We win together

We invented chess, which was pretty cool of us. The original game 'chaturanga'that is four divisions (infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry)-was a war strategy game. When the game travelled to the Middle East, they mangled the Sanskrit and it ended up being called 'shatranj' instead.

- ANUJA CHAUHAN

The pawn (infantry) and the knight (cavalry) are still very much in evidence on the modern chess board but the Persians mispronounced rath (chariot) as rukh, which got translated in Europe to rocca which means 'fortress' in Italian. And so we have the rook, which looks like a castle. The elephant shared a similar fate, as the stylised design of the piece resembled a bishop's mitre, so the Europeans (who clearly had no issues mixing church and state) started calling it the bishop.

The Middle Easterners also came up with 'shah-mat' to indicate that the king's defeat was imminent, which led to westerners mangling the term to 'checkmate! Still, it is very much an Indian game, and we are damn good at it-just look at our grandmasters and everything.