very real people. At the end of an exhausting day, we didn’t have to begrudgingly watch the extravagant life of a multi-star Michelin chef or a millionaire Hollywood actor or an impeccably dressed fashion icon. We could instead laugh, sigh, cringe, cry and live life in the company of a struggling actor who smelled fart, a boring professor who was very particular about his sandwiches or even a singing masseuse who carried the children of her own brother.

For more than one reason, this show invoked powerful emotions in me and it continues to do so. Because I know that if those 6 could get around to being happy for ten whole years on the screen, I can too, off the screen. If they could get over heartbreaks and failed marriages and childlessness and career struggles and so much more just because they had amazing people with and for them, then so can I. Because even though it hasn’t been my day or my week or my month or even my year and I’ve had a million struggles of my own in my life, I have a million and one reasons to live through them. I have my husband, my son, my brother, my sisters(in-law), my parents, my family, my extended family, and my own F.R.I.E.N.D.S (like the Australian Mahima and Hyderabadi Nireekshana who bully me into mentioning their names in my blogs) who have been and will be “there for me”.

Thank you, Marta Kauffman and David Crane for redefining sitcom. For redefining happiness. For redefining 'break'. And for defining Friends.