What the 64 Squares taught me
It is a few minutes before 10 am on Sunday,
November 14, 2010. I am sitting in a small room on the third floor of a
building a few hundred meters from the Miriswatte Junction on the
Colombo-Kandy Road, i.e. just past the intersection when going out of
the capital. I have just attended the opening ceremony of a Chess
Academy. Well, the opening of a ‘branch’ of a Chess Academy; the ‘64
Squares International Chess Academy’ is based in Kandy and was launched
earlier this year
Listening to the speakers and the pre and post event conversation, I
was persuaded to think about non-chess issues. Chess players used to
retire or move to fun-chess pretty quickly after leaving school because
the money you won at tournaments was not enough to live for more than a
couple of days. Coaching was an honorary occupation. Times have change.
Tuition classes
Today chess is like English. There are lots of coaches and lots of
English teachers. Parents who are not fluent in English send their
children to tuition classes and have no clue about the quality of
instruction or the nature of the return on investment. It is the same
with chess. Parents who have never played the game and have no way of
ascertaining the instructing skills of ‘coaches’ spend a lot of money
thinking their children will improve their game, pick up useful
analytical and other life-skills and who knows, even end up as an
International Grandmaster. By the time wisdom descends, the little boy
or girl has moved on to other spheres of action and the relevant parent
is poorer by a lot of bucks.
Pawns used in a game of Chess |
Children need to be taught the A the B and the C etc of English and
of other subjects too, including chess. There was a time when things
were so bad that being able to learn the alphabet was considered an
achievement. This was before communications hit the island like a
meteorite. Today, there’s enough English letters bombarding the senses
of the entire population in such volumes as to make alphabet-learning
meaningless.
Chess coaches
It is the same with chess. There are hundreds of ‘coaches’ who can
teach children how to move the chess pieces. I met an Indian coach in
Greece who told of a fellow-coach who was happy to teach a student how
to move the knight. This is not an achievement or something to raise
eyebrow about except that it had taken him a week to impart the
knowledge! My friend said ‘Man, he was teaching this child how to move
the knight; one-two-three, three-two-one, for one week.
I told him, “bastard”!’ He made a lot of bucks. Today, there are
chess coaches in Sri Lanka who do one-two-three kind of coaching make a
cool couple of hundred thousand rupees a month or more. As a result
there are thousands of children playing chess in all parts of the
country. This is good and encouraging because some will move from
one-two-three to more interesting and worthwhile pursuits someday. It is
not enough. We fall short on quality.
This is why ‘English Our Way’ is a hoax; it fools parent and student
both and produces only basic literacy and not the levels of language
competence that can make a difference to learner and society both.
World Champion
Quality is the key, I thought, as listened to speaker after speaker
speak my thoughts. My mind went back to the year 1980. The coach of the
senior chess team of my school was talking about strategy. He was using
‘Chess Fundamentals’ by the incomparable Cuban Grandmaster and World
Champion J R Capablanca as his main source.
Arjuna Parakrama did not believe in one-two-three instruction. He
taught the noble art of thinking, of analyzing, of visualizing, of
imagining and the beauty of playing for small gain which when
accumulated eventually produced the most satisfying victories.
He made me realize that memorizing the move-order of various openings
was important but not as crucial as securing the keys that would unlock
the secret doors of chess behind which the magic of its poetry lay
hidden. It is easy to learn the alphabet. Learning grammar and
enunciation is tough. Understanding and appreciating literature takes a
lot of time and effort. Writing is an art which is made of 1 percent
talent at word-play and 99 percent of practice. Not everyone needs to
write literature, but it is certainly useful to write a letter of excuse
or a love note. Knowing the alphabet is basic but this alone will not
deliver.
Opening ceremony
Arjuna taught other things. He taught the importance of trying to be
the best you can be. The importance of focusing on the task at hand, not
getting ahead of oneself and not getting emotional and bogged down in
what has already happened, the games won or lost. He taught integrity.
He taught the important lesson that there are never short-cuts when it
comes to securing worthwhile objectives.
All these things he taught over the 64 squares. There are 64 squares,
half of which are black and the other half white. Each and every square
is important at all points of a game and one can ignore this only at
grave risk. Learning is about exploring all 64 squares, i.e. the full
landscape of the possible.
There are no short cuts. You can’t learn A, B and C and think you’ve
got it all under your belt.
The opening ceremony is over. We had our kiribath and kevili, the
milk-rice and sweetmeats. The guests have all gone. The noise level has
come down. There are no classes scheduled for today. Time will tell if
things will get delivered as promised. I think there’s a good chance as
long as quality and integrity remain the corner stones of the program.
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