This month's guest blogger is one of the outstanding young leaders I had the pleasure of meeting last year! Devanshi Rathi is a 2018 Queen's Young Leader Highly Commended Runner Up from India. She gained this recognition through her work with underprivileged young people and more recently teaching blind people how to play the intricate game of chess! Because I know her love for the sport, I was not surprised that her was chess related!
To me, this one quote defines the very essence of the mind sport that I have been competing in for the longest time that I could remember in my life. The basic feature of the game, that it is an ocean where anybody can swim, gives one motivation to compete at one’s best level whether playing a solid titled player or an amateur. Taking one’s life as an example, one should believe that our life is essentially the same. It’s depth and length can be defined by how much we achieve. However, this achievement often gets so strong in our mindsets that we forget the primary focus of our lives. So, in an ocean called life we must remember to be happy and healthy at all times, whether it be while we are on the ‘winning’ side or on the ‘losing ‘end.
Achievement is a word that cannot be simply defined, and we must understand the same. What we should aim to go at is not to achieve things, but to simply learn and grow.
The recent popularity of a growth mindset, famed by Professor Carol Dweck’s theories, has been seen to have affected a number of the so-called high level ‘achievers’ in any field. These personalities have not run after achieving things. Instead, they have focused their energy and efforts on improving each and every part of their body, mind, soul, and ultimately their lives that has impacted their supposed success. In chess, a fixed mindset can lead to temporary gains, but in order to conquer the opponent’s king, one must let go of any ‘fixed’ strategies and keep improvising as the positions develop steadily.
We’ve always thought chess to be a philosophical game, as can also be seen through the quotes above. However, we must understand that these philosophies, if applied in our own daily lives, can have a positive change for our well-being. Ultimately, the main goal in our life should be to attain our true stand, as learnt in the Hindu-Vedanta philosophy. It’s not about what others think of us, or even about what we ought ourselves to be positioned at. It’s more to do with our utmost sense of belonging with the earth and where we really find ourselves. This path finding has definitely got less to do with an ‘ordinary’ man’s dream of obtaining monetary gains and riches. Similarly, in chess, temporary material victories have no meaning if one cannot find one’s ultimate route of defeating the opponent’s king. One has to search for the most optimal way to reach the ‘enemy’s’ territory, and once this stage has been reached, it’s that of true nirvana.
Life and chess have many overlaps and similarities. It is up to us to understand and learn from these lessons. After all, in chess, there are a million possibilities, that’s why no game is absolutely the same. However, that being said, the player has to have the vision to see what’s best for himself or herself. Finally, our journey is our own and we shouldn’t waste it by thinking about what we could have done differently or what could have been the best for us.
As it’s said in chess, “If you find a move, look for a better one.”
Thus, if we find our supposedly true move in life, then we should go searching for a better one or that one that will lead us to our stage of ultimate nirvana or peace.
Devanshi Rathi is a current undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a passionate chess player and enjoys playing and watching different sports. Her mission in life is to create a positive difference in the world around her. She is trying to do that through her foundation, the Devanshi Rathi Foundation, a registered non-profit company. In her free time, she likes to write about sports and loves to take interviews of different players because it leaves her INSPIRED.