Chennai :

Sixty-four squares. That’s all it takes to create a level playing field between the blind and the sighted, said Charudatta Jadhav, founder of the All India Chess Federation for the Blind (AICFB), on Saturday, at the premiere of the film, Algorithm, at PVR Skywalk in Chennai.

The film, directed by Ian Mcdonald, is a 100-minute black and white documentary that follows the lives of three young chess players between 2009 and 2011.

The film attempts to show that for the game of chess, you don’t need sight, just foresight; you don’t need eyes as long as you have vision. This was also underlined through a blind blitz game between five-time world champion and grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand and Jadhav. Anand and Jadhav tussled in a 10-minute game (of course Anand won), with the world champ facing away from the board and visualizing his moves. “For a moment there, I thought I had forgotten one of my moves, but luckily I hadn’t,” said Anand.

Krishna, who is featured in the film, took to chess at age nine because he wanted to play a game he could excel at. “I couldn’t and didn’t want to play outside with my friends because I couldn’t see the balls or bats they played with properly,” said Krishna, now a student at Loyola College. “Then my mother taught me to play chess and when I realized I could compete with people who could see, I decided to work hard to excel at it,” said Krishna, who has beaten many sighted champs over the years.

“Chess is about calculating and predicting moves,” said Jadhav, ” it is immaterial if you can see.” Unlike Krishna, who has been visually impaired since birth, Jadhav, now 47, went blind at 13. “It happened in a matter of days. I was a topper, sitting in school one day, when I began to see grey dots everywhere. My vision got fuzzy, and before I knew it I had lost my eyesight because of a retinal detachment,” he said.

“It was a depressing five years between 1980 and 1985, but chess changed my life… chess showed me that even the blind can be as independent as the sighted,” said Jadhav, who pursued software engineering because vision did not really matter in that field. Jadhav, now, head, innovation strategy, at TCS in Mumbai, decided to start the AICFB in 1998. “The blind do not want sympathy or pity. We want to be treated as equals,” said Jadhav,.

And that’s what McDonald has done in the way he portrays the champs – cheeky Darpan Inani from Baroda, the highest ranked totally blind player in India; gentle and eccentric Anant Kumar Nayak from Bhubaneswar; and the determined Krishna, who is fighting to conquer championships as well as his impairment. The documentary, though made in 2012, will release in theatres on August 21.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai / by Kamini Mathai, TNN / August 10th, 2015