Amrutanjan and The American Legend
Chennai can be proud of having hosted the FIDE Chess Olympiad of 2022 in style and at such short notice too. Believe it or not the seeds for this event may have been sown fifty years ago, in the United States.
In 1972, at the height of the Cold War, American Bobby Fischer, a self-taught genius, defeated the defending world champion Boris Spassky. 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. The Russians were newly open to the idea of popularizing the game and Chennai got its first formal chess club as a result.
“I started the Tal Chess club in the Soviet Cultural Centre in 1972,” Aaron told Scroll.in. “I had 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.”
“And they gave us a lot of things. Chess books, chess sets, chess clocks… everything they used to import from the USSR for free. And they built a place for the club too. And we charged only 20 rupees per month as membership. Ironically, chess was at its peak in popularity in Chennai because of Fischer’s win over Spassky.”
Before Tal Chess Club – named for the 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 organized weekend competitions – so the players could try and put all that learning into practice. In 1983, Anand, a 13-year-old, beat Aaron. The rest, as they say is history.
In 2006, only two years before Fischer passed away, he asked to meet Anand, who was visiting Iceland for a chess event and sent word through an Icelandic Grandmaster. 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 Soviets 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 and ever since, the exile had been looking for it in 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 Return of Crazy Thieves, one of Crazy Mohan’s finest comedies, you may remember the character of 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. So here is my question: 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 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. Perhaps, they should hold some informal open-air chess events at the park in memory of Bobby Fischer, Genius and Madman, user of Amrutanjan.