The Writer’s Flight

If there is one name in India Chess is synonymous with, it is unequivocally that of Viswanathan Anand. Today India may have 65 Grandmasters but this was not the case 33 years back, when “Vishy” (as he is fondly called) became country's first Grandmaster in December 1987 and won the World Chess Championship in 2000.  He talks about why chess is one of the best mind games ever -  in an exclusive with Namrata Kohli It is believed that playing chess results in better brain function, improved memory and cognitive abilities. Does playing chess make one smarter? I think what it trains you to do is it improves your pattern recognition - so chess is about seeing a lot of patterns and connecting the dots and seeing the bigger picture, so to speak. And then it’s been proven in many studies, that students who play couple of hours of chess a week, their academics get better. They retain information much better.  Second is the ability to concentrate on a problem, push aside the distrac...

Deepa Narayan’s thought-provoking book titled ‘Chup’ lifts the lid on deep seated prejudices prevalent in the Indian sub-continent and she is talking about the upper echelons and the educated middle class By Namrata Kohli A girl should be seen, not heard. Be quiet- Chup, this is often used to silence girls, right from childhood, well into adulthood and deep into old age. Deepa Narayan’s book comes to this startling conclusion that women are systematically trained to delete themselves, their power and make themselves invisible. The worst is how women are delusional about who they are and live their lives in what she calls a “massive pretence”. It started with the 2012 Nirbhaya case, when Narayan embarked on a journey to find the root cause of this abuse and disrespect for the fairer sex. She spoke to some 600 women and men, and after 1800 hours of interviews, her key finding was that while we have changed on the outside, inside we are still the same. Our biases, notions of what ...