In the New Year, I can say with conviction that Indian chess is clearly on the upswing. Koneru Humpy put in an exemplary performance at the Doha Asian Games.
In the New Year, I can say with conviction that Indian chess is clearly on the upswing. Koneru Humpy put in an exemplary performance at the Doha Asian Games. P Harikrishna and K Sasikiran did extremely well in the team event and took India to a very commendable medal.
In fact chess got India two gold medals. If I am not mistaken, the first and the last gold medals came from chess at the Doha Games.
We have a lot of young talent in Parimarjan Negi, Srinath and Sethuraman. Recently at the Women’s National A, Tanya Sachdev won the event after a hot contest. So the field is becoming competitive in all age categories.
Most of these names I’ve mentioned before. I can add a few more now. There are players like Deepan Chakravarty and Surya Sekhar Ganguly. It is amazing Surya has won the National A for a record fourth time. Sandipan Chanda played some very nice games in the German league.
Clearly, up is the only direction Indian chess can go. If one looks at absolute achievement, chess would have few competitors in India.
Personally, I thought 2006 was not a bad year for me. It was in fact a good year. I started off by winning the strongest classical event and finished it off by winning the strongest blitz event and for the rest in between it was a standard Anand year. The only low point was the Olympiad in Turin.
I surely think 2007 will be better.
I will play in Wijk Aan Zee in January, Linares in February and March and Amber tournament in Monaco in March. The main highlight will be, of course, the World Championship in Mexico in September.
You can be sure, I will be training for that. I have identified specific areas I want to work on. Also the distance between Veselin (Topalov) and me has narrowed and I have a good chance of overtaking him. So that will clearly be a stimulus.
Having said that, I admit Veselin or Vladimir (Kramnik) are not the only players I would be concentrating on. If you see an event like Corus, all the 13 participating players are tough rivals. I will be doing a mistake if I concentrate on only two people.
Talent is something very difficult to analyse or predict. In the new world arena, someone like Magnus Carlsen has shown a lot of talent at the age of 15. So that is the competition we should be preparing for.
(As told to Vijay Tagore)
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