{"id":78729,"date":"2013-01-17T13:45:59","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T08:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=78729"},"modified":"2013-01-17T13:45:59","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T08:15:59","slug":"pawn-stars-of-gariahat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/pawn-stars-of-gariahat\/","title":{"rendered":"Pawn Stars of Gariahat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"When<\/a>
When chess hit the streets<\/strong> The Gariahat Chess Club members face off\u00a0Photo:<\/strong> Ronny Sen<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nAS ONE<\/strong> game ends, a crowd of people jostles to play next. Twelve-year-old Surdhenshu Mitra makes his way through the crowd, only to find the seat on the cold metal railing has already been taken by an adult. His face falls, but Ashutose Bose Roy, the silver-haired man in the other chair, who happens to be one of the vice-presidents of the Gariahat Chess Club, says to his opponent: \u201cLet the kid play. You and I are old. He\u2019s young; he can still learn a lot.\u201d The boy gleefully takes his place and starts setting up the pieces.<\/span>
\nIt is a scene out of a sports movie, the inspirational story of an old curmudgeon taking young talent under his wing. In Steven Zaillian\u2019s Searching for Bobby Fischer,<\/em> chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin finds Vinnie (Laurence Fishburn), a speed chess hustler in Washington Square Park in New York, whose aggressive gameplay and garrulous \u2018street\u2019 wisdom earns the ire of Waitzkin\u2019s regular coach, a more conventional chess-obsessive, but stands the young Waitzkin in good stead in the national championship and, more importantly, in his life away from the table. Unlike Washington Square, the Gariahat Chess Club is less apparently dominated by testosterone and hustle and trash talk but the chess is intense. In a resolutely urban setting, under a giant flyover at one of Kolkata\u2019s busiest intersections (no vernal corner of an elegant park, no marble chess tables here), this community of chess players congregates every evening to play, watch and discuss the game they love.<\/span><\/p>\n

The watching crowd\u00a0discusses and dissects\u00a0every move of an ongoing\u00a0game, as part of a typically\u00a0passionate Kolkata\u00a0adda<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like countless others in this city with a long chess-playing tradition, Debashish Basu \u2014 Gora to all who know him at the club \u2014 and his friends used to play chess regularly on a table fixed on the pavement in Gariahat, one of Kolkata\u2019s largest shopping districts, before the construction of a flyover, the first of many during Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee\u2019s modernisation drive at the turn of the century, forced them to abandon their spot. Undeterred, they embraced the very cause of their transplantation and relocated their game to under the flyover once it was completed in 2002. As Roy puts it, \u201cThe flyover gave us shelter against rain and a constant source of light. So why not?\u201d Playing at the intersection, they soon attracted attention, and throngs of people often gathered around the players to watch, bark instructions, and maybe even get a game. You had to be brave to play, many of the regulars were accomplished players in their own right, and word soon spread through the tournament circuit. By 2006, the group had acquired a critical mass and Basu did what any Kolkatan would in such a situation: he started a club.<\/span>
\nSubir Ghosh, the joint secretary of the club, is one of the newer entrants. He stands next to Mitra, conferring with the boy on moves before manoeuvring the pieces himself. Neither is the watching crowd too deferential to participate. Every move is discussed and dissected, made and unmade as part of a typically passionate Kolkata adda. Mitra doesn\u2019t mind; he says he learns a lot from the adults\u2019 discussions. With professional coaches charging up to Rs 800 a session, an increasing number of parents are bringing their children here to play and learn for free. Mitra\u2019s mother has left him here while she goes about her shopping.<\/span>
\nGhosh played earlier in a room at the nearby Ballygunge railway station, but decided to move because the area was prone to political violence. The room is now a party office. He doesn\u2019t share the general enthusiasm for Kolkata\u2019s chess tradition. \u201cChildren in Chennai and Bengaluru are playing chess by the hundreds. It\u2019s part of their syllabus,\u201d he says. \u201cThe numbers here are encouraging, but Kolkata still has a long way to go.\u201d He has the fanatic\u2019s passion when he talks about chess, an obsession his family has tried in vain to curb. It\u2019s the same in Roy\u2019s house. \u201cI\u2019m almost 78 now,\u201d he says, \u201cand my family has resigned itself to the fact that I have to play chess every day.\u201d Everybody has a similar story here, which they share with endearing sheepishness.<\/span>
\nTHE TRAFFIC<\/strong> is at a standstill because of a long red light with the inevitable irritable honking. But the players play on nonetheless; not the serene chess players of Satyajit Ray\u2019s famous film, but completely absorbed in the world of the evening game, arguing over every move, mocking, cheering, or even talking about the day. It\u2019s become a popular hangout, underneath the flyover: couples sip tea, a Gariahat Carrom Club has been established.<\/span>
\nOne would think it would be annoying to play in such a din. \u201cIt is at first,\u201d Roy says, \u201cbut it\u2019s great practice for tournaments. If you can concentrate with all the honking, the pressure of a tournament will be nothing.\u201d Ghosh and Mitra have Roy on the mat, having breached his defence and raining down perennial checks. The crowd begins joshing him about losing to a kid, but Mitra makes a dubious move. Roy calmly lights a cigarette and responds with an attack down the centre. Mitra fights \u2014 players rarely resign here until the bitter end \u2014 but it\u2019s downhill from there. The end comes soon after, and the duo resign. The onlookers reset the position at which the fatal error took place. They play out the position to its logical conclusion: it still would have been a win for Roy, but he would have had to work for it. They sigh and set up the pieces again. It\u2019s time for the rematch.<\/span>
\nAjachi Chakrabarti is a Correspondent with Tehelka.<\/em>
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has the king\u2019s game ever been played in so democratic a setting as underneath a busy flyover?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":78751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,8182,6387,1714,8183,8184,8185,8186,7540],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78729"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}