Look beyond your bias
Chess remembers its legends like no other sport does. In most other disciplines, the past is beckoned to compare tally and establish new records whereas in chess, the magical 64 squares — blessed with infinite possibilities; more than the number of atoms in the universe, apparently — refuse to forget its history. Since every single move is recorded and every position studied, if you and your opponent happen to repeat a move from 1896 between Lasker and Steinitz, the latter will be duly invoked. Why? Because chess doesn’t forget. Not all chess players have eidetic memory though. You’ll never look at a forehand by Djokovic and say that a similar shot was played by Roswell in 1965. Or admire a sixer by Kohli for its resemblance to a similar shot by Richards in 1981. No, that’s not happening.
I’ve finally reached that stage in life where geography is merely a matter of detail. Whenever somebody DMs me to ask where I am from, I am a bit confused. If I tell them that I am from Gurgaon — granted I’m spending my sixth summer here — it’d be misconstrued as belonging to this city. I don’t. My heart belongs to Bombay as I grew up there and my head belongs to Mangalore because I wish to grow old there someday. For the record, I was born in Manipal; my maternal as well as paternal village is barely five kilometers away from KMC. So, again, it’s difficult to come up with an answer that won’t require a follow-up question. However, going forward, I’ll tell people that I am from my mother.
Statistics helps us understand a subject on a deeper level provided we are deep enough. For a shallow person, statistics turns into a tool for spreading misinformation. To give you a prime example, most people believe in percentages — one of the main reasons why presentations/decks are encouraged to flash % sign — as they symbolize sore facts. When you excavate further, you realize that that is not entirely true. Most of the percentages we confuse for reality are built on the back of unregulated assumptions. There is no way, humanly possible, by which we can know what majority of Indians think/feel/believe about a certain subject. To bypass this handicap, we consider sampling — taking chunks of the population, often in thousands — to represent a greater commonality. Forget India, with this method, you can’t even get a nation of Singapore’s size correct. But then, statistics is all about the bigger picture.
Sports entertainment likes to see itself as a paragon of absoluteness. When you read Bradman’s batting average as 99.94 runs, it’s a mathematical certainty, right? Wrong. Those digits don’t tell you anything about the quality of his opponents or the quality of the pitch. Zilch. It only tells you that, for his era, Bradman set out to make a century every single time he stepped out of the pavilion. Similarly, when you look at Cristiano Ronaldo’s incredible rout in Champions League, you miss out a crucial detail. On record, he has scored 128 goals in 168 CL games. That’s simply phenomenal. But it’s only when you study those numbers you learn that he shot blank in his first 29 games of this prestigious competition. He ultimately opened his account in the 30th match and never looked back. Tells you a lot about industry, diligence and focus.
Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I successfully donated blood but it wasn’t my first attempt (more on that later). It was an emergency for a friend. We (my wife and I) stepped out and saw empty policed roads for the first time in almost a month and the whole process went by pretty smoothly. The last time I tried donating blood was in 2005 thanks to a donation drive organized by our polytechnic (Nashik). I remember showing up in the morning all enthu about the “good deed”. After going through the standard questionnaire — had no tattoos back then — I lied down on the cot but as soon as I noticed the blood leaving my body, I fainted.
Classic wuss move.
However, when I woke up, the attending lady was least interested in knowing how I was. She very matter-of-factly said, “Donating blood isn’t for you. Please don’t come back here. You are discouraging other people.” Anyway, after years of proving her right, I finally made it. She wasn’t wrong that day because for a nation bulging with 1 billion+ humans, we shouldn’t be running out of blood but the bitter truth is we do. People spend their entire lives without donating blood but expect blood to be miraculously present in the bank whenever they need it.
It’s difficult, not impossible, to understand our society. We are strange people, following stranger diktats of normalcy. If all of us shat in the open, it’s normal to shit in the open. If all us adhered to the principle of zero littering, none of us would throw around garbage. Hidden in these blind trends are our insecurities and a desire to fit in. Despite all these nuances, nobody can deny that we aren’t sure as a society what we want to be. In 1980, we might have wanted to be something. 1994, we wanted to be something else. In 2020, we are still figuring out. Most probably, we’ll find our answer by 2073.
Remember when Harsha Bhogle, one of the sanest voices in cricket, went for hair transplant? Social media went unkindly and berserk as usual. The poor guy had to go on record that he is well within his aesthetic rights to feel good about his onscreen appearance. One column back then even argued that by going for corrective measures, Bhogle was abandoning his bald ilk. Whatever the fuck. If fixing teeth by paying exorbitant money to an orthodontist is alright, then there is not a thread wrong with opting for hair transplant. One can go on and on about mortality but it won’t make all the mirrors disappear. Not to mention the greatest mirror of all: our eyes. I pray for a future when men are as open to the idea of penile enlargement surgeries as they are to continuation of patriarchy.
Once this crisis is over, I will be a changed person. I will keep in touch with everyone I promised to keep in touch with. As an extra token of appreciation, I might even start conversations and not wait for others to make the first move. In simple words, I shall be a friendlier, gentler and engaging person. Amid this crisis and the resulting (minor) inconvenience, it has become clearer to my harried mind that people are indispensable. Even those whom you avoided and ignored earlier. It’s remarkably tough to find inspiration in isolation. Everybody matters.
What happens when we don’t accept each other for who we are? Friction of the kind that doesn’t nourish us. Acceptance is the first step towards growth (no, not the MBA type). When you accept others, you are also accepting yourself for who you are. Diversity terrifies a lot of people because it demands attention. Sadly, we don’t want to spend our limited resources on everyone. We want it to be reserved for few. But at the same time, how will you grow if you don’t expand your range? Which is also why acceptance goads you to look beyond your bias and defeat your prejudices.
I was watching some fitness videos online — no, I am not working out — isn’t workout banned in this lockdown? — sorry for the bad pun — and I noticed the difference between me when I was 23 and at 33. During my younger days, I would have looked at the superfit guy in the video and marveled at his chiseled arms and abs. Not anymore. Today, I was looking at his blushy lips and felt a hint of envy. As of now, I’ve got a bigass bruise on my lower lip and barely talking with a lisp. Proper red, proper swell. I bit myself talking-while-eating last Saturday and have been nursing the pain since. It’s only gotten worse with time. To add to my summer misery, my AC wasn’t working. Heat map, anyone? Speak to my mouth.
