Check! Castling in the air

Zugzwang is a chess term which, in simple English, is the situation when the player who has to make the next move would lose. The German word, pronounced ‘tsooktsvang’, means ‘compulsion to move’.

- R. PRASANNAN

Looks like INDIA has been caught in a zugzwang. Whatever they do is getting them in a worse position than they were in before making the move. They thought they got a good acronym for a name, but now the rest of us say, INDIA is falling apart. Their Prince Charming thought that instead of spending his winter evenings in Delhi having chai-pakodas and feeding his Pidi, he should ride out to reconnoitre the field, and rouse his troops for the poll battle. Now allies are blaming him for going on a joyride when he should have been in the war-room crafting strategies.

But why pick a chess term to describe political parties’ pre-poll predicament? It is just that our treasurer Nirmala Sitharaman gave me some food for chess thoughts in her budget speech. Hailing the prodigy Praggnanandhaa who nearly checkmated world champion Magnus Carlsen, she proudly claimed “today India has over 80 chess grandmasters compared to little over 20 in 2010.”