The boy who would be king

Abhimanyu Mishra is the epitome of the new-gen chess player and is on course to becoming the youngest grandmaster ever

- REUBEN JOE JOSEPH

THE MILITARY SYMBOLISM of the pieces on a chess board is hard to miss. Before the Europeans tweaked the pieces to reflect their social order, chess, in its early years, was a game of war using purely military units. But while war is loud, brutal and erratic, chess is quiet, logical and safe. The battle is restricted to the players’ minds.

Nevertheless, Hemant Mishra wants to revive the original metaphor. “It is a war, for all practical purposes,” he says as he sits down for a chat over Zoom. He is talking about the long hours of rigorous training that his son, Abhimanyu, is undergoing to become the youngest chess grandmaster (GM) ever. The 12-year-old from New Jersey has already earned two GM norms. He has until September 5 to collect his final norm and break the record of 12 years and seven months set by Sergey Karjakin in 2002.

The path to rewriting history is a painful one. Abhimanyu trains for 10 to 12 hours a day, as against the four to six hours that others his age spend on chess. It helped him become the world’s youngest international master in November 2019, beating the record set by R. Praggnanandhaa. At the time, Abhimanyu had a cool 22 months to crush Karjakin’s GM mark. But to his dismay, he lost 14 of those months to the pandemic. Though there were online events, GM norms can be earned only on over-the-board events. Hemant promised him to take him to wherever events were held as soon as things opened up. And that is what they did.