Poha vs Pasta

The prompt was togetherness across the Commonwealth. Most entries to something like that reach for history, institutions or sport. I wrote about a rapid game on Chess.com.

What happens in it

A Friday evening in Amritsar, a pressure cooker going somewhere in the flat, and me on my bed opening Chess.com for a ten-minute game. I get matched with someone playing under a Mexican flag, under the handle el_rook. I open with e4. He answers with the Italian, and in my head the tortillas go away and the pasta arrives.

The essay narrates the rest of the game that way. My pieces turn into chole bhature and idli dosa, his into pasta and quesadillas, and the two of us eat our way through the middlegame. I lose. His pawn promotes and it is over quickly after that.

Then he messages me in the chat to say he enjoyed the game, I message him back, and I find I am not annoyed about losing at all.

What I was actually arguing

I admit near the start of the essay that I stereotype opponents by the flag next to their name, and that this says more about me than about them. I do it because chess on its own is abstract. Imagining a person on the other side is what makes the game worth playing.

The argument is that the stereotype is only where you start. Ten minutes of moves later you have read how somebody thinks: whether they will take a risk, and how long they sit on a position before committing to it. I will never know el_rook’s real name or hear his voice. For ten minutes I knew how his mind worked, and he knew mine.

Widen the frame and it is players from India, Australia, Nigeria and Canada on the same board every evening. That was the Commonwealth point, and I did not want to make it with history.

Why I wrote it that way

I assumed the person reading these essays gets through dozens of them, most of them loaded with argument and assertion and heavy words. I did not think I could win by supplying one more. So I wrote something light, and I tried to make him smile. That was the entire plan.

Result

Results are yet to arrive.

The essay itself is not reproduced here.