Registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India under R.N.I 53640/91
Vol. XXXII No. 9, August 16-31, 2022
Amrutanjan and an American Chess Legend
-- by Vijaysree Venkatraman, v.vijaysree@gmail.com
The Chess Olympiad of 2022 has just ended. We, in Chennai, can be proud of having hosted an international event in style. But believe it or not the seeds for this event may have been sown fifty years ago.
How so? At the height of the Cold War, American Bobby Fischer, a self-taught genius, defeated the defending world champion Boris Spassky. This was in 1972. The World Chess Championship was held in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. Fischer showed the world that the Soviet Union could be beaten at chess.Manuel Aaron, who had become India’s first International Master in 1961, attests that the seismic event had reverberations even in distant Chennai.
Manuel Aaron. Picture courtesy: The Hindu.“I started the Tal Chess club in the Soviet Cultural Centre in 1972,” Aaron told Scroll.in. “And I even studied Russian, I have a diploma, to be able to read the books. They saw that I was the national champion and that I was studying the language, so they asked me if I could start the chess club there. At that time, one has to remember they were the Soviet Union and they wanted to propagate their views everywhere and they looked at Chennai and me as a possibility for their propaganda.”
Before Tal Chess Club – named for the diminutive chess champion Mikhail Tal from Soviet Latvia – there were no serious chess clubs in Chennai. In his excellent article for Scroll.In, How Chennai became the chess capital of India, Ashish Magotra writes that the IM began to give regular lectures about chess theory at the club in Alwarpet. A very young Viswanathan Anand attended these lectures regularly, Aaron recalls. The Tal Chess Club also organised weekend competitions – so the players could try and put all that chess theory into practice. In 1983, Anand, a 13-year-old, beat Aaron. The rest, as they say is history.
Bobby Fisher. Picture courtesy: Wikipedia.In 2006, just two years before he passed away, Fischer asked to meet Anand, who was visiting Iceland for a chess event. He sent word through the Icelandic Grandmaster Helgi Olafsson. By then, the American chess genius, who was in exile in Iceland, had grown reclusive, paranoid, and eccentric but his mind was still that of an elite chess player. Perhaps, the lonely genius wanted to meet someone who, like him, had never trained in any system, but took on the formidable Russians and won.
Anand has spoken of this memorable meeting in many interviews since. But what took the legend from Chennai most by surprise was this request from Fischer. “Did he happen to be carrying bottles of the pain balm Amrutanjan?” Apparently, Fischer first discovered this product in the Indian grocery stores of New Jersey. He liked this lemon-yellow pain balm. He had been looking for it in many cities the world-over. Could Anand and his wife help him lay his hands on some? Fischer even took down the couple’s address – although he took great care to ensure that they didn’t know exactly where he lived in Reykjavik. He seemed to think that the CIA, the American intelligence agency was still closely tracking his whereabouts. Anand and Aruna came back to Chennai.
Now, if you recall the comedy Return of Crazy Thieves, one of Crazy Mohan’s finest plays, you may remember the character Chambal Gopi, who was a big user of Amrutanjan. The head of that gang of thieves – the mastermind, if you will – always needed a quick dab of the balm to think up of ideas for clever heists, bank robberies, and the like. His minions kept bottles of Amrutanjan in stock, because, of course, they did not want their boss to run out of ideas. Did Amrutanjan help Fischer think of clever moves, new chess-playing strategies? Or did he, like the rest of us, use it for bodily aches and pains?
Poor paranoid Fischer passed away in 2008 at the age of 65. We will never know if the American in exile was ever able to find his favorite pain balm in the last years of his lonely life. The freedom fighter who formulated the lemon-yellow pain balm, lives on in our memory, thanks to the Nageswara Rao Park in Mylapore, which is named after him. Perhaps, they should hold some informal open-air chess events at the park in memory of Bobby Fischer, Genius and Madman, user of Amrutanjan.
