An Immortal Game for the 21st Century: Wei Yi Fashions on the Chessboard a Pure Work of Art

The musings below were prompted by an astounding game played by the young Chinese chess prodigy Wei YI in a recent tournament in China. Wei was facing off against the Cuban Grandmaster Batista Lazaro  Bruzon in the 6th Hainan Danzhou tournament held last month in Danzhou, China.

Wei Yi, The Chinese Prodigy

The game is already being celebrated across the globe with epithets like ‘Wei’s Immortal Game’,  ‘Game of the New Millennium’,  ‘the Chinese Immortal’, ‘21st Century Immortal’ and so on. The web is flush with encomiums for the game and there are hundreds of videos out there celebrating this game.

This is a great video on the game by Simon Williams. The Wei Game

The Wei game is an astounding fete of human imagination, intuition, and intellect which makes you marvel at the incredible fetes human mind is capable of.  It has, stamped all over it, the sign of that strange and mysterious natural phenomenon: Human Genius. 

If you are not a chess-person, and is not interested in a bit of narrative on the game itself, please ignore the next two paragraphs.

In the game the players start off with a classical Scheveningen in Siclian Defense, a much analyzed  line which has been popular in grandmaster practice since the 1920s.  On move 22 Wei, instead of retaking a Knight to equalize the power parity, sacrifices his Rook on the f7 square and drags Bruzon’s King into the center of the board. This is a huge gamble, and before making the sacrifice-move, Wei’ had to have visualized a win through the maze of possibilities of moves that follow.   What ensues is a romantic king hunt, reminiscent of the combinatorial chess played by the likes of Adolf Anderssen and Paul Morphy in the 19^th century and Rashid Nezhmetdinov and Mikhail Tal in the 20^th century.

In games like these the attacking side has to make forcing moves to keep the attack going, and if the attacker cannot visualize forcing moves it is rare he or she will embark upon the risky enterprise of sacrificing a whole Rook. Forcing moves are like chasing the enemy through a lighted path, whereas ‘quiet’ moves in a king-hunt are like swerving into unlighted diverging byways with the intention of tightening the trap from different directions. ‘Quiet’ moves are difficult to visualize because they do not present themselves in the obvious move-sequences (variations).

The Position Before 22. Rxf7!!

In Wei’s game, he uncorks a number of ‘quiet’ moves which slowly encircle the black King until Black’s defenses collapse and the mate, inevitable, looms on the horizon. Is it possible that Wei would have calculated the immense number of variations, or was he intuiting how the chase of the King will develop and end? The fact that the path to the win contained the ‘quiet’ moves indicates he would have had to visualize them through the maze of variations.  A computer, through the ‘brute force’ of its calculating prowess of its silicon brain, may be able to find out those moves in the variations that follow the sacrifice, but how does the human mind do it? By intuition?

In his biography of  the greatest 20^th century mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (The Man Who Knew Infinity- The Life of the Genius Ramanujan), Robert Kanigel defines human genius  as the ability to leapfrog across intermediary steps and directly arrive at  the truth, whereas ordinary mortals like us have to work out the intermediary steps, the so called ‘proof’, to convince ourselves about the truthfulness of the truth, so to speak. Often the Genius knows the truth by intuition, even before she or he sets out to devise the procedure for arriving at it.  In other words the genius has the ability to find truth by insight, whereas others struggle towards it by proof.  Insight vs. proof, as method.

When natural laws and ideas combine at its most logical union, there is a beauty in the harmony that results. Isn’t the instinctive recognition of this harmony, that, when expressed in tangible form,  becomes, a scientific formula, a mathematical equation, a work of art or poetry, or a celebrated composition in music?  The harmonious inter-play of elements which evokes a sense of beauty is intuitively grasped by the mind of the genius.

The Romantic, The Magician From Riga- M. Tal

Nowhere else is the work of genius mind seen as obviously and frequently as in mathematics, music, and the game of Chess, and probably Art. It is a well-known fact that many great proponents of any of these forms of creative activity have had an affinity for one or more of the other three forms of creativity. Throughout history, from Danican Philidor to Vasily Smyslov to Mark Taimanov we see the musicians excelling as world-beating chess champions.   Emanuel Lasker, the great 20^th century world chess champion, was a celebrated mathematician-philosopher, and several others in the following generations, like Mikhail Botvinnik, Max Euwe, and John Nunn, continued to straddle the worlds of chess and mathematics. Marcel Duchamp the great proponent of ‘Conceptual Art’ and ‘Dadaism’ was obsessed with Chess, an art form which in his firm belief opened up immense possibilities for human creativity.

That chess romantic, the immortal Mikhail Tal, said every chess game was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem. The Wei game is a work of pure art that creates beauty and inspires the awareness of the Beautiful in an otherwise blemished world of harsh realities we live in.

The Vision

When I came out of the house, the rain and the wind had departed. The house stood on the edge of the mountain, poised on the cliff under a brooding sky. The ground fell away beyond the backyard.  Whoever built the house had hewn the backyard out of the rocky growth that made up this side of the mountain. The stone was pitted and ravaged by time, and cold to touch, and my feet cringed when I walked over to the fence. 

The woman was sitting on the fence, silhouetted against the dull sky.  She turned towards me, her eyes opened, and she looked towards the house. The house stood still. I stretched my hand and touched her. She fell. She fell, her eyes open and the hair streaming up, she fell. 

I looked down. There was nothing there on the other side of the fence, no swirling tangle of trees, no rivers, no valley. Just her, a dwindling shadow in infinite fall.  

There was no world there, no movements or time, not even emptiness, but just an absence. The house behind me wasn't there either, I knew, nor did I exist.The world and time had not begun yet. 

The foundations of the world were not yet laid.

A Treasure Trove For Perry Mason Fans

In every person’s young years there is a phase in which he or she is obsessed with a particular genre of literature. Mystery and Suspense were my obsession during those callow years.  The regular diet was made up of the likes of Earl Stanley Gardner (remember Perry Mason?), James Hadley Chase, and Agatha Christie.  It was out of curiosity and nostalgia that I was searching the net for electronic versions of the Perry Mason mysteries, and I stumbled upon in this website a treasure trove for those who love these mysteries. Here is the link: http://bpsc.bih.nic.in/Books.htm.  You will find almost all of Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books there in neatly paginated electronic format. 

The website belongs Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC). It is a greater mystery than the ones solved by Perry Mason that these electronic books should appear in a staid government website in India! But there it is. Free. 

I am still a great fan of mystery and suspense, though I believe I have outgrown the pulp variety. Some of the greatest writers in world literature have contributed to this genre of fiction. The list includes the greatest novelist of all time Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the world’s foremost semiotician Umberto Eco, and the genre-hopping omniscient Isaac Asimov. But most of the stories in this genre were written by the writers of pulp, who sold their stories for compensation by the count of words. Over the years some of their works, especially those now recognized as classic noir fiction, have passed into the heritage of world literature.

Earl Stanley Gardner

Middle-brow literature that made nods to some pseudo-philosophy was always popular with the campus crowd of 60s-80s.  The most prominent examples that come to mind are Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land, Collin Wilson’s Outsider, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. To be certified as ‘well-read’ was almost a rite of passage for those aspiring to be counted among the elite.  Being ‘well read’ meant you have to be up-to-date with the ‘latest’ popular fiction in English. The college going teens’ ambitious reading experience traced a familiar pattern. It started with the obsessive consumption of popular paperbacks, which included the mysteries of Earl Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, the pseudo-American noir fiction of James Hadley Chase, and then the thrillers of the likes of Alastair Maclean, Robert Ludlum, or Frederick Forsyth. Romance that the girls consumed by truckloads (such as the sado-masochist fantasies of Barbara Cartland, and the syndicated outputs from Mills & Boon, Harlequin and Silhouette) and horror a la Stephen King, were indulged in but not easily admitted to lest one should be accused of having poor taste. A dash of P G Wodehouse rounded up the whole experience. 

JH Chase (RLB Raymond)

The aspirant who wanted to enter the elite club of the ‘well-read intellectuals’ had to complete the final blood ceremony by determinedly plodding through the Ayn Rand toms, the Fountainhead and the Atlas Shrugged.  

Most people gave up reading fiction once they enter the serious business of life, and live out their years missing the pleasure of real Literature. Some of them turn to ‘serious’ reading, ‘serious’ here meaning the ‘self improvement’ books whose dry as gravel contents and bullet points (these books have a predilection for the bullets) are the endless regurgitations of old Samuel Smiles.

I am not arguing that the above authors and their works do not represent good literature. I leave it to the learned critics. By the way, re-reading some of these authors recently, I now realize that the lowly-rated but the then most popular James Hadley Chase (real name René Lodge Brabazon Raymond), whose hallmark was simplicity, the short sentence, was a far better writer than the rest including the verbose misanthrope Ayn Rand.  If any proof of the popularity of Chase in the sub-continent is required, consider this: the most widely read English daily in South Asia, the Times of India, even deigned to write an editorial paying homage to this foreign writer when he died in 1985, normally a rare honor reserved for a few Nobel prize winners!

It was the nostalgia about those times that prompted me to search for the electronic versions of the Perry Mason books. The above BPSC website has it all, neatly laid out for you. 

If you are an aficionado of these mysteries, enjoy it while you can (before some bureaucrat takes it down)!

2 States: The Contrarian View

I admit I am not a great fan of Hindi Movies, and having watched only a handful of them my experience with Hindi movies is limited.  I liked a few of them though, especially the emotional dramas from the black and white era, such as Seema and Haryali Aur Rastha, and the Raj Kapoor knock-offs of the Charlie Chaplin movies.  The Raj Kapoor versions, I felt, were more interesting than the original. May be that’s a cultural thing.

I have never been able to sit through the five most popular types of Hindi movies: 

1. The siblings separated at birth

2. The father-son conflict (often includes brother vs. brother)

3. The reincarnated woman-snake story

4. The story of vengeance against three/four villains a la the Count of Monte Christo

5. The ever popular one where the story begins with the killing of the hero's parents by the villain(s) and the hero growing up to take revenge.

The last type is often grafted on to the first type to increase the emotional quotient.

In am aware that many of the better, more enjoyable movies in Hindi are either remakes of successful films from other Indian languages in which more accomplished film cultures flourish, or knock-offs of foreign movies (example Beja Fry  the curry version of Le Dîner de Cons). A casual survey will show that Hindi films always had a tradition of borrowing its muse from Hollywood. Sometimes I am just curious to find out how well the rip-off works and end up watching the movie. These are often older movies like Kati Patang, the adaptaion of No Man of Her Own  which was based on the cult noir novel I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich (my favorite suspense writer).

I had recently watched the Tamil romantic movie ‘Nee Thane En Pon Vasantham’ (You Are My Golden Spring) and had liked it. The film, slow and sure-footed, had the subtlety of underplayed emotions, sophisticated but believable characters, and a thread of longing and yearning running through the film. Is this the new trend in Indian movies? So it seemed, and when a friend suggested I check out the new Hindi block-buster ‘2 States’, I succumbed to the temptation. The contrast between the two movies was drastic.

Before I go on, I must  pause and praise two elements in 2 States that stood out. The incredible acting by Amrita Singh (what a transformation from Betab to this!), and the coruscating dream-like visage of Alia Bhatt in a Saree.

I thought I was appalled by the movie's immaturity, the cardboard-like lead characters, and the plastic props in place of supporting characters (how did Revathi agree to this humiliation?). The in-your-face shallowness of the script and its unabashedly kitschy mounting, the two-dimensional characters whose mental and emotional growths seem to have stuck somewhere in pre-pubescence, the incredibly brazen stereotyping (especially of the Tamils), and a male lead with a wooden face on which even a stray accidental molecule of emotion has to struggle to maintain its footing, cried out for an abysmal rating for the movie. 

Then, think again.

This is What We Are

Think about us.  We might have high opinions (often misplaced) about our sophistication, behavior, intelligence, and intellect, but is that the real us?  In real life aren’t we indeed two-dimensional characters like the crudely wrought protagonists of 2 States, who lack intellectual depth or sophistication in the conduct of our daily life?

People are not mature or sophisticated. Nor are they subtle.

That sounds a very harsh judgment but think back, for example, about how we behaved when we (those of us who) were in love.  We exchanged puerile one-liners when we wooed, and generally behaved like pre-pubescent kids. Spoke to each other in stilted clichés ('Are you hitting on me?'). Our nods to the fashionable were 'going steady' and the ultimate statement of modernity a contrived sexual conquest. To our callow minds these were not artificial addenda to everyday life, but symptoms of sophistication, our homage to the in-thing. Most of us, not unlike the two cardboard lovers in this movie, existed on a low level of psychological maturity, intellectual growth, and emotional intelligence.

Our minds and behavior did not grow beyond the early teen’s even when we attended prestigious adult institutions, like an IIM in the movie. We will later take the stunted growth to Harvard, if possible. We looked at the world through stereotypes, and the jokes we laughed at were ethnic slurs or those that reinforced the stereotypes in our yet (nay, ever) immature minds, and we continue to delude ourselves that the victims too should enjoy the jokes.  In short, we were rather uninteresting, unsophisticated.  Doesn't, then, the lead pair of this movie appear less improbable and ridiculous? 

The film is based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel of the same name, which according to the author is autobiographical.  Chetan Bhagat’s style is unabashedly pulp, pulp kneaded and flattened with a heavy hand, and he revels in it, not a bad thing in itself considering the success he has had with it so far. We should believe him if he owns up the film as a true depiction of his love, wooing, and marriage. The author is to be appreciated, because it needs courage and humility to own up something that uninteresting and uninspiring, a slice of humdrum love life in the Flatland.

A Flatland it is, inhabited by two-dimensional beings going through the motions of their dull lives and unimaginative loves spouting one-liners, surrounded by a supporting cast of papier-mâché figurines stuck on props ever ready to fill in with actions expected of the stereotypes on demand. A nod to Karnataka Sangeetam here, a Balle Balle there, and throw in a Kancheepuram saree in between. We are caricatures on the pages of pulp.

Considering the honesty in all that I rate 2 States very, very high.

Squirrels, Tulips, and the Coming of Spring

When the ice in our front yard melted it revealed the carpet of rotting grass underneath, and the tiny pink tip of a lone timid tulip plant pushed through the peaty ground, signalling the winter is over, almost!

This was one of the nearly 100 tulip bulbs we planted in the fading days of the fall.

May be half of them survived the marauding squirrels. 

We had to wage a relentless battle against the squirrels to get those bulbs into the ground and make them (the bulbs) stay there.

The rascally rodents have a free run of our front and back yards in the summer.  When the fall approaches they are restless, frantic, running against time to stock up food for the winter. The squirrels watch us from a safe distance and silently mock our efforts when we go about planting the bulbs.  The moment our backs are turned they sneak in and ferret out the bulbs from the ground. The bandits know where to dig and are very professional about it.  The routine is: dig, snatch, run.  Safely ensconced in the crook of a tree, the critters have a way of clutching the bulbs between their paws, like a child examining a surprise gift, which is so endearingly human. But given the circumstances we are hardly able to enjoy such display of child-like innocence by the thieving rodents.

If even half of our tulip bulbs survived the plundering by these rowdy elements, we will have a riot of colors when the spring gets into full swing!